Giving Thanks That It's Time for a Showdown

If we work at it, everyone can find at least something small to be thankful for. Jesus said, "Don't fear, only believe." In God's parlance that means believing God meant it when he looked down on creation and declared it good. Even in times of fear, believers know God intended us for joy. With faith we can take hold of it. Even in the darkest times, that's something to be thankful for. It's up to us to find our particular, personal door to God's joy. If you're having trouble finding the latch on your door check out Jesus; he can help you put your hand on it.

That's my take on personal thankfulness. But as believers we have some shared reasons to give thanks this year. Tops on my list is that the church seems to be inching toward reconciliation and perhaps taking the nation with it. The poet T.S. Eliot once surveyed the "Wasteland" of our culture and saw only one institution, the church, that had any chance at all of reversing our slide into empty materialism. He wasn't hopeful enough to think it probable the church would succeed, but if it didn't, we might as well admit that the values of justice, compassion and spirituality are now nothing more than a quaint memory.

Maybe I'm deceiving myself, but I've had opportunity to visit a variety churches recently and have noticed a willingness to jettison doctrinal differences in favor of fostering a sense of God's spirit moving among us, giving of strength and perspective. With that gained perspective I believe the church is seeing how it has been used to support the politics of personal gain. The deal the church has made, especially the evangelical branch, has turned out to be Faustian in nature -- a deal with the devil -- that traded promises on a few isolated issues for permission to rape the many in favor of the few. This is the same deal the church of Jesus' day made with the Romans, and a deal made by the Christian church with political and economic elites throughout the centuries.

John wrote that Jesus brought a light into the world darkness could not overcome. We're starting to see now how true that is. Believers everywhere are starting to see that it's time for a showdown, a time to stand up for God's values, in God's Spirit, and insist that the light of God that radiated from Christ will also shine in us. For that I offer a prayer of thanks. It is never too late.