Once, there was a woman who was nearly late for a very important appointment.
But on her way out the door, she couldn’t find her car keys.
She had her mask, her glasses, and her phone - but she had misplaced her keys.
Come on, God, she prayed. I really can’t be late to this. Please, help me out.
She looked everywhere for her keys.
God, please, come on. I need my keys. Where are they! Help me out, God! I need you!
And then - in a place she most definitely had NOT left them - her keys!
Whew!
Nevermind, God - I found them!
Frantic and stressed from this difficult start to her day, she rushed off to her appointment.
***
Once, there was a woman who was nearly late for a very important appointment.
But on her way out the door, she couldn’t find her car keys.
She had her mask, her glasses, and her phone - but she had misplaced her keys.
Come on, God, she prayed. I really can’t be late to this. Please, help me out.
She looked everywhere for her keys.
God, please, come on. I need my keys. Where are they! Help me out, God! I need you!
And then - in a place she most definitely had NOT left them - her keys!
Whew!
She stopped, then, took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and thanked God.
Calmed by this moment of gratitude and prayer, she headed off to the rest of her day.
***
We’ve probably all heard the first part of this little joke. The second part, perhaps not.
Now, I can hear the more theologically minded of you already saying - but wait, Lily! Are you really saying that a vast, great, mysterious God, the Creator of the Universe, acts like a personal assistant to white American women who are being mildly inconvenienced? How does this square with all the pain and injustice in the world? Are we to believe that God simply picks and chooses which prayers to answer, and that somehow your missing car keys merited Divine intervention while so many other people cry out for liberation or relief?
No. In fact, I don’t think these little parables are meant to tell us much about God.
They tell us about ourselves.
At Youth Group, we talk often about the metaphor of a radio. Radio signals are always in the air, all around us. You just can’t hear them unless you have a radio antenna, and until you turn the dial to the specific frequency.
The radio does not make the signals appear. It just allows us to tune in to them.
God is like the radio signals, and we are antennas with dials. At any given moment, God is here, active and present in our worlds. And at any given moment, we can choose whether or not to be “tuned in” to that presence.
Our bodies, minds, and souls are like radios, and things can get fuzzy and distorted when they’re not tuned in to the right station. It’s not our responsibility to create the radio signals, but it is our responsibility to choose which stations we tune into - is it programming the world creates, about shame, and stress, and division? Or are we dialed in to the messages God is putting out?
Gratitude is one very simple way to turn our dials toward God. As our readings today tell us, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”
God is always blessing us, always surrounding us with grace and glory and love. There is nothing we can do or say to change this. When we pray, we don’t call down or activate God’s goodness - we simply acknowledge what was already there.
On this Thanksgiving day, we have access to two very powerful methods of “tuning in” to God’s presence - gratitude and tradition.
Tradition can be a tricky one. As a kid growing up in the Jewish tradition, I often wondered why we had so many rituals and traditions that were supposedly there for the purposes of connecting with God. If God really was so big, and so powerful, and so loving, why did it matter whether we said the right words, or lit the candles in the right order, or ate the right things?
Was God really so limited, or so petty, that we humans had to create the exact right circumstances for God to be lovingly present to us?
Of course not. Tradition and rituals aren’t magic spells that conjure God’s goodness. They aren’t really for God at all. They’re for us. Just like a radio antenna doesn’t create the signals or control the programming, it just allows us to hear and receive.
This Thanksgiving service at Saint Mark’s is special because it reflects over seventy years of tradition. It was the very first service held on our campus as a Saint Mark’s congregation, and we honor that history by using the older, more traditional readings in our liturgy today.
Those traditions are for us - because connecting with our history helps many of us tune our dials.
Ultimately, God doesn’t mind what Bible translation we use, whether we’re in a half-finished chapel or our own living rooms, what candles we light or what we eat. But WE do. God doesn’t need us to build special in-roads into our world - but we certainly need help finding clear pathways to God.
Take the people in our Gospel reading today. All ten people were blessed by God - and for some of them, that was enough. They got their healing and went on their way, listening to whatever radio station their hearts were tuned into - plans to find their family again, wondering hungrily what they might have lunch that day, bitterness at what they lost during their exile - we’re all familiar with the myriad of signals our souls can latch onto.
But one person chose to take that moment of blessing and hold onto it. To use it as an opportunity to step deeper into an awareness of God’s love. They would have been healed no matter what - as this passage shows, our righteousness or gratefulness doesn’t have much bearing on God’s desire or ability to bless us - but they chose to remain focused on the larger truth behind the miracle, to use one instance of blessing as a springboard into a life of deeper communion with God.
I think we all would like that - a life lived in more constant awareness of God’s peace and joy and love. But it’s not easy. Our personal radio antennae tend to pick up on all those other signals, especially if we’re not paying attention.
So we need those dials. Those concrete, tangible ways we can take control of our spiritual antenna and tune it back to God. Tradition. Ritual. Gratitude.
Did God really help me find my car keys? Who knows. I’m not an expert in miracles. Probably not, considering that atheists and believers find and lose objects at roughly the same rates.
But I’m not God. I’m a person - one who tends toward anxiety and distraction and self-centeredness. And I’ve found that a personal practice of thanking God after finding a lost object helps keep my radio tuned in to my soul’s favorite station. My prayer isn’t a reminder to God to care about me - it’s a reminder to me that God cares about me.
Today is Thanksgiving, and in a few days we’ll enter Advent. I like to start a tradition that’s sort of the opposite of Lent - instead of giving something up, I Add something to my life. (Get it? Add-vent?) So I’d like to encourage you to find a way to ‘add’ a spiritual dial to your life. For me, it’s every time I find something I’m looking for. Maybe for you, brushing your teeth, or using the microwave, or hearing the kids’ screen time timer go off could be your small reminder to take a moment and ‘tune in’ to God.