A simple way of teaching children how to pray is to say three things: "Please." "I'm sorry." And "Thank you." Those are essential words in our vocabulary with one another, and with God, too. We say "Please" when there is something we want. It is okay to ask. Jesus said, "Ask, knock, seek." We say "I'm sorry" when we have behaved badly, having hurt others. And we say "Thank you" when we receive what we need. Not necessarily what we have asked for, but trust that God gives what you truly need. Spiritually it is important to remember that "Thank you" comes first and last. It is not simply a polite response. Gratitude is the starting point and the goal. Gratitude is what God is always guiding us toward. It is all, really, that God wants from us.

The holiday of Thanksgiving, at its best, is a wonderful blend of spirituality and patriotism. Thanksgiving recalls a brief moment in our history in which our congregational forbears interacted humbly and generously with our native American forbears. Sadly, all too fleeting, yet a lovely memory. Thanksgiving is our most inclusive of holidays. School pageants this time of year feature pilgrims and Indians re-enacting that noble first Thanksgiving meal. But the cast of children playing those parts might be Asian, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, or Latin American. Religiously speaking, Thanksgiving in America can be just as inclusive - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. Come December we split up into celebrations of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and a host of winter solstice rites. But at Thanksgiving, the theme of saying "Thank you" to God touches us all. And Thanksgiving is a lovely celebration of families and extended families. As we all know, more people travel to be with loved ones at Thanksgiving time than at any other time of the year. Large, loving extended families, the gathering of generations, links us with our past, our traditions. And though there are many ethnic dishes served then, it is rare to find a table without a turkey. (My then determined vegetarian daughter found Thanksgiving the toughest day of the year to hold the line).

That is, it seems to me, Thanksgiving at its best. But what about Thanksgiving at its worst? America's most celebrated theologian of the last century, Reinhold Niebuhr, crustily declared that Thanksgiving had become a celebration of American nationalism and the proud embrace of empire. He said that the nature of the thanks we offer is not so much based on a deep and abiding sense of gratitude for God's unmerited blessings, as it is a polite tip of the hat to a God who is wise enough to recognize how worthy we are of such gifts. We are those "good and faithful" servants enjoying our just rewards. Thanks to free enterprise and military muscle we have laid claim to the first fruits of the world’s harvest. Why? Well, because we want it, we must be entitled to it. That lovely first Thanksgiving was the exception that sustained the rule - the America of today was built on brutal conquest, beginning with a lethal partnership of European Empire and aggressive Christianity, and then with three centuries of chattel slavery. How much of our accumulated wealth comes from, as Abraham Lincoln put it, the bond-man’s unrequited toil? Today Thanksgiving weekend inaugurates the holiday consumer shopping frenzy and non-stop sporting events. Niebuhr warned us to beware of Days of Thanksgiving promoted by Empires. On just such a national day of "General Thanksgiving" proclaimed in England in 1816, the poet Wordsworth embarrassed his sovereign with an ode written for the occasion describing his fellow country-men as "arrayed for mutual slaughter, - yea, Carnage is Thy daughter!"

Niebuhr raises a prophetic voice. It is a reminder that God is King and that nations are always at risk of blinding themselves with the grandeur of their might. When pushed to extremes, Empire always responds with "a show of force" as we now see happening in Iraq. When pushed, we "get tough." Our sense of Thanksgiving becomes a perverted and twisted from of self-congratulation. You find this expressed in comedic form with the Simpson's family dinner grace, thanking themselves for what they find on the table before them. "We earned it. We're entitled to it."

On the Christian liturgical calendar, this Sunday is designated "Reign of Christ" Sunday. What do we mean when we say that "Christ is King?" We're told that the earliest Christian statement of faith was "Christ is Lord" - Not the Roman Emperor. And an early statement about Christ said simply, "Christ died. Christ is alive. Christ will come again." The author of the Book of Revelation likely lived during the first century persecutions of the Emperor Domitian. This Emperor declared himself "Lord and God" and those who refused to bow their knee to him were tortured and executed. Many fled, including John to the Isle of Patmos to write his Apocalypse. Faced with an Emperor who thought he was God, John declared that the true God is the one who is, who was, and is to come. God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. In John's Gospel we find this famous dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, on the eve of Jesus' execution. It is a beautiful example of people speaking to each other, one on one level, the other on another level. When Pilate asks Jesus if he is a King, all he wants to know is whether he is trying to lead the Jews in revolt. He doesn't get it. Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world and his followers are committed to truth. The Roman rulers were committed to force. Like all imperial lords, then and now, they believed that ultimately the way you win the war for peoples' hearts and minds is through shows of force. Might makes right. Military might. Economic might. That is how freedom is won. The followers of Jesus believed that "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

To say that God is the one who is, who was, and is to come, is to say that God's reign is eternal. It is to say that ultimate authority rests in something that is transcendent. To say that Christ died, Christ is alive, and Christ is coming again, is to say that the Reign of Christ - a reign of justice, peace, and love - humbles the deeds of kings who thought themselves mighty. All that majesty and power is temporary and impermanent. Remember Shelley's famous poem we learned in school? A traveler through the desert comes across the remains of a statue of a long ago monarch.

...Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

God and time are great levelers. When we invaded Iraq we saw a statue of Saddam Hussein toppled to the ground in Baghdad. Last week we saw a state of George Bush toppled to the ground in London.

What does it mean to give thanks? I began by saying that most prayers are "Please," "I'm sorry," and "Thank you." Thank you is the beginning and the culmination of our relationship with God. Gratitude can never be disconnected from humility. When we say "Please" we are begging God to care for us in God's wisdom. "Give us this day our daily bread." When we say "I'm sorry," we are acknowledging our brokenness, our stupidity, our hurtfulness, our blindness. And when we say "Thank you" we are expressing gratitude to God for loving us and accepting us in spite of our failures, as we are. Somebody said to me the other day that his idea of Christianity is that the world is made up of two kinds of people. On the one hand, there are the jerks. On the other hand, there are the jerks who have learned that God loves them and forgives them. Jerks who have been saved. I like that. I can relate to that. Why not apply it nations and empires as well? Perhaps one day the heartfelt prayers of the nations can truly be "Please," "I’m sorry," and "Thank you." AMEN.