It has been a good holiday weekend. The last time I spoke with you, we were in London, and I set up my camera in our son Luke’s living room. This Thanksgiving weekend we’ve been enjoying having our family, including Luke, all together here in Portland. 

I’m calling this message ACTS, Part three, and in choosing this title, I’m admittedly being a bit sly. Maybe some of you already suspected that ACTS is an acronym, and I’ll explain where it came from. Some of you may remember my first visit with you this year, which was on January first. It was part of a series you had about Quaker folks who’ve had a big impact on us, and I chose to tell you about my Quaker mentor, Deborah Haight, the scientist around whom Ottawa Friends Meeting gathered—which became the second largest meeting in Canadian Yearly Meeting, and the meeting where I first became a Friend. 

When Deborah first arrived in Ottawa, there was no Friends Meeting close enough to attend regularly, so she began attending an Anglican church. As she explained to me, she was listed on their rolls as “a Quaker in the Anglican Church.” She learned to practice an internal liturgy as a form of prayer shaped by her experience there, and she brought that inward liturgy into her practice as a Quaker. 

Drawing on Anglican and Catholic spirituality, her inward liturgy at its most basic level was summarized by the initials A, C, T, and S. I bet some of you already know where I’m going. “A” stands for “adoration,” “C” stands for “contrition” (or in some traditions, for “Confession”), “T” for “Thanksgiving,” and “S” for “Supplication.” Each one of these elements of the inward prayer liturgy is worth at least one Sunday morning message. Since this is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I’m skipping “A” and “C” of that potential series, and jumping to part three, looking at prayers of Thanksgiving. 

So … I began searching for a Scriptural anchor for a second Thanksgiving message. (Second message, because Ruthie Tippin touched on the theme last Sunday, based on Psalm 89.)  I admit that I even resorted to a Google search to view recommended Bible verses for Thanksgiving. Here’s what I found: they were all about giving thanks to God. 

Giving thanks to God the Creator is never wrong, even in the face of the utter agony of the Israelites’ Babylonian captivity which dominates the second half of Psalm 89. There is nothing about the tradition of giving thanks to God which requires us to pretend everything is OK when it isn’t. I can’t help thinking of the pastor of the Lutheran church in Bethlehem, who recently gave a message about the events in Gaza, including the bombing of Gaza’s oldest Christian church. His sermon was entitled “God Under the Rubble.” On his way to his ultimate point about persistent faith, he said: 

We prayed. We prayed for their protection … and God did not answer us, not even in the “house of God” were church buildings able to protect them. Our children die before the silence of the world, and before the silence of God. How difficult is God’s silence! 

I want to pause and acknowledge this pain, even as we might be giving thanks today for the brief cease-fire in Gaza. As for the war in Ukraine, I’ve touched on that sad theme many times since my message on “Russians, Ukrainians, and Zombies,” back in January 2022, so I won’t go there today. 

In any case, the theme of giving thanks to God in the midst of suffering is an important subject for another message. What I was looking for was some Biblical evidence that God wants us to thank, not only God, but also each other. I couldn’t find any clear directions to do so, but I did find several Scriptures that seem to imply that we ought to have a thankful attitude toward each other. Many of Paul’s letters have this implication. For example, in First Thessalonians, in his opening greetings, Paul writes: 

We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Paul expresses similar sentiments in many of his letters. He’s thanking God, but he is specifically thankful for the believers he’s writing to. I don’t think it is a big stretch to say that he’s also thanking them for their labor and their endurance. When he writes to individuals, he’s more direct. For example, in writing to Philemon, Paul says,  

I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear about your love for all his holy people and your faith in the Lord Jesus. I pray that your partnership with us in the faith may be effective in deepening your understanding of every good thing we share for the sake of Christ. Your love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the Lord’s people. 

This reminds me of a funny counter-example in my own life. The very first time I gave a message in a programmed Friends meeting happened shortly after Judy and I arrived in Richmond, Indiana, so that I could begin my studies at Earlham School of Religion. I got a job at Quaker Hill Bookstore, whose manager, Fred Boots, also pastored a little country Friends Church in south central Indiana. One day he asked me to substitute for him at the meeting on a Sunday he had to be elsewhere. He had mentioned that this church had a problem with people gossipping about each other— surely that never happens in most churches! — and so, when I prepared my sermon, I mentioned the importance of the Queries in Indiana Yearly Meeting’s book of Faith and Practice, specifically these: “Do you love one another as becomes the followers of Christ? Are you careful of the reputation of others? When differences arise, do you make earnest effort to end them speedily?” 

It didn’t take long for me to find out how my message landed. The following Sunday, Fred Boots was back at his church and heard about my sermon. One of the Elders informed him tartly that Fred’s absence that previous Sunday morning was not appreciated, and she accused him of not giving adequate notice. She went on to say, “And not only that, but SOME BOY came and preached at us.” After enjoying my discomfort at this description of my debut performance, Fred did go on to thank me by saying, in effect, “Apparently you said what they needed to hear.” 

You know that this happened a long time ago … nobody has called me “SOME BOY” in recent decades. 

Here’s another passage from Paul that hints to me about the importance of thanking each other. It comes from Ephesians, Chapter 1, starting in the middle of verse 15 and ending in the middle of verse 19:

Ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.  I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ … may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know [God] better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which [God] has called you, the riches of your glorious inheritance in [God’s] holy people, and [God’s] incomparably great power for us who believe. 

So, as we’ve seen before, Paul starts out by implying his own thankfulness to his audience for their faith and love. By the way, we’re not sure who that audience was, because this letter was apparently intended for several churches. Unlike most of Paul’s letters, this doesn’t have any personal greetings at the beginning, nor at the end, so some commentators theorize that we just happened to have the copy intended for Ephesus. Maybe we can call this Paul’s letter to Spokane, for the principles still apply. 

One of the things that stands out for me in this letter is the point about the eyes of our hearts being enlightened. Among other things, this should result in our awareness of “the riches of our glorious inheritance in God’s holy people.” I love this! We are each other’s wealth, we are each other’s glorious inheritance. There are so many wonderful implications of this, of which I’ll just name two: 

First, the church’s wealth is not measured in property or budgets, but in relationships. I got a great example of this back when I was working at Friends United Meeting. We had a doctor appointed to the Friends Lugulu Hospital in Webuye, Kenya, and that doctor’s term in Kenya was coming to an end. We thought that the enlightened option was not to offer to send another North American doctor to take their place, but to offer to fund the salary of a Kenyan doctor. No sooner had we finished congratulating ourselves on our wise and sensitive approach, than we got a reply from the hospital: they didn’t want money, they wanted another North American doctor. As we probed for the reasoning, we got the message: Kenyan doctors and nurses were available, and on call at the nearby government hospital in Webuye, but for our hospital, the relationships, the fellowship with us in the international family of Friends United Meeting, were more important than money. It was the relationships that formed our glorious inheritance. 

I’m not pretending that money isn’t part of the picture. We still had to pay that doctor that we sent to Lugulu. And all of this became even more real to us during our nearly ten years in Russia, and you Spokane Friends helped support us there. But again, money wasn’t everything. A huge part of your care for us was Dwaine and Becky Williams serving on our support committee, and all of you who hosted and fed us when we visited, and Jonas Cox’s fabulous resources on educational methodology. Once again, thank you so very much, Spokane Friends Meeting! 

The second implication of having the eyes of our heart open to the wealth we have in each other, is to realize that our diverse gifts and temperaments are part of this wealth. A few days ago on a social network, I read a moving story of a compassionate response to poverty. As was utterly predictable, someone commented that compassionate responses miss the point: an unjust system requires systemic change. But why do we have to choose? I’m sure Spokane Friends Meeting has people particularly gifted to act compassionately in specific circumstances, kindly and competently providing resources to those in need. Maybe in reality that’s all of you! Other Friends are particularly gifted prophets, analyzing the systems that cause pain and telling us what God has to say about those systems. No doubt, the prophets and the helpers get on each other’s nerves sometimes, but if they remember to pray for each other and support each other, the whole community becomes available to serve as the answers to God’s promises of justice and reconciliation. 

Queries: 

What do Paul’s words “I always thank my God…” mean to you? Paul sometimes wrote these words from prison; what does that context do to their meaning? 

If Paul were to write an epistle to Spokane Friends Meeting, what would he thank God for concerning your community? 

Think of the Quaker you know who is most unlike you in temperament or gifting. What might you thank that person for, as their contribution to the Friends community? 

This message was given to Spokane Friends by Johan Maurer during Meeting for Worship on Sunday, November 27, 2023.