+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
What’s an atheist? {{Congregational Response}} [someone who doesn’t believe in God] How many of you would describe yourself as an atheist? {{Congregational Response}}
Now, for the next series of questions, keep your answers to yourselves. How many of you are worried or anxious about employment? about your family? about the church? about the economy? about what’s going on in the world? How many of you are worried or anxious about the Thanksgiving dinner you’re going to be cooking?! How many of you are worried or anxious about the Thanksgiving dinner you’re going to be attending?!
Paul knew that the disciples in Philippi were worried and anxious about many things, too. So as he finished up his letter to them, he gave them words of encouragement:
“The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving make your requests known unto God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Paul was reminding the Philippians that God was with them so much so that they could pray with anticipatory thanksgiving.
Jesus faced a similar situation with the crowd that followed him after he fed them with just five loaves and two fish: “When the crowd found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, ‘Rabbi, when did you come here?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs [that is, signs that would lead them to become disciples], but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.’ Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’”
Notice that the crowd has taken Jesus’ words about “working for the food that endures for eternal life” to mean work that they themselves must do. So Jesus corrects them: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Jesus isn’t asking them to do anything― they are to believe in the One who will give them everything they need.
Although neither Jesus nor Paul would have put it this way, both the crowds whom Jesus fed and the Philippians to whom Paul wrote were suffering from “functional atheism.” Here’s how the Quaker writer, teacher, and activist Parker Palmer describes “functional atheism”:
“. . . the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God. . . .
“The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn sometimes that we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands” (Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation [San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2000], pp.88-89).
On this Thanksgiving Day, may God grant us the grace to renounce our “functional atheism” and remember all the gifts we constantly receive from God’s gracious and loving hands. Amen.
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