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The reading is from the Acts of the Apostles, the 27th chapter. I begin the reading at the 33rd verse. As day was about to dawn, Paul urged them all to take some food, saying, "Today is the fourteenth day that you have continued in suspense and without food, having taken nothing. Therefore, I urge you to take some food. It will give you strength, since not a hair is to perish from the

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head of any of you." And when he had said this, he took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all, he broke it and began to eat. Then they all were encouraged and ate some food themselves. We were in all 276 persons in the ship. And when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, throwing out the wheat into the sea. And may God bless to us and to our

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understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The preacher climbed up into the pulpit. In front of him were seated 100 persons. Those 100 persons represented the four billion citizens of the earth. He took a breath mint and put it under his tongue to both sweeten and lubricate his speech. And then,

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adopting the silly smile of the insensitive, he said, "Let us give thanks to the Lord." And the 100 people said, "Amen." Let us give thanks for whole bodies, for legs that can run and ears that can hear birdsong and eyes that can see sunset. And some blind persons and some deaf persons and some crippled and maimed persons silently and sadly got up and went away. Let us give thanks

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for health, for lungs that can breathe deeply, for appetites that are vital and fulfilling, for skin that is rosy and soft to the touch. And some lepers in the room and some with tuberculosis and some with ulcers and some whose skin was old and wrinkled silently and sadly got up and went away. And let us give thanks for our benefits, for the comforts and the luxuries that we know,

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and for the rivers of wealth that bless us as a society. And some people who had children at home who were hungry and who were themselves malnourished, and some who were cold and some who were almost naked for they had no money for clothes, silently and sadly got up and went away. But the preacher was so lost in comfortable thoughts that he did not notice what was

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happening. Let us give thanks for home, for a warm hearth and for Ham family that loves us. And some refugees in the room and some who were old, their families having long since gone on before them. And for a teenager who had been thrown out of his house, for them there was silence and sadness and they got up and went away. And let us thank God for our friends, for those who stand by

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us in every time of hurt and of need. And some forgotten men who ate in greasy spoons every night of their life. And for some who were isolated on remote farms and places in the deep woods. And for those who were cut off and discriminated against, well they silently and sadly got up and went away. And let us give thanks for our grace, for our charm, for the social skills we have

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developed, for the fact that we are nice to be around. And a lady who knew that her chin receded too much. And a man who was cross-eyed. And some who were fat and some who were bald and some who were shy and some who had never been taught the graces of society and were unpopular, silently and sadly went away. And let us give thanks for our education, for our minds that can search out

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the secrets of art and science and literature and can master all of this great universe. And those who had not gone to college because there was no cash, and those who were simple-minded, those who were limited and retarded, got blank looks on their faces and they silently and sadly went away. But the preacher never looked down to see what was happening in front of him. And so he said, "Let

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us give thanks for our virtues, for our strengths, and for those healthy and noble attitudes which are ours, and the ill-tempered, and the jealous, and the envious, and the anxious, and the impotent, and the nervous, and the afraid." They went silently and sadly away. And let us thank God for justice. And an Arab who lived in Jerusalem, and a Jew who lived in Moscow, and a black who

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lived in Soweto, and a Chicano who lived in Los Angeles, and an Indian who lived near Albuquerque, and a Christian who lived in Utah. All those separated by the injustice of society, silently and sadly got up and went away. And let us most of all thank God for peace. And an African, and a Nicaraguan, and a citizen of Cambodia, and a Lebanese, and an Ethiopian, and an Angolan, they

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left the place. And behold, the preacher looked down, and he saw that no one else was left in the room. And beside that, his little breath mint had melted away so that his speech was no longer smooth. And his voice cracked as he cried out to God and said, "Where have they all gone?" And God said to him, "You have exalted those things which I have never promised. You have spoken sweetness

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to those who have known bitterness. I have never promised to anyone health, or wealth, or prosperity, or brilliance. I have never promised unbroken families and unbroken friendships. I have never promised to the earth justice or peace. Think of my servant Job. Think of my servant Jeremiah. Think of my son Jesus. Think of the Apostle Paul." And it's true, isn't it? The essence of thanksgiving,

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has never really rested in things, or in people, or in situations, or in circumstances. You know, I wish today that I was an artist, and that I could paint for you four pictures. Because I am not an artist, I cannot use pigments or paints, I can only use paragraphs. But if I was to paint for you four pictures, they would be these. The first picture would be built on John chapter 6.

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It would be all in sunny, bright pastel colors. It would be in a plain frame, because the scene was itself rather plain. A wide grassland, some mountains off in the distance, maybe tints of gray and blue there. And the picture crowded with people, from one border to the other. Over 5,000 people. Jesus, you see, is very tired. He's exhausted. He's been healing, and ministering,

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and preaching, and counseling. And he wanted to get away, so he took the twelve and went to a place apart. But the crowds followed him. The whole 5,000 plus were there, gathering about him. There was no escape, and it began to get toward evening. I think I put some purple clouds in the sky, a touch of vermilion to represent the sunset. And Jesus, wanting to test his disciples, said to

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Philip, "Feed these people." And Philip throws up his hands in despair, why 200 denarii worth of bread would not feed all of these people? So Jesus said, "Do Andrew, feed these people." And Andrew says, "There's no food here. Here's a little boy who has five loaves and two fishes, but that's all." Now, mind you, Andrew and Philip had been with Jesus from the beginning. They knew the powers

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which were his, but at this moment they forgot that, and gave an expression of despair and of faithlessness. So here is Jesus, trying to get away from the crowds, surrounded by the crowds. Here is Jesus, looking for his disciples to turn to him in the moment of need, and instead hearing them despairing and saying that nothing can be done. Here is Jesus with no joy and no satisfaction

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and no peace and no quiet in the moment. But, and this would be the text for my painting, the 11th verse. "Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated." Now my second picture would be drawn on Luke chapter 22, and this would be a picture in the classic style. It would have a gold frame, and if I could, and if I had the skill, I would paint

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it like Rembrandt. All dark colors, many of the figures shadowed, everything subdued, but right in the center of the picture there would be a lamp on the table, and from the glow of that lamp, all about it would be illuminated. The light would reflect off the polished tabletop and up to Jesus, who would be stripped to the waist. You see, the disciples had been arguing over which one was the

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greatest, and he had taken off his robes and girded himself with a towel, and was now washing their feet. The scene, of course, is the Last Supper. Now the light splashing off the table illumines the faces of the disciples about, and they are astonished at what Jesus is doing, and astonished also because you see the shadow of the cross is in the room. I think I would show that by having

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two of the disciples reaching out and their arms somehow crossing in front of the light on the table so that the shadow of the cross was shown falling across the face of Jesus. Judas would not be in the picture, he had already gone. There on the tabletop would be the sop of honor which Jesus had given to him. It would be sitting there now, soggy, in a pool of blood red wine. Peter would

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have just said, "I will never deny you," and somewhere nearby a cock would have ruffled its feathers. And Jesus would be thinking about the cross because he knew what crucifixion was. When he was only six years of age, someone from Galilee named Thutis had led an insurrection, and the Romans had crucified him, and all those who followed after him. The crosses lined the roadways. Even as

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a boy, Jesus saw that. He knew that the Romans knew how to subdue a people. So there he sits, rebuffed, being betrayed, surrounded by those who are ignoring him with the promise of nothing but suffering ahead. But what does he do? The text for my picture would be the 19th verse. It says, "And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is

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my body.'" Now my third picture would be drawn from Acts chapter 27, and this would be in a weathered frame, a distressed oak or something of that kind. And the colors would all be blue and green, dark blues and shadowed greens, because this is a vessel caught up in a great storm, a storm which the Bible calls a Northeaster. Paul is a prisoner of the Roman government. He's being taken to Rome.

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He warned them not to go at this season of the year because it was a dangerous time upon the waters, but they went. And this great storm comes up, and it captures this vessel. Now they did everything they could to secure the vessel, and they ran great lines about it to try to undergird it, and they jettisoned all the excess cargo, and they even threw aside the lifeboats so that none

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would be tempted to desert. And it was altogether dark. There was no star to steer by. And then to add to all of this anxiety, the sailors who were used to the sounds of the sea hear the roar of surf. They know that in the darkness they're coming close to someplace where the water is smashing against the rocks. So here they are, caught up in this cataclysm of sound and of

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motion. And in the very middle of the picture, I would paint Paul holding on to the mast with one arm, his hair and his beard and his robe all wet. And the 35th verse of the chapter would be my text. "And when he had said this, he gave thanks to God in the presence of all. A prisoner rejected in the dark, in the center of a storm, heading toward the rocks. And he gave thanks to God."

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My fourth and last picture would not be drawn from the scriptures. It would be painted all in shades of brown because it would be of the pilgrims, and the pilgrims were originally called brownists. A very rough use of the paint, not with a brush but rather with a spatula, broad slashes of color, abrupt demarcations between them, because these were a hard and a severe people. It's December

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of 1621. They have been at Plymouth now for more than a year. They did not come to this country like immigrants come today. Today immigrants come here to find their fortune. These people left their fortune behind them in order to be able to come. Their journey had to be underwritten by others. Two ships set out, one had to turn back. Only the Mayflower made it, and it had about a

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hundred on board, and 50 of those died in the first year. They would take them out at night, and they would bury them at a place called Cole's Hill, and they would cover over the grave because they didn't want the Indians to know how many of them had perished, how small their force was becoming. And that first winter, all they had to eat was what they brought with them on the ship,

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and some clams and water, but they were as tough as the rock on which they landed. Driven out of England because of what they believed, they came here to form a kind of New Testament community, a tiny band of people who were poor and bereaved and ill-fed, who were ill-housed, who were facing an unknown continent and wild woodlands before them, the wind blowing down on them, a December

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wind in New England, blowing their hair, playing games with their broad collars. And what do they do? They hold a feast of thanksgiving. Those would be my four pictures, a kind of gallery of gratitude, if you will. And notice, in none of those pictures is there a situation or a circumstance which seems to suggest thanksgiving. There's no health here, there's no comfort here, there's no ease here,

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there's nothing easy in these pictures at all. But they give thanks, because gratitude is properly built not on the things that God gives, but upon the God who gives them. The great gift for which we can alone, always and forever be thankful is not a thing, it's not a situation, and it's not a circumstance. The great gift is God's giving himself. The essence of thanksgiving is the

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reality of the presence of God. That's what led Jesus to thankfulness on the hillside in the upper room, that's what led Paul to thankfulness in that ship, and that's what led the Pilgrims to thankfulness on the pitiless shores of North New England. Not for what God gives, but for what God is. Lloyd Douglas, the great author, had a friend who was a violinist, an old man, and he

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used to drop in and see the old fellow because he was a delight to talk to. And on one occasion he walked into the old man's home and he said, "Tell me, what's the good news for today?" And the old man put down his violin and he picked up a tuning fork and he struck it, and holding it up so that the sound filled the room, he said, "The good news for today is this. This is A. Yesterday it was A,

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today it is A, and a thousand years from now it will still be A." We give thanks for the things that are constant. And the greatest constant that we know as Christians in our lives is this, that no matter what our situation or circumstance, God is with us. When they first built the ironclad ships, each ship had two compasses. One was down close to the deck and one was high up on the mast.

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And of the two compasses, the one on the mast was considered to be the one of ultimate dependability. You see, the ship's compass that was down close to the deck, it could somehow be influenced by all the iron about it in these ironclad vessels. The circumstances, the situations could lead that compass to go astray, but if you went up and looked at the compass closest to heaven, there

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you would always get the direction which was sure and which was true. And so it is in situations and circumstances our earthly compasses become confused. And if it is for this we're going to give thanks, then we have little to give thanks for sometimes. But if we move in our thoughts toward heaven and remember that the compass of God points always to the reality of God's being with us

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no matter where, when, why, how, then there's cause for giving thanks. I hear people say from time to time, and you hear them too, "Count your blessings." I find it very hard to do that. For the simple fact of the matter is that many times I don't know what situations in my life are blessings and which ones are not. Sometimes time has to pass

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before you really know. I mean, if the pilgrims would have drawn up a balance sheet on that day in December of 1621, the totals would have come out in red, not black. And yet out of all that hardness came great blessing. Phillips Brooks, one of the greatest preachers America ever produced, wanted to be a teacher and labored very hard to be a teacher and failed and was in great despair

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over it. But it was his failure as a teacher that led him to move toward the ministry and to become one of the greatest servants of God which this land has ever known. If he would have counted if he would have counted his blessings at the moment of his failure, he would have had no blessing from that perspective to count.

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When John Bunyan was thrown into prison in England, he was there for 12 years, and he did not count that a blessing. But it was while he was in jail that he wrote "A Pilgrim's Progress," and "Pilgrim's Progress" crawled out between those bars and walked up and down the highways and byways of the world and knocked on doors all over the world

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in the native tongue of the people who lived there so that more people in the world across history have read "Pilgrim's Progress" than any other book that has ever been written with the exception of the Bible. And it all came out of a time which was a time of deep despair for Bunyan. Arnold Toynbee, the great philosopher of history, says that it takes centuries for a nation to discover whether

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an event in its history is for good or for evil. And just as that's true for nations, so it's true for people. So when someone says to me, "Count your blessings," I oftentimes don't know what to count. I also don't like people to say that because it seems to me that it can lead so quickly to pridefulness. You know, the old line, "I always felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until

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I met a man who had no feet," kind of suggests that you go around, you know, until you find somebody that's worse off than you are, and then you thank God for the things you have that he doesn't have. And that's very arrogant. H. L. Mencken, who was an atheist and wrote, you remember, with such a vitriolic and acid pen, said, "The Thanksgiving Day was the day on which people

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who had inflammatory rheumatism went about thanking God that they did not have hydrophobia." That kind of thankfulness can become prideful so quickly. Haven't you ever heard somebody get up and begin to thank God for all the blessings that have come to America? And then somehow, very subtly, and I'm sure quite unconsciously, they begin to talk about how good America is,

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and how great America is, and how God has blessed America because America is good, and because America is generous, and pretty soon you see it's that God is on our side because we are on God's side, and that becomes arrogant and blasphemous and not real gratitude. Now, counting your blessings is sometimes impossible and other times dangerous.

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The only ground for gratitude is the faithfulness of God. So one year ago on this very day, some people who had celebrated Thanksgiving in one of those modern apartments high up in an apartment building in Manhattan, after dinner was over and the evening's pleasures enjoyed, they got on the elevator to go home and they were halfway down

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that skyscraper of a building when the elevator got stuck between two floors. And they tried to cry out but the walls were thick and no one could hear them. And of course it was Thanksgiving Day, all the help was off for the day. And they had nothing above them but empty elevator shaft and they had nothing below them but

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deep, deep, empty elevator shaft. And they were filled with disheartenment. And then a little boy who was standing in the corner of the car began to whistle, probably because he couldn't think of anything else to do. And he whistled a song that he'd heard that morning. "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing." And another person in the car began to hum,

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and then another, and then as best they could remember it, they sang the song and remembered the faithfulness of God. That whether you're going up or whether you're going down or whether you're stuck in the middle, God is there. And singing and laughing, they whiled away the time until they were saved. So we must not be like that preacher

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who cried out, his voice now cracked because his breath mint had melted away. "Oh Lord, where had they all gone?" And God replies, "They have gone because you exalted what I have never promised. You talked of sweetness in a world that knows bitterness. I have never pledged to anyone health or wealth or family or friends or beauty or intelligence

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or justice or peace. Consider my servant Job or my servant Jeremiah or my beloved son Jesus or the apostle Paul." "Well then," said the preacher, "what have you promised?" And God said, "Why, I have promised myself." And the preacher scrambled down out of the pulpit and he ran to the door of the church and he threw open the door and there were the hundred people representing all

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the population of the earth. They were sitting in the shadows and they were mute and downcast. And he took his box of breath mints and he hurled it into the outer darkness and he called out with a cracked but a more human voice, "I have deceived you. These things of which I have spoken may be in your life or they may not, but there is one who will be with you because he is love and that one

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is God. He will be with you forever and absolutely." That's the reason Job could say, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." That's the reason Jesus could say, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." That's the reason Paul could say, "Nothing can separate us from the love of God. God gives us himself." And a blind man who heard that began to weep and some friendless people reached out and

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took one another's hands and a black man decided to persist with his struggle. And the preacher climbed back up into the pulpit and the 100 people all looked up at him and he said, "Let us give thanks to God for the God who is always with us." And a hundred people said, "Amen." And there was great joy in heaven. Let us pray.

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Our Father God, sometimes we find ourselves overwhelmed with the hardness, the difficulty, the intransigency of our situations and our circumstances. We thank thee for the good things which are ours, but far more than that,

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we thank thee for thyself, that thou hast given to us no less a gift than thyself in the person of thy Son and the person of thy Holy Spirit. On this Thanksgiving Day, we thank thee for the one gift which makes all other situations and circumstances acceptable, the gift of thy presence in love. We pray our prayer by thy Spirit in thy Son's name. Amen.

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