There’s a good chance that you are already thinking about Thanksgiving. Whether you’ll be celebrating with family, friends, or by yourself, you’ve probably been doing some planning for Thursday or whichever day your feast of gratitude will happen.
Will it be a formal meal, casual gathering, or something in between? What will be the main course, the side dishes, and the desserts? Who is in charge of what and what will you wear? (Stretchy pants are always a good option for Thanksgiving Day dinner attire.)
If you are hosting, you may have a growing “to do” list of what needs to happen before everyone shows up at your place. The foods you’ll prepare or purchase, the chores that need to be done, and what things need to be tucked away into the basement or closet.
As we prepare to welcome guests, we vacuum, sweep, dust, and spruce up the place. We may get out some good dishes, grab the cloth napkins, and do other things that are beyond the everyday meal preparation and dining experience. Thanksgiving is a special day, so we want to put out our best to celebrate and impress.
If we visit with others over food or drink this weekend, we’ll probably keep rolling out the best stuff, only sharing the successes and good news. When someone asks about work, health, and relationships, we’ll only reveal the positive, saying “It’s going well. Things are good.”, whether that is true or not. Some of us will resort to outright lies to hide the difficult truths and the pain of our lives.
All too often, we fall into the same pattern as a community of Christian faith. We think that we need to put on our best face when we show up to worship, Bible studies, or other moments together, pretending like everything is okay and we’re holding it together. We roll out a false narrative, rather than speaking the truth about the brokenness in our lives.
Makoto Fujimura in his book Art + Faith: A Theology of Making contends that there is much for us to learn as followers of Jesus from the practice of Kintsugi. “Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art form of repairing broken tea ware by reassembling ceramic pieces, creates anew the valuable pottery, which now becomes more beautiful and more valuable than the original, unbroken vessel… A Kintsugi master mends the broken tea ware with Japanese lacquer and then covers that with gold, [making] the broken pottery even more beautiful than the original.” The process isn’t only about repairing what was broken, but about reassembling the vessel into a new creation.
This is the work of God. The Holy One gathers our shattered shards and creates something new and beautiful out of that which has been destroyed.
Fujimura continues, “What kind of a church would we become if we simply allowed broken people to gather, and did not try to ‘fix’ them but simply to love and behold them?” This is God’s work among us. Let us hold one another tenderly, trusting that God will continue to do the work of resurrection.
As you speak words of gratitude and give thanks this week, you can do so knowing that God welcomes you and loves you whether your life is pulled together and clipping along with great success or you are stumbling and crumbling at every turn. Jesus doesn’t wait for us to clean up our act and pull our lives together before loving us. Instead, Jesus gathers the chipped and broken pieces of our lives and holds us in love.
As I gather in gratitude this week, I will give thanks for Lord of Life and our mission to love people well. We strive to welcome and care for all people, no matter where they are in their journey, and let Jesus go to work doing what God does best.
I thank God for you,
Pastor Lowell