Countless Gifts of Love

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, Nov. 22, 2009

You see at the top of your order of service today there’s something we say almost every week as we announce the offering time at church:  “We have been greatly blessed.” 

Well, we have been.  But I’ve heard some people say when they hear that, they think it must mean that everybody here is doing really well, that it must mean that none of us has any problems, that maybe it means you have to be perfect and your life has to be going really, really well for you to come here.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nobody’s always okay.  All of us have bad days.  All of us feel down sometimes.  All of us have hard things happen to us.  We all have days and times when we need a friend or someone to talk to or somebody to lend us a hand or someone to assure us that things are going to turn out alright.

To say “we have been greatly blessed” doesn’t mean any of us are perfect.  To say “we have been greatly blessed” means that no matter how bad it gets, we’re still going to take time to notice the countless gifts of love in our lives.  And that’s what today is for.  That’s what Thanksgiving is about.

 

Here are many things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving, but I’ll just tell you about a couple of them.

First of all, I’m thankful for the love of my family.  Of course for Linda who shares my joys and celebrations, but also listens to me grouse and complain and bang my head on the wall and cry in a puddle on the floor some days.  But I’m thankful for all the rest of my family, too.  A symbol of this familial love is something I got in the mail this week from my grandson Benjamin.  Linda and I sent him a box of gifts for his 6^th birthday in Ann Arbor a couple of weeks ago and this week we got back this thank-you letter that says (I think):

“From Ben, Thank you for the Pokemons and the cookie cutters, To Grandma and Grandpa Van Zandt.”  It might be the first letter he’s ever written us.  They grow up so fast.

Another thing I’m thankful for is this church and for the ability of its people to show love for each other.  One example of that happened last Thursday evening when I went over to SIU-Edwardsville to see Sayer Johnson participate in a presentation on transgender issues.  Sayer was there to tell his story to a large gathering who desperately needed to hear true stories about real-life courage and authenticity.  Sayer was wonderful, and Sharon, too.  But so were the people from this church who showed up in public support:  the ones I saw were Pat, Rachel, Cheryle, Diane, Layne, and of course, Sayer’s family Sharon, Devon, River, Lyric, Sayer’s mom, and the rest.  It was a serious gift to me to be there to witness that courageous event and to see the support that members of this church can be for one another.

 

One more thing I’m thankful for is what I choose today to call the love of God, which is the source of all the good things in my life.  I call it “the love of God” because those are the only words I know that are big enough and inclusive enough and uncertain enough to express it.  When I try to make a list of all the things I’m thankful for, it goes on and on.  When you take the time and the intentional energy it sometimes takes to pull yourself out of the soup of trials and tribulations in your life, you may see that there are countless gifts of love there for you as well.  It’s certainly not that everything’s ever perfect, but on a day like today, in the moment we’ve been given together, there’s an awful lot to be thankful for.

One of the things Sayer said on Thursday night was that one of the driving forces in his life journey is his desire to be more authentic.  Amen to that.  It seems like we’re all trying to grow up - even us older folks - we’re all trying to become authentic and to be who we’re supposed to be.  I find such a journey to be difficult, tedious, painful , and joyful, and somehow given more breadth and depth by the support of a community like this one. 

Surely some days will still be harder than others.  But if you can keep in mind the gifts you receive, if you can remain connected to a supportive community, and if you can begin to give back some of the love you’ve been given, then the journey becomes its own reward - for all of us, and thereby we are all greatly blessed.

So may it be.