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Ep. 32: Happy Thanksgiving, Eh!

Eric Fistler

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For Sunday, October13, 2013
Happy Thanksgiving, Eh!
Proper 23C / Ordinary 28C / Pentecost +21


Show Notes after the break (click read more) 

Opening Music: “Thank You” by Led Zepplin

For Sunday, October 13
Episode 32 - Proper 23C / Ordinary 28C / Pentecost +21


Check-in

  • Harvest Festival
    Support West Suffield Congregational Church! - buy a Cow Chip Bingo Ticket!
  • Revelation and Sleepy Hollow
  • Robb is running in “Gigi’s Playhouse 8K.”  Gigi’s Playhouse is an organization that supports families with kids with Down’s Syndrome.  Click here to make a donation to my team.
  • Canadian Thanksgiving
    • A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed – to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October.
  • Columbus Day
    • "The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and 'with God's aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.' " - Ferdinand Columbus’ biography of his father (according to Sale, Kirkpatrick (1991). The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy)
    • "In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold," Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496. "In Castile, Portugal, Aragon,.. . and the Canary Islands they need many slaves, and I do not think they get enough from Guinea." He viewed the Indian death rate optimistically: "Although they die now, they will not always die. The Negroes and Canary Islanders died at first."
    • Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, "A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."

Primary Scripture – Luke 17:11-19, Thankful Leper

  • Leprosy
    • probably was not actual leprosy but a skin malady - is this important to bring up?
    • Healing - both physical restoration and social restoration - lepers are returned to the community
  • The importance of giving thanks
    • Do you write thank you notes?
  • What is important?
    • Not religious orthodoxy
    • not cultural acceptance
    • Orthopraxis- giving thanks
    • Once again, the Samaritan is lifted up as the hero of faith.  The one in ten that gives thanks.
      • More than just saying “thank you,” this is an outpouring of worship that shows us the Samaritan is the only one that gets the full benefit of Jesus’ healing.  The others are healed, yes.  This is the one that is redeemed.
      • “The passage confronts us with more than a push for common courtesy of saying our thank-yous.  It gives us an outsider whose unrestrained and spontaneous appreciation dramatizes the essence of faith and who disrupts an otherwise easy perception that we know who the real insiders are.” (Charles Cousar, Texts for Preaching, Year C)
  • v 16 - Eucharist -to give thanks
  • “Your faith has made you well”
    • Wasn’t the Samaritan already made well?
    • There is a difference between "being cured" and being "made well"
    • It was not his faith in the healing power of God- it was his thanksgiving
    • Do we remember that God is the source of blessing
    • Can God be the source of blessing and not the source of woe (even via passivity)?
    • Faith is something lived - in thankfulness
  • Faith as a life of thanksgiving
    • Thankfulness for being cured of dis-ease
    • Thankfulness for being present in the midst of dis-ease
    • If we take the presence and loving nature of God seriously- can we be anything other than thankful?
    • Not faithful/thankful
      • we deserve it - about time
      • What needs to be cured next?
  • “Worship is certainly at the heart of the Christian life, and the story of the one who returns to give thanks points us to that truth. God promises to be at work in the world, in our church, in our lives; so we cannot but give thanks.” - Kimberly Bracken Long, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary - Feasting on the Word – Year C, Volume 4: Season After Pentecost 2 (Propers 17-Reign of Christ).

  • Prayers:
    • Anne Lamott: 2 favorite prayers
      • morning: “Help me, Help me, Help me”
      • evening: “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you”
    • Doxology - “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…”
    • Meister Eckhart - “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is "Thank you"' it will be enough”
    • Eucharistic Thanksgiving Prayer - “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give our thanks and praise. Eternal God, holy and mighty, it is truly right and our greatest joy to give you thanks and praise, and to worship you in every place where your glory abides.”

Secondary scripture - Psalm 66:1-12, Psalm of Thanksgiving

  • Hymn of Thanksgiving
  • Whole Psalm?
  • Easily adapted into a Call to Worship or a Confession of Faith
  • Movements:
    • Praise to God
    • Deeds of God
      • Sea into Dry Land
        • Creation
        • Exodus
        • Promised Land
        • Bringing life out of death
        • Baptism?
          • The Vulgate called titled this “Psalm of Resurrection”
          • Can the Psalms be faithfully interpreted Christologically?
          • instead- perhaps we should read Christ throu8gh the lens of the Exodus
    • Faithfulness of God
      • Through fire and water
      • tested
      • given burden
      • yet always redeemed
      • This is not the confession of a people who have “had it easy”
    • For the sake of the people, and for individual
      • “Just as Christians affirm the participation in the paradigmatic death and resurrection of Jesus, so also the psalmist affirms the participation in the paradigmatic event of exodus.  Finally, what God has done for all God’s people is inseparable from what God has done for the individual.” (Clint McCann, New Interpreter’s Bible, v. IV)

Closing - Fire and Rain by James Taylor
          TY: listeners, Opening music, Dick Dale and the Deltones “Misirlou”

TY: Closing music,Paul and Storm, “Oh No”

Shout outs:  Hope Molozaiy and Constance King 

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