November 20, 2011 | 23 Cheshvan 5772

I bet your Thanksgiving dinner plans are set, aren’t they? Are you going to someone’s house this year or have you invited family and friends to join you in your home? How about the delectable menu? I bet you or your hosts have decided who is bringing which item to the feast.

What a great day…

Macy’s Parade in the morning, a little football (maybe a lot of football) in the afternoon, a moment of prayer expressing gratitude for the bounty you enjoy and then a delicious Thanksgiving meal…followed by your likely involuntary nap… Have I pretty much summarized how you will spend the day this Thursday?

Of course, some of you will spend part of the day in a particularly worthy activity…like sharing your time with those in need, helping to serve a meal… But at some point during the day, every one of us here will enjoy a Thanksgiving feast.

This year I want to offer a suggestion for your celebration. Why don’t you change its location?

I want you to move your nicest dining room and living room furniture outside and eat your Thanksgiving meal under the heavens. That’s right!  Don’t even look at the weather forecast!  Just take the dining room set and the sofa and those nice chairs, and move them right on outside the door!

Think I’m crazy?  Listen to this:

“You shall sit in huts” (Lev. 23:42).

The rabbis of the Talmud went on to say:  During the holiday of Sukkot a person is to make the Sukkah a permanent abode.  How?  If the individual has beautiful sofas and chairs, he should bring them into the Sukkah.  (Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 28b).

Does anyone here know what a sukkah is? It is a temporary hut built for the week-long Jewish thanksgiving festival of Sukkot, and its roof has to be constructed so that from inside, one can see the sky.  

So let me get this straight. The rabbis said:  Bring really nice furniture into a flimsy building of sorts that has no solid roof!  Are you kidding me?  Those rabbis must have been crazy!

Maybe… After all, Sukkot occurs in the fall…when the temperatures go down and the rain begins to fall. But logically, I can think of two other possibilities. Perhaps the rabbis were speaking to people who could afford to replace those beautiful pieces of furniture just like that (snap fingers) if the elements damaged them. I don’t like that suggestion any more than you do.

Or maybe, just maybe, the rabbis were trying to teach us something about thanksgiving and the appropriate place of material possessions in our lives. Perhaps they were telling us that to really celebrate your bounty you have to recognize that your hold on it may be very tenuous.

Most of us don’t think about our possessions in that way. Oh, yes, many of us have seen significant diminishment of our retirement resources in recent years. Our portfolios have been hurt. But most of us have remained pretty comfortable despite the prolonged recession.

It’s difficult for us to feel what it would be like not to have the material harvest for which we offer thanks at this time of year. It’s nigh impossible for us to feel what it would be like to lose some of our most valuable possessions.

And that is why the Rabbis said, “Do it!  Go ahead!  Put some of your most valuable possessions outside where the rain and other elements can ruin them.”  But most of us are not prepared to lose our valuable possessions in this way so we won’t place them in a sukkah or any other place they may get damaged. Ironically, that is why we ought to look at the sukkah itself, this porous, flimsy hut, to provide us with direction in celebrating our harvest at this time of year.

I told you earlier that the sukkah must have a roof that enables someone inside it to see the sky…it must be open to the heavens.

I have to add one more piece of information. As you might imagine, a sukkah usually has four walls with an opening for a door. But to be fit for use on the holiday of Sukkot it only requires two and a half walls.

Can you visualize that?

A hut that is completely open on one side, perhaps a bit more… open to the heavens above; open to the world around it. Yes the sukkah itself does help us to understand how to enjoy our bounty… not just by recognizing how tenuous our hold on it may be, but by recognizing the source of our blessings and how we may act to increase our recognition of them.

To look up into the heavens is, for many of us, an image of reaching out to God.

Our harvest, no matter how great or how meager, becomes real when we recognize that the Holy One is the source of our blessings.

As we acknowledge, praise and thank God it seems our bounty grows.

Then, when we look out into the world we see beauty, but we also see a world that reflects deprivation and abuse. It beckons us. It calls us not just to see it, but to mend it. As we do so, we begin to make a difference, and the changes we help to bring about add immeasurably to our bounty.

So let us begin to act – let us look up and let us look out.

Then, as we acknowledge the Source of all blessings and reach out to those who need us, we will add to the bountiful harvest we celebrate at this time of year.

A hut, a dinner and a challenge…

Let us enjoy this special time of year and answer the call that beckons us.

Amen.

THANKSGIVING SERMON
COMMUNITY INTERFAITH SERVICE
Northside United Methodist Church