“Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts…” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It’s that time of year again. We are now fully into Thanksgiving week. My guess is that you are already planning your third or fourth trip to the grocery store. You’ve spent most of one paycheck on just the necessities and are working on a second. You’re busy, harried, and tried. And you’re doing all of that for the chance to sit and enjoy some time with family you might want to see…or maybe not. But you do it because tradition – not to mention nostalgia – demands it. Yet lost in the hustle and bustle of this week is often what the day is supposed to be about. Wise leaders of the past called on the country and even established this particular day as one to be set aside for giving our attention to matters of gratitude. That gratitude was specifically intended to be directed toward God, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that I think that’s the best direction for it, but gratitude of any kind is good for the soul. So, this week, instead of our regularly scheduled programming, we’re going to take a bit of time each day to do just that. And today, to get us started, I’m thankful for a noisy room.

When I tell people that I’m the pastor of a Baptist church, occasionally they’ll ask me what that means. I tell them it means two things. It means we dunk people all the way under the water when we baptize them, and it means nobody else gets to tell us what to do. For hundreds of years, those two things (believer’s baptism by full immersion and a commitment to church autonomy) have been the primary hallmarks of a Baptist church. Beyond that, it’s really the wild, wild west out there. You’ll find Baptist churches taking theological and cultural and moral and ethical positions all over the map, and even on some places the map doesn’t cover. As long as they dunk people and don’t let anybody else tell them what to do, though, they’re Baptist.

As important as those two things are, I think a reasonable case could be made for adding one more to our primary list of identifiers: we like to eat. I regularly joke with my congregation when announcing a community meal of some sort that they will want to make sure to be there because we’re Baptists and we do food well. There is no potluck – or, covered dish as they say in these parts – quite like a Baptist potluck.

This past Sunday evening we had our annual churchwide Thanksgiving dinner. We do it every year on the Sunday evening before Thanksgiving at 5:00 PM. And each year, I get tasked with offering up the blessing before the meal. Well, my voice isn’t all that loud. And the acoustics in our fellowship building are awful. It’s all hard surfaces everywhere you look, and a really high ceiling so that sound waves have plenty of room to bounce around and get all jumbled up. Trying to have a conversation with another person sitting directly across from you when there’s much other noise in the room is a challenge. Getting the attention of a roomful of people when they are all talking (and having to compensate for the extra noise of the people next to them talking by talking even louder than they normally would) is almost impossible.

When it came time for me to get everybody’s attention, I had to pause for just a minute to get a big breath, because I was going to have to shout at the top of my lungs to do it. Just before I started shouting, though, I offered a quick, silent prayer of thanks for a loud room. We didn’t have everybody there, but we had most of the body. And they were noisy. They were noisy because they were all talking and laughing and having a great time together. They were telling stories and sharing life. They were showing love and delighting in community. It was a sign of a healthy church family. It was the sound of a group of people who genuinely love one another. And I was grateful for it. I was grateful for that noisy room.

You need to have a noisy room in your life. The best place you’ll find that is in a church like mine where everybody loves to get together as a group and share life and their mutual love for one another. That’s the kind of community that gives us a good taste of the life that is truly life. And I’m grateful for it. I hope you are too.