First Sunday in Advent

Happy Thanksgiving! I pray that today will be a day filled with joy, gratitude, and reflection on all the many gifts of God that surround you. I pray that no matter what the day brings, you will be able to recall some gift of grace over which to give thanks. And I want to share with you a quote from Julian of Norwich that I’ve been pondering since I read the book, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic and Beyond by Matthew Fox. (I had hoped to share it in my message last Sunday but like so many things in sermon preparation, it was left on the editor's cutting floor.) Julian saw an intimate connection between gratitude and prayer, writing, “Giving thanks is also a part of prayer. Thanksgiving is a true, inner awareness. Charged with the quality of reverence and loving awe, we turn ourselves with all our might toward the actions our good Lord guides us to, rejoicing and thanking him inwardly. Sometimes the soul is so filled with gratitude that it overflows and breaks into song: ‘Good Lord, thanks be to you! Blessed are you, O God, and blessed may you always be.” (p. 33)

Whether you are moved to break into song or not, know that to be grateful is to reflect a heart of prayer. Gratitude invites connection with our God from whom all blessings flow. I pray you will experience that intimate connection with our loving creator God and with your loved ones as you gather around a Thanksgiving table.

This Sunday in worship, we are so excited to begin the Advent journey with our Advent/Christmas message series, “Declutter Christmas”. We hope to invite you to declutter your life in such a way that the heart of Christmas, the gift of God’s love in the baby born in Bethlehem will be able to take center stage in your Advent and Christmas celebrations. There is so much about Christmas that is lovely, exciting, and just plain fun. The challenge is to be intentional in choosing to make time and space for those practices that will lead us deeper into the mystery and grace that is the coming of Jesus. What are the things that you can do, the ways that you can declutter your life, and your soul, so that your relationship with Christ and others can flourish and grow during this sacred season?

To aid you in that, you should be receiving our Declutter Christmas postcard in the mail. On one side of it, you will find important dates and times of special events at Suntree UMC during Advent and Christmas. On the other side, you will find an old-fashioned Advent calendar with practical suggestions of things you can do to help make your Advent and Christmas truly centered around the message of Christmas. We hope you will put it on your refrigerator or with your bible and other devotional materials so that you can refer to it through the season.

This Sunday in worship we begin the journey to “Declutter Christmas” by focusing on hope and the promise that not only did Christ come long ago but that someday Christ will return to complete the work of healing and transformation that began with the incarnation. (You may want to read Luke 21:25-34 in preparation for worship.) Sometimes it’s easy to get discouraged with life the way it is. But Christ’s followers live as people of hope, believing that even now Christ’s work of healing and transformation continues, and will one day be complete. Rather than fear the future, we hold our heads high, eagerly anticipating the work of Christ in the future.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving, and I look forward to worship this Sunday as we begin the Advent journey together!

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Annette

Thanksgiving Sunday

Last week, on the Interfaith Mental Health Panel, Rev. Dr. John Baggett closed our time together reflecting on the powerful, unifying force of gratitude in our lives. He shared, appropriately, that gratitude was a value in each of the faiths that were present on the call. In addition, the American holiday of Thanksgiving is an example of a place that we can unify in that value. It felt like a cap on a beautiful afternoon and focused our hearts toward our upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.

The truth of the matter is, gratitude has a powerful effect on us in many avenues of life. It seems that whatever you may be searching for advice on, gratitude shows up. Whether we are thinking about our generosity, our mental health, the upcoming holiday season, our morning and evening quiet time practices, best practices for relationships, and building connections, gratitude somehow finds its way to the center. It is powerful, popular, at the center of many faiths, and, of course, at the center of the Thanksgiving holiday.

As we consider Thanksgiving this coming week, we can focus on our faith and think of the many times in Scripture where the writer gives glory and thanksgiving to God. It happens again and again; whether in an important battle in the Old Testament, giving glory for a covenant, throughout the power of the Psalms (even the ones where there is lament!), in Jesus’s ministry including at the Last Supper, and into Paul’s letters to the early church. When we consider, like much of Scripture does, the power of God to create, sustain, redeem, and love all of us, and when we survey the earth, it is a natural response to give glory to God and give thanks. What a loving, sacrificing, generous God we serve!

The power of gratitude that Rev. Dr. John Baggett highlighted in our Mental Health Panel is that when we take a step back, give honor and glory to God, and look at the good (even simply a beautiful sunrise or God’s grace through the care of someone else), we feel better. We remind ourselves that we aren’t in control. We can look at the long road of our lives and see how God has walked with us through terrible and beautiful things. We can see God’s handiwork in the skies and in the minutiae of our lives. In a season like the one we have been weathering in the pandemic, it can help us remember that God is still Lord and in control over the long moral arc of our universe, through the end of time. When we see who God is in Jesus, we say, what great news!

This Sunday in worship, we’ll give glory to God for this year’s blessings. We’ll also hear a story of gratitude- and lack-there-of- in Luke 17. Jesus has much to say about our prayers of gratitude, but the story of the ten lepers is one that shows gratitude’s power in full example. In our lives, we can be the one leper that returns to our benefit, the benefit of our communities, and the benefit of our world.

Wherever you are, I hope you’ll join us to give thanks to God for who God is, and what God is up to in our lives. We’re excited to walk with you in that.

See you then,
Pastor Allee