Generous God

Text: Psalm 93

Focus: Thanksgiving

Function: To help people be generous to strangers.

Form: GOK

Intro: There are a few profound sermons that I have heard in my life.

I think one that has stuck with me the most was a man asking us to quote the first 9 words of John 3:16.

Say it with me: “For God so loved the world that He gave.”

So far this month, we have been looking at the idea of Generosity when it comes to our faith. We examined Generous people, generous grace, generous resurrection and today, the well spring of all that generosity is our final message, Generous God.

The nature of God is generosity.

And today we celebrate God's generosity as we celebrate Thanksgiving.

I wonder if Thanksgiving is actually our most Christian holiday.

I know Easter celebrates the Resurrection and Christmas celebrates the coming of hope, healing and restoration as we celebrate the coming of God, the Word of God made flesh: Jesus.

And although Thanksgiving is not actually a religious holiday per se, I have often wondered who or what those who claim that they do not believe in any sort of higher power or Creator are thankful to.

I suppose that there could be an honest celebration of success, hard work and good luck every year when Thanksgiving happens as it is wrapped around our harvest celebration.

Thanksgiving is a throwback to an agrarian culture.

After the Industrial revolution, modern cultures were no longer merely agrarian. Economically, we are a consumerist culture.

And that leads us to a sort of sad part of what Thanksgiving has become.

Since inevitably, at least one person from our household works in retail, our Thanksgiving celebration starts early and is cut short.

And our economic future for the next year is predicted to be good or bad based on the level of success that Holiday Shopping from the previous year.

And it is true, if Christmas sales go well, then it stimulates the entire economy and the hope for prosperity or lack of it is determined.

In an Agrarian culture, the quality of the next year was based on the harvest of the year before.

But that is the neat thing about faith.

That, to me, is the neat thing about Thanksgiving.

That is the neat thing about worshiping God in gratitude every year at Thanksgiving.

Because, people of faith have gathered together every year and have taken the time to stop and to say “Thank You” to God.

And, that attitude of thankfulness has come from believers regardless of the quality of harvest.

If the harvest was disappointing, people still stopped to celebrate and to say thanks to God because we who live by faith have learned this lesson, our Hope is in God.

And God is indeed generous.

We know that God is generous with Grace because God has chosen to forgive us and welcome us into God's family in spite of our own failures.

God is love. And God's love draws us back to God and keeps us in God's protection.

Profound scholars, and skeptics both have come to a wonderful understanding, God gives rain, sun, harvest and hope to everyone, even those who are wicked.

God is love. And God's love is generous toward everyone, especially those of the household of faith.

Even though Thanksgiving became a national holiday as a day of prayer right before the Civil war, for some reason that first celebration with the Native Americans and the Pilgrims sticks especially in my mind.

Those Pilgrims endured a bitter winter the year before and their population was cut by one third because of the hardship of that winter.

The next winter, instead of hording their labors in preparation for another hard winter, they decided to share with their new found friends.

And in a spirit of hospitality, their new friends, the native Americans, who knew how to cultivate and prepare for the harsh Northern Winter, welcomed the strangers, the Pilgrims, and shared with them.

I pray that we, who then dispossessed those people who were generous to us, can be of the same mind toward everyone who comes begging us for shelter and succor. Those victims of ISIS are fleeing religious persecution much worse than the Pilgrims had when they fled to this new land.

(look up) Oh God, we pray that we will be a nation that will respond with the same generosity.

Let me read Leviticus 19:33-34: ³³“Do not mistreat foreigners who are living in your land. ³⁴Treat them as you would an Israelite, and love them as you love yourselves. Remember that you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Unfortunately, some people have used those refugees as political pawns and are trying to reap political points by shouting out fear towards the very people trying to flee from ISIS as if they were ISIS themselves merely because they look and dress like some of them.

Imagine what that first Thanksgiving would have been like if those who had no claim to the teachings of Jesus, the teaching to love one another as yourselves, would have treated the Pilgrims like some fear-mongerers are treating Refugees?

There would be no Thanksgiving holiday.

These people want a safe and secure future just like the Pilgrims did 450 years ago.

And that passage in Leviticus haunts me about what God will think of us if we refuse the same succor and help we were given.

Don't mistreat them. That is obvious. But God gives a reason why.

God told them that since God gave them a new land, a safe place, where they were given security, and they didn't build the houses, plant the vineyards, erect the walls around their cities, pave the roads, clear the fields, all of that was a gift to them by God, the only thing that God expected in a form of gratitude was that they treat every other foreigner who came to their land with the same blessings that God gave them.

And then, 15 times in this chapter alone, God repeats this statement to them: “I am the Lord.”

Well, they knew that. The repetition is God's subtle way of reminding them that God is watching, and judging -either with blessing or hardship- as to how well they do this.

So, God says to them: This was not your land, I gave it to you by driving out the people who were living here. And since this Land is my gift to you, I have this condition for you as a way to honor my gift for you. Give the same freedom to enjoy this land to the strangers who come to you. And by the way, I am watching to see if you do it.

Now, most of us have an issue with the way the land of Canaan, what is today modern day Palestine, was given to the Jewish nation.

The entire population was killed. And because of that, we Brethren make it clear that our Creed is the New Testament because we believe, and can prove it from scripture, that the New Testament ended that kind of warfare.

Most of us have a hard time defending God's willingness to allow the Jews to wipe out the native people.

But, the defense, whether we like it or not is this: The people were cruel, especially to foreigners. It was proven by the way the angels who visited Lot were treated. And yet, even then, God was trying to win back the hearts of those people.

God told Abraham that the iniquities of those people was not yet as bad and they would have to wait 400 years until their collective evil was bad enough.

And so, they went to Egypt.

The reason for the delay is obvious when one reads the OT prophets.

God sent prophet after prophet to these people telling them to be kind, loving, and caring towards others. And it appears that after continually rejecting the prophets warnings to stop doing evil towards others, God made an example out of them.

I don't believe that God allowed the Jews to displace those people with violence because God loved the Jewish people more than others.

Nope, God loves everyone equally. The OT declares that the Jewish people were some of the most stubborn of all the peoples and God loved them and God blessed them when and if they ensured justice for everyone, even the stranger.

Now, there are a lot of other ways to look at the warfare in the OT than the one I just gave. I think I am almost alone in my understanding of that. And don't, please don't get bogged down with those points except to hear this.

The Jewish people were under a manifest destiny to possess the land. God never gave us the right of manifest destiny.

Instead, God didn't stop us when we displaced the very people who were kind enough to share with the Pilgrims. By their very actions that first Thanksgiving, the native Americans exhibited the just and loving acceptance of strangers that God commanded the Jews to demonstrate toward other strangers.

We took the land with violence and I cannot justify that action as being anything that a Christian nation would do.

But that is irrelevant to the conversation, if the Jews, who had manifest destiny, were commanded to welcome the stranger because they were also strangers to this land, then how much more does God expect us be generous with God's provision of such a rich land?

And I want to end with the idea of God's generosity.

You see, we cannot out give God.

That first Thanksgiving, resources were still limited among the Pilgrims. The pain of all those who died the winter before was fresh on their minds. But, they still trusted God enough to share. And they did that because they knew that God was generous.