Thanks for The Invitation

Hello again, dick foes here with stories to make sense of it all and it's Thanksgiving week 2021 and I'm so excited. Looking forward to that meal with all the trimmings and if I can talk Ruth into one of her apple pies, it could just be, you know, I could die a happy man and she says it's just a Betty Crocker recipe and I'm saying Betty doesn't do it better than this. So that's what I'm looking forward to and hope you folks are able to have that kind of experience yourself long way. Rather than doing an original podcast right here, I'm going to do something that I haven't done before in these four years of podcasting. I just like to drop in a message that I spoke a few years ago at Timberline Church in Fort Collins, Colorado. Tom Thanksgiving and it's called thanks for the invitation. So I will leave the message to speak for itself no pun intended. Here it is. Good morning. Thanksgiving. Biggest travel week of the year. You travel. You have food. Take an app. Have food. Say hi. Have food. I love it. I'm thankful on Thanksgiving week for lots of things but today in particular, as I speak to you, I want to talk about being invited. I'm thankful for being invited to things and I'll explain that as we go forward. Some of you are saying you're a little gussied up aren't you compared to what you usually got the tie and all that. This is my full Thanksgiving tie. Actually this is Charlie White's tie. Some of you have heard me tell the story of Charlie White. Charlie White was a Navy sub commander and he was a chief of staff on Capitol Hill and he passed away about 20 years ago. Afterwards, his wife came to me, Mary and said Charlie's got a lot of ties. Why don't you come see because you weigh a tie every day in DC. We live there 15 years. So I went out and out of all of his ties, I picked this one because it has a little pizzazz and it's cool and Charlie, just a few months before he went home to Jesus, responded to his invitation. Jesus' invitation. So I'm wearing this in honor of Charlie today. If Thanksgiving Ruth, my wife, loves puzzles. She'll put back the tablecloth a little bit on the dining room table, get the grandkids and they'll do puzzles. 300 piece puzzles, 500 piece puzzles, 1000, it makes me crazy. How many puzzle people do we have here, Julie? Oh, a lot of puzzle people. I just don't have the patience for, I do three pieces, say, I'll look at the picture on the box. So that's not to do this, you know. So the puzzle, if this were a puzzle, my talk, I would say scripture is going to be at the center and then around it will be some American history and will be a story, a story of a kid from Pennsylvania, okay? So I want to get started. And those of you who are taking notes in the bulletin, we won't get there for several minutes. So don't have your pen poised. I'll tell you when we get there, it'll be good, okay? Two years ago, I introduced you to my friend Max Finberg from Washington, DC, who whenever you said to him, Max, how are you? He'd say, I'm alive and grateful. Anybody remember when we, and so, and I said, where did you get that? He said, well, I go to an African-American church in downtown DC and our pastor, Dr. Sam Hines would always say that so the whole congregation would say that. So I'd say that, I just thought we might as well go back and let's do it again. So I'm going to say, how are you? And your response will be, I'm alive and great. It's just a great response. It'll be on the screen. Are you ready? Here we go. How are you? Once more, a little more punch. How are you? Doesn't that feel good? It's terrific. And it's true. See? What I'd like to do is to now have us say the lyrics in a worship mode to a 3,000 year old Hebrew song. We call it a Psalm. It's Psalm 100. And it's about Thanksgiving. And rather than me just reading it to you, why don't we just say it as a congregation? Words will be on the screen. Give it some punch, give it some gusto because it's a great, and you're not doing it for me. You're singing it to God. Here we go. You're saying it. Please don't start singing. Just go with the saying, okay? Here we go. Shout to the joy to the Lord, all the earth, worship the Lord with gladness. Come before Him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is He who made us. We are His. We are His people, the sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates with Thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him and praise His name for the Lord is good and His love and yours forever. His faithfulness continues through all generations here here. Yeah, you can clap for that. There's a good place to clap. Thankful people, all the studies show this. Thankful people are healthier, live longer, and have more friends. So why wouldn't we want to be thankful? Why wouldn't we want to practice that? Sometimes we learn to be thankful often. We learn to be thankful because of the hard times. Sometimes when we feel like we're on the edges or the margins, we find out that we can be thankful. The way we find that out if we're on the margins of things is when somebody does this one thing, when somebody invites us in. Jesus is big on inviting people in. Luke 14 is a chapter that's really about sitting at table in Middle Eastern culture. The table was and is to this day sort of a center point of Middle Eastern culture. Who you sat with, who you ate with, who you invited was all about identity. And Jesus in Luke 14 and I encourage you to read the whole chapter. It's not long. He has three sort of exhortations and then a big story, a parable about a great banquet where people are invited and they beg off and the host gets upset and says go out and get the people who are crippled and blamed and have them come, the people on the margins. But this is what he says before he tells that story. Luke 14 12, then Jesus said to his host, when you give a lunch and dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives or your rich neighbors. If you do, they may invite you back, so you'll be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the cripple, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, although they cannot repay you, you'll be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. I'll come back to those thoughts in just a moment, but let me just come back to Thanksgiving, which is uniquely American. It's not exclusively American, but you say where did that come from? You say, well, the Puritans, yes, but it wasn't formalized until 1863. Abraham Lincoln created a proclamation for Thanksgiving because a woman, a 74-year-old woman magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale wrote him a letter and said, we need to have a day of Thanksgiving every year, and so Abraham Lincoln wrote a proclamation. This is part of it. We have gracious gifts of the most high god who, while dealing with us an anger for our sins, has nevertheless remembered mercy. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of these United States and also those who are at sea and those who are so journeying in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent father, who dwelleth in the heavens. You say, well, that's cool, that's good. You like he talked about God and everything? It's crazy for this reason, and I put crazy in quotes. This was October 1863, in the middle of the civil war. 90 days before, there was a battle at this little town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg. It was the turning point in the war. 116,000 soldiers on the field, 10,000 died, almost 40,000 wounded. It was horrific. And in the middle of this upheaval in our culture, the worst war we ever had in terms of casualties, more than any other, the war, more than all the other wars combined. 600 to 700,000 people died. In the middle of that, Abraham Lincoln, at the encouragement of this lady, says, why don't we, as a nation, give thanks? That's what you call swimming upstream. That's what you call seeing something larger than the moment. It's in the hard times we learn to thank. So lots of folks know about Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. If this is a map of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia is over here. Pittsburgh is over here. Gettysburg is about in the center down toward the Maryland line. 140 miles to the northwest. Near Pittsburgh is a town called Latrobe. If you're a golfer and you follow golfer, and you like Arnold Palmer, that was his boyhood home. But there's another kid born the year before Arnie, who grew up in that town. His name was Fred. Fred was sickly boy. He had asthma, had rheumatic fever, couldn't go outside alone to play when he was small, and while Arnie hit golf balls at age five, Fred learned to play the piano at age five. He spent much of his life in his own bedroom. This is Fred when he was a bit older, and he called himself a little chubby kid. Kids made fun of him, taunted him. He was alone a lot. And when he was alone a lot, he sort of, you know, when you're alone, you create your own world a lot of times, especially when you're small. And he created a world with stuffed animals and some puppets and stuff like that, but he was a really good musician. And he loved to visit his grandpa. His grandpa on his mother's side was Grandpa McFeeley. One day, grandfather McFeeley, after a day with Fred, young Freddie said to him this, you know, you made this day a really special day, just by being yourself. There's only one person in the world like you, and I happen to like you, just the way you are. Freddie never forgot that. He was shy. He was introverted. He started getting confidence. He got to high school, but a great thing happened at high school. The captain of the football team befriended him. He invited Freddie in. And by the time Freddie was a senior, they elected Freddie student body president at his high school. He graduated, went to college, got married, moved back to Pittsburgh, got involved in educational TV as a puppeteer. He was always a thankful person. And while working in TV, he decided to go to seminary and became a Presbyterian minister. And he was ordained in 1863 at the age of 35. And this was the charge that was given to him when they laid hands on him. You can read it on the screen. We charge you to shake us through a God who involves himself in our world, into the world where he already is. This world of TV cameras, of puppets, of children, of parents, of studios, of directors, of actors. This too is God's world. We as the church charge that you speak to us to disturb us. We charge you to speak to us to remind us that we too, through you, must be involved. That was 1963. Then came 1968. 105 years after Gettysburg. But 1968 was another kind of civil war. Some of you may remember 1968. Historians, American historians say that it's one of the worst years in US history started out late January when the USS Pueblo Naval vessel was captured by the North Korean, 82 guys held for a year. And it went on. In March of that year, Robert Kennedy said he was going to run for president against the sitting president from his own party, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Two weeks later, LBJ said he wouldn't run four days after that on April 4th. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. And when that happened, the world exploded. In 110 cities across the United States, people poured into the streets. There were riots. Cities were set on fire. The heart of Washington DC and the inner city virtually burned down 13,000 National Guardsmen on the streets. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy won the California primary on June the 5th. As he was walking out of the American hotel in Los Angeles, he was assassinated. Later, they had riots. The Democratic National Convention and it went on and on and on. Almost unnoticed. February 19th of that year, Freddie walked into a public television studio in Pittsburgh, WQED, put on a cardigan sweater, spoke quite slowly because he knew that for little people, you need to leave space because little people don't process as quickly as big people. It was simple. It was hokey. Everything you think about good television, it was the opposite. It was like having a Thanksgiving proclamation in the middle of the Civil War. His name was Fred McPhilly Rodgers and the world would never be the same. When our world was coming apart at the seams, this quiet, quirky man from La Trobe brought a different lens. He offered small children and two worlds, a real world and an imaginary world, a world of make-believe. In those two worlds, four-year-olds already have. They're all blurred together when you're four years old. Through those worlds, he taught little people and parents biblical ideas. What's important, how to see other people, how to deal with hard things, two or three days after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, two assassinations in eight weeks. A hand puppet said to a human being on the program, tell me, what does assassination mean? You say, how can you talk to a four-year-old about such things? Well, Fred McPhilly Rodgers did, because he said that's their world, too, and if they can learn to express their feelings in ways that are appropriate and don't hurt other people, that's what we want them to learn. He taught them how to think about life, how to be kind. He thought if you could provide an environment where they could be, who they were. Awesome things could happen. He worked with an early childhood specialist, University of Pittsburgh, Margaret Farlin, and this was her saying, what's human is mentionable and what's mentionable is manageable. Fred thought simplicity was a virtue. Simple was a virtue. Fancy was suspect. Simple was pure. Fancy was exhausting. What he used to say a lot from the book The Little Prince, which is a biblical idea, what is essential is invisible to the eyes. I'll never forget my first meeting with Richard Halverson, chapter in the US Senate back in 93 when I went to DC, and he said, always remember that the kingdom of God is mostly invisible. You don't know what's going on in that person's heart, what God is doing. It's mostly invisible. That space that he created is called Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood. If you're old enough, you remember Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood. If you're over 21, you remember Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood. I love the tagline. It said for preschoolers, but appropriate for all ages. I love that. Good TV programs last six, eight years. Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood lasted 33 years, from 68 to 71 at the peak in the 85, 86, 1.6 million homes viewed Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood every day. You have two or three kids at home, three generations of children, millions of children. Listen to him talk. Today, it's continued in Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood animated form. Fred McFeely Rodgers was a genius. He created the sets. He wrote most of the scripts. He wrote most of the songs, including the theme song. A friend said this about him. Fred Rodgers was a lanky six-foot guy, utterly devoid of pretence. He liked to pray, to play the piano, to swim and to write. He somehow lived in a different world than I, a world of simple words and deceptively simple concepts, and a slowness that allowed for silence, focus, and joy. He wasn't a Superman. He wasn't like Batman or Superman or Spider-Man or Marvel character or an Avenger. For Pete's sake, he was a guy in a cardigan sweater and tennis shoes. What could a guy like that do? Apparently just about everything. You say, is this message about Jesus or Mr. Rodgers? And I say to you, yes. Because you are the Jesus to a lot of people. The Jesus in you comes out in how kind you are. Or how much time you take to listen. In creating that scenario, he was swimming upstream. It was like suggesting Thanksgiving in the middle of the Civil War inviting people to dinner who were outcasts. He had been commissioned to disturb, but he did it so gently. You just didn't know what was happening day after day. It's like, I met this guy when I was at kids camp. I was 10 years old. His name was Roy Blakely. You've heard me speak of him before, because he became my father-in-law some years later. But at his memorial service, an architect who had come to faith because of Roy said, Roy would come up. He was like an elephant and he'd stand beside you. And then he'd just start ever so gently leaning. And after a while, you thought you were going and you were going over there. You didn't even know you were going over there, but because Roy would say, that was Mr. Rogers, day after day, day after day. This is why I like the idea of invitations. Mr. Rogers' theme song asks an inviting question. Some of you remember his theme song. It asks an inviting question. If he were here in Larimer County today, it could be that his theme song would sound and look with a little help from my friend Richard Flores would look like this. If you know it and you want to sing along, go for it. It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood, a neighborly day for a beauty. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you. I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you. So let's make the most of this beautiful day. Since we're together, we might as well say. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor? Won't you please? Won't you please? Please won't you be my neighbor? I think I heard even a couple of guys singing on that. I just... You can clap for that. Okay, those of you who have been poised waiting for the Bulletin Notes, now's your time. Here we go. He asks this question, please won't you be my neighbor? And generations have responded to that question. By the way, two movies in the last 18 months have come out on Fred Roger's life. He's been gone 16 years. And one opens this weekend. I've never gone to an opening. I went to it. It is amazing. I don't pump movies from that, you know, I don't. But it is true to who he is, okay? And I say, why would Hollywood do that? Well, Bucks, sure. But there are two questions, two things that are suggested in his question, and they're these. These aren't the questions. These are the statements. One, we want to be valued. Human beings want to be valued. Nobody gets up in the morning, say, I think it's just like to go out, go to work and get spit on. Nobody wants that. We want to bring value to have value. I loved it when I first came here 10, 11 years ago, when I heard Pastor Derry said to the pastoral team, when you walk into a room, do you want your presence to say, well, here I am, or do you want your presence to say, well, there you are. That's one of those value questions. Well, there you are. Fred Rogers would get up every morning, most of his adult life, and swim 100 laps. Or, excuse me, not swim 100. Swim laps. I'll get it right. Swim laps. Say that 50 times fast. Swim laps for an hour. He looks sort of wimpy, but I'd say he's a stud. I'm just saying that, okay? And then he would read scripture, and then he would pray. He kept a notebook, legal pad, I think, of people and he would pray out loud for them by name. Because prayer doesn't set your value. What prayer does is it recognizes your value. When you say to me, Dick, I'd like to pray for you. I'd say cool. Because what you're saying to me is I think you're so valuable, and your need is so real that when I speak to the creator of the universe this morning, or this afternoon, I'd like to bring your name up, prayer does not set value, it acknowledges value. Secondly, we want to be welcomed. Everybody wants to be welcomed. I used to go to those congressional receptions. They have a 50 a night, and I used to go there, and I just would pray that there'd be somebody there that I knew who would see me across a crowded room and say, Dick, I'm over here, you know? Because you want to be invited in. The place to invite people naturally, and especially at this Thanksgiving time as we think about it, you know, it's sort of in the foreground. I'm not saying you have to do this Thanksgiving. I'm just saying this is the idea. When you invite somebody to a meal, the word company comes from components, which means with bread. It's a thing that's done around the world. It's always with the times. It's always current. Nobody says when you invite them over for dinner. If you come over for dinner, nobody says, oh, that's so old school. We used to do that, but that's out of date. Now, it's never out of date to invite people to table. It's a gift from my person to yours. We used to go to Thanksgiving at my grandma and grandpa's house in Dynuba, California when I was a boy. That was 90 miles from Oakland. And I knew, I always knew what my grandma would have. I've told you this before, she would have turkey and she'd have fresh homemade biscuits and fresh honey and pineapple freezer ice cream. I can see it in my mind now. I kind of want it now, but I got to finish this message. But the scriptures are full of meal moments starting from Genesis. God says in Genesis 9, I give you all living things. Genesis 9, 3, give you everything that lives and moves about will be food for you just as I gave you green plants and I'll give you everything. Adam and Eve, they were orchardists, if you will, Cain and Abel sort of had a food fight that didn't end well, okay? Moses leading the Israelites out for years, he's in the desert and they're thinking about food in Egypt and Jesus' first miracle at a wedding feast. The largest recorded miracle in all four gospels is the feeding of the five thousand and then Jesus describes himself as the bread of life. I love it when he comes back after the crucifixion. He shows his human by eating broiled fish with his disciples and then there's that piece with Peter on the beach when he restores him. So when Jesus talks about table, again I want to read it to you one more time, then Jesus said to his host, when you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brother's sisters relatives because they can invite you back, when you give a banquet invite the poor, the crippled the lame the blind, they cannot repay you. He's suggesting this great disturber who Jesus is. He's suggesting that they invite not people of their class, not by the traditions they're used to, not by what their culture says, because the culture says, if I invite you, the deal is, you're supposed to invite me back. It's always reciprocated. That's what the culture around the world says. And Jesus comes along and says, why don't we turn that on its head and do the kingdom of God thing and invite people who can't invite you back? This idea, as Jesus invited guests, who cannot invite him back, that's in your notes. And they became transforming moments. Think of Simon Peter had failed so miserably, shot off his mouth, couldn't produce, I so identify with Peter, I promise so much more than I can produce. Could Simon Peter ever eat fire roasted tilapia, probably that was the fish again, without remembering breakfast on the beach with Jesus as he stood there, he just swam the equivalent of a football field to get to Jesus. And he's standing there humbled, sopping wet, and Jesus, both paraphrased, says, come over here, let's eat together, Peter, I like you just the way you are. At a beach side table, he embraces this fallen rugged man, and Peter will never be the same and we can never be the same. So today, what about the meal today? Where's the table gone in our culture? We have an epidemic of loneliness, everything you read says that, especially with young people. Could it be that the table is disappearing? Sherry Terkel, who's a psychologist, MIT has studied this a lot, and she says this, we know that for children, the greatest predictor of success later in life is the number of meals shared with their families. Now with little people, that's a huge deal, and you're sort of in control, when they get bigger, teenage, that's a negotiated piece a lot of times. But with little people there, you said, well, why would you talk about table? You should have been at my table, you talk about food fights, man, we had a, you know, I love that book that's about family life that's entitled to where two or three are gathered together, someone spills his milk. I love that title. But even if you struggle at the table, that's my seat, don't you eat all the potatoes, so I never get a chance, you know, what you learn at table is how to deal with life. What you learn is how to have conversations that have commas in them that you can pick up the next evening. That's what the table does. An invitation to the table says, step into my life. Invitation to the table says, step into my life. When you invite me over to eat, it's not just roast or potatoes or chili reanos, not just curry or lasagna, it's not just apple pie or ice cream. That's my life you're ingesting there, or my life, your life, I'm ingesting. In an agitated, often cynical world, Mr. Rogers question, won't you be my neighbor? I like you just the way you are, all those things he said were profound. He didn't call us out like it's so common today. He called us to something. He was a great inviteer. I've seen two iconic inviteers in my life, people of faith, who were in the media. One was Billy Graham, and one was Fred McPhilly Rogers, inviting different cores of people, but the same kind of invitation. And Hollywood even couldn't get past it. So 29 years after the program came on, they gave Fred McPhilly Rogers a lifetime achievement award. He's there with his wife, Joanne, and this is that moment. Ladies and gentlemen, the best neighbor any of us has ever had, Fred Rogers. It is my honor on behalf of everyone here, and on behalf of the millions of children, whose mornings you have brightened with your kindness to present you with this lifetime achievement award. Oh, it's a beautiful night in this neighborhood. So many people have helped me to come to this night. Some of you are here, some are far away, some are even in heaven. All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are? Those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life, 10 seconds of silence. I'll watch the time. Whoever you've been thinking about, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they've made. You know, they're the kind of people television does well to offer our world. Special thanks to my family and friends and to my co-workers in public broadcasting, family communications, and this academy for encouraging me, allowing me all these years to be your neighbor. And so Jesus sits at the table and he rebukes the people who didn't think about neighbor, who didn't think about inviting the people on the margins in. They were making judgments they had no right to make because God's already made a judgment. His judgment is this. I made you in my image. You may have wandered from the dream I have for you, but I'll come to you to provide a way back to me. Who then is invited? Well, the great unwaster invited, the great unwanted, those who mask their personalities or those who've been disappointed by life or disappointed by themselves, people like me were invited. It's a freeze frame of heaven. At the end of the book, the end of the Bible in Revelation, Jesus describes his mission this way to us. Here I am. I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I'll come in and eat with that person. And they with me, what? Jesus comes to my table and invites me to his? What an invitation. Man, I'm thankful for that invitation. My instinct is to say, can I bring anything? He says, well, as a matter of fact, you can. Why don't you bring yourself and your wounds and your hurts and your mads and your disappointments and your shattered dreams and your hopes? And why don't you put them here at the table and let's swap them out? Let's do that. When I was a kid growing up in Oakland, my mom would say, dick, it's time for dinner. Go get cleaned up and come to the table. And that's good. That's high chance. Good. Jesus comes into my world and says, dick, like you to come to my table. And I'm saying, okay, I'll go get cleaned because I'm not and he says, why did you just come to my table and I'll clean you up as you come? Why don't you do that and we'll just be neighbors here at the table? That's our hearts and our heads in prayer. In the silence of this moment, I'd like to do something just a little different. And that is, I'd like us, as we spoke to the Lord in Scripture to start, I'd like to have us speak to him together out loud in prayer at the end. And I'd like us to lead us. I remember sitting in Charlie White's front room and Charlie said, if I come to God at 64, I haven't paid any attention to him at all, isn't he going to be mad? I said, no, he'll be glad. He won't be mad. And I'd just like to invite you to follow me out loud and for all of us, if you've never done anything like this before, we'll good on you. This is your chance. And if you've done this a hundred times, what joy this is, I'm just going to lead us in short phrases and pause in between and just follow me out loud. Here we go. Here I am, Lord. You know me better than I know me. I sit here today, thankful that you have invited me. I give as much as I know of me to as much as I can understand of you. Thank you for asking me. I come with joy in Jesus name. Amen. Well, that's it for this week. I pray for you all that your thanksgiving will be rich and fruitful and connected. Thank you for taking the time to subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you might be listening on at this moment. And please know that I'm thankful for you today. That's it for now. Dicful signing off. Catch you next time. God bless.