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Village SDA Church

Ron Kelly

Why America? Why Thanksgiving?

Father, thank you for your intervention in our lives, and I pray now, Lord, intervene however you wish so that we can have strength and courage, peace and purpose.

We come to you humbly, Lord, praying now for your Spirit to touch our hearts, and may we not mistake His impress.

Last week, I was asking you to reflect on significant anniversaries that we could or should be celebrating.

And I asked you if you were aware of any, and most of you were not.

I was assured that with a little prompting, some would have remembered, and no doubt, they would have.

But I asked you, why is it that We've come up to the fourth century of the pilgrim fathers coming to our country.

That is 400 years for this very young country, about a century and a half older than the country.

Why is it that nobody is talking about it?

How come we're not celebrating the componentry of religious liberty and the foundation of this nation?

There are a variety of reasons why this be so.

1 would be that we no longer really believe that the church and the motivations of God are what made this great.

Somehow we have the idea that it is the genius of enlightenment that moved on the hearts of a Jefferson or an Adams, and that somehow, voila, we ended up with this nation minus the infusion of the Spirit of God directing in the affairs of men.

There is another reason, and that is at this moment in our country's history, we are exceptionally polarized.

And 1 of the reasons you're not hearing about this in the modern media is that the media has moved on to a new gospel.

Now, I don't want to, in any way, minimize what I'm about to talk about.

I was very edified in the Sabbath school portion of our worship services this morning as we were looking at the story taught by none other than Jesus about the good Samaritan, who in the minds of every Jew, no such thing existed.

There was no such thing as a good Samaritan.

The problem is wherever you go, wherever you live, it doesn't matter whether it's in Northern Michigan between people of 1 color and the Native Americans, or whether it's halfway around the world in another place, whether it's the caste system in India, or prejudice in any of its forms in any country, including this 1, people without Christ are very good at dividing along tribal lines.

And sometimes the tribal lines are visible and you can see them.

And when this happens, what we find is that people no longer have a bridge for connecting.

We have lofty sentiment, academic and philosophical goals, but no bridge for connecting.

This morning, I want to assure you that we are 1 in the Spirit, we are 1 in the Lord.

Now, Some would contend that in the church that is not so.

And I would assure you that in many places and in some hearts it is not so.

If there's 1 thing that should distinguish a Seventh-day Adventist Christian from all others, it is an objective commitment to the truth.

And it cuts to deliver us from the social ills and the spiritual tumors that would take away our freedom in God.

There is no human heart that is beyond being prejudiced, and there is no human heart that cannot be set free from prejudice.

However, the new intellectual gospel suggests that no human heart is wise enough and aware enough to be aware of hidden prejudices.

Of course, there's some measure of that that is true, but God does not take us and leave us where we're at.

So there's a second reason this morning that I want to make you aware of as to why we are not celebrating the 400 years of pilgrim history.

It's not just that the church is now seen as the locus of prejudice and bigotry against the new gender gospel, it's also because the church with other value systems that stand in the way finds itself without a clear clarion voice outside of the political realm to establish its own integrity and credibility in a skeptical nation.

There was a project that a reporter from the New York Times conceived, Nicole Hannah-Jones, a summer ago, just over a summer ago, August of 2019, it was called the 2019 Project.

And while I have no doubt that her intentions are well, at least I choose to believe so, the outcome has found its way into what I'll call an ever-polarizing narrative of peoples in different places.

The New York Times published its 1619 project in August.

When they did, people lined up on the streets in New York City to get copies.

Since then, the project, a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions, has spawned podcasts, a high school curriculum, an upcoming book.

For Nicole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project.

I want you to know from this preacher's point of view, there is nothing wrong with turning over whatever rock needs to be turned over to expose the dark and unfortunate and wrong sides of American culture.

However, the problem is, is that the 2019 project is not just a study in how we can move away from any of our problematic past.

It's a journey in the reframing of the history of this country.

And when the storyline is, I shouldn't say over, but when it starts to reach its ultimate point, the problem is now instead of seeing the nation as a place of developing liberty, we see it with, to use their terminology, an original sin of bigotry.

And because there were indentured people and slaves brought over with some of these original, you could say colonists for sure, America is fatally flawed and is only now coming to reap the fruit of her sins.

Well, I'd like to suggest to you a completely different narrative, and the narrative is such as that not only has America had its flaws, And not only has America battled its racism, some not so much, which is terrible, no Christian should begin to take the name of Christ who knowingly entertains the slightest momentary sentiment of angst against the person of another ethnicity, nationality, or origin.

And if we want any credibility in this world, we better be able to articulate it on the side of the oppressed, the ones that we don't, that don't easily understand.

I'll repeat it here this morning, because I don't want to be misunderstood.

A person in our community is shopping, happens to be a person of lighter colored skin.

They trip and fall outside of a grocery store.

A person of color goes to assist them, a member of our church.

That person is waved off by the person who is obviously an elderly person needing help.

Another person comes to a help who appears to have a pigmentation much more similar to their own, And that person is not waved off.

Tell me how you feel when that kind of thing happens.

It's rooted in the fabric of the carnal heart.

It has no place in the fellowship of Christ, no place in the church.

However, to talk about this dynamic in regards to those who have been on the wrong side of the minority status, that is wrong in the sense of being treated wrong, cannot keep you or me in the right way from talking about the other half.

And this morning, that's what I'm talking about.

I have no intention to try to create a problem in anyone's heart, but I do have this intention which remains mine every Sabbath, and that is to lovingly lift up the Christ who told the truth to his best friends and his worst enemies in the hope that they would turn to the narrow path that could make them brothers and sisters no matter whether they were Samaritan or Jew.

This is where God's church is called to be.

Now having said that, the 1619 Project, which is found its way into the ascendancy of American culture, has America as a place of compromise liberty from the very beginning.

Of course it was in some measure, can be no doubt.

The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, we all understand, not only owned slaves, but treated them as property to the final and most perhaps unacceptable step of fathering a child with a slave.

At the same time, should we take everyone from 2 centuries ago and try to place them in the flow of a progression of truth and suspect that they should have then what we have now, we would be mismanagers and malaligners and mispractitioners of what it means to be human and grow.

God is calling us into a journey of growth.

No excuses, and yet at the same time, this supposed sense of heightened morality that can cast a shadow backwards on people when we don't know what shadow will be cast back on us is a gross form of intellectual hypocrisy.

And so this morning, I come to you with this knowledge that there are a variety of reasons.

The country that we will be celebrating today is in no doubt a unique country, and I'm not celebrating it today from the dynamics of a wrong sense of national pride, this country has its flaws.

But in the same sense this morning, I think it's important for you to know that people are always looking for a cause, and when they find 1, they can sometimes turn it back around.

Take your hymn books out this morning if you would.

We're gonna look at this in the form of a hymn.

And I wanna look at that hymn entitled Once to Every Man and Nation, 606.

Now we're not gonna sing it, we're just gonna look at it.

606, and I wanna read the words with you because I want you to understand the nature of truth.

What our forefathers knew and what they know now, what we know now is different.

You know, this church does not teach, because the Bible does not teach it, that you burn in hell forever.

But there were many of the men and the women who began this church who began believing God did that.

The truth of the matter is that kind of abuse and abuse of God finds no place in the litany of truth.

Once to every man and nation, number 606, comes the moment to decide.

In the strife of truth with falsehood for good or evil side.

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, and the choice goes by forever, twixt the darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble, second verse, when we share her wretched crust.

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Why America? Why Thanksgiving?

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