When John Mickey asked me several months ago to talk this morning about thankfulness it seemed fitting since it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Little did I know at the time, as a Wake Forest fan, just how thankful I would be!
As I thought about how I might connect a theme of thankfulness to the overall stewardship theme of Living our Gifts, I realized that perhaps the greatest way to show our thanks to God for the gifts we have been given is to live them, to use them, in our worship and in our daily lives.
This morning I want to talk about three gifts that I have been given and about how Home Moravian church and the Moravian Church generally have helped me to live them. For each of these, I am truly thankful. These gifts are music, citizenship, and intellect.
I am thankful for the Moravian heritage of music as an essential part of worship and for the beautiful music we hear and sing each Sunday in our worship. I did not grow up in the Moravian church but as a child and teenager, I loved to sing and sang in my church choir, school choirs, the shower, the car, wherever I could. When I went away to college however I stopped singing and I didn’t start again until I came to Home church.
When I look back at it now, I think it was a combination of no longer having a church home, the inevitable process we go through in college of figuring out what we will do with our lives, and what we will not, and the realization that the joy I got from singing exceeded my talent. When I came to Home Church, one of the first things I did was join the Intergenerational Choir at the invitation of my friends Carl and Helen Moses and I will always be thankful for that invitation. What I have learned from singing here is that music is prayer. It was never about me or how skilled I was. It was always about using the gift of song to praise God, from whom all blessings flow. For this, I am truly thankful.
I am also thankful for the gift of citizenship in the United States, a gift I fear too many of us take for granted. We enjoy in this country great prosperity and political freedom and yet barely half of us turn out to vote when we are selecting the president and even fewer than that when we are not. Perhaps because I study and teach political science I am constantly reminded of the importance of one’s participation in a democracy. But I am also aware of the many barriers that get in the way of that participation, not the least of which is the often ugly and conflict ridden world of politics and what can seem like the unsolvable problems of public policy. When we enter the international arena, problems can seem even bigger and more difficult.
This is why I am so thankful for the opportunities I have had at Home church to work on the World Hunger and Global Concerns committee and to be part of groups like Bread for the World and CHANGE. What I have learned from these groups is that people of faith can work together across the partisan divide to address difficult problems. They can live the gift of citizenship by using their influence to make the world a better place. This gives me hope, and for this, I am so thankful.
Finally, I am thankful for a gift all of us have – the gift of a human brain, that has the capacity for reason and the ability to seek understanding of the world. This is a gift I came to appreciate fairly early in my life, when I spent a summer working at a camp for severely retarded children. I realized that summer how fortunate I was and the obligation I had to use and develop the intellect I had been given. Unfortunately, for some time in my life the development of intellect seemed to me to be in conflict with most of the organized religious belief I had encountered. I had many questions, and few people of faith willing or able to answer those questions. While I did not ultimately lose my faith, I will say I drifted fairly far afield. It wasn’t until I had my son and realized that I wanted him to have a Christian education that I began to look for a church home.
I must say, the Moravian commitment to education and the saying “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love” was a powerful invitation to come through these doors. And what kept me coming was the fact that I wasn’t required to check my brain at the door. In this day and age, that is more rare than I think we realize and it is something for which we should be truly grateful, to our Moravian ancestors who understood that faith and reason could coexist and to all the people at Home church who do the work of Christian education. I have grown in my faith here by being allowed to question and required to think. And for this, I am very thankful.
In this season of Thanksgiving, I hope we will all reflect on the abundant gifts God has given us and recommit ourselves to living those gifts as our way of saying thank you. And let me say thank you to each of you, for being my church family and giving me a welcoming place to live my gifts. For this, I am most thankful.
Katy Harriger, November 2006
