THANKSGIVING, WHERE ARE YOU LOOKING FOR IT?
Young Paige, whose father was a radio announcer, was invited to a friend’s house for dinner. When she arrived, the mother asked Paige if she would honor them by saying the blessing. Paige was delighted. She cleared her throat, looked at her wristwatch, and said, “This food, friends, is coming to you through the courtesy of almighty God.” We have to admit, Paige was right, all the food we eat and for that matter, all our needs come to us through the courtesy of almighty God. This is the reason we follow Paul’s instructions and “Give thanks in every circumstance.” (1 Thes. 5:18a)
Thanksgiving is a special time of year. You can feel the great anticipation building in our society as we prepare for this day. Well, maybe not! Unfortunately, Thanksgiving isn’t high on many people’s priority list. Most of the time, all Thanksgiving is, is a pause. It’s seen simply seen as a day off; an opportunity to take a nap before the Black Friday sales and a day of football. Thanksgiving is 5 days away from school, a big meal and a big mess, for most folks today. If asked about Thanksgiving, most people would likely respond, “Just what do I have to be thankful for?” Granted, the Pilgrims had reasons to offer thanks to God, but not in this dog-eat-dog, selfish world. Thanksgiving? “No, pastor,” they’d say, “please get real.” David Feddes puts it this way: “For many of us, Thanksgiving doesn’t come naturally. It doesn’t seem obvious why we should be saying thank you to God. “Some of us, whether we admit it or not, are like Bart Simpson.
In one episode of THE SIMPSONS, young Bart sits down with his family to a meal. When it’s his turn to pray and give thanks, he says something to this effect: Lord, my dad earned the money to pay for this food, and my mom worked for hours to cook it. What did you do? Thanks a lot for nothing.’ Bart Simpson is of course, only a cartoon character, but he says what a lot of us are tempted to think,” says David Feddes. It’s sad. But that’s the way many people think today. Many people have no feeling of Thanksgiving.
We all hear, from time to time, humorous stories of people who, in a moment of frightful crisis, will make extravagant promises to God, and then when the crisis has subsided, they reduce the levels of their promises significantly. For example, I heard about a man in Asia who was caught in a terrible storm. He promised God a sacrifice of 20 oxen if he survived. As the storm quieted, he thought: “Why be so foolish as to give oxen? Why not nuts instead?” On the way to offer the nuts, he became hungry and ate the nuts. He ended up offering the empty shells as his sacrifice. Empty lives and empty promises seem to go hand-in-hand. Some people don’t feel what we feel on this day. Thanksgiving seems to be a foreign concept to them. Even the biblical writers found it necessary to issue a corrective for ingratitude.
In our Old Testament lesson for this evening we read these stirring words: “For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey; a land where you shall eat food without scarcity, in which you shall not lack anything; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. When you have eaten and are satisfied, you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.
However, “Beware lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments and His ordinances and His statutes which I am commanding you today; lest, when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies, then your heart becomes proud, and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Moses was warning the Israelites not to forget the One who freed, protected, fed and blessed them when they entered into the Promised Land. Yet tragically, they did. But this warning isn’t limited to the Israelites, it’s also a warning for those of us who are blessed in this land today!
This passage from Deuteronomy sounds a lot like what we’ve experienced here in the U.S. over the past many decades. Here in America, who can deny that we’ve been blessed with fertile land, a wealth of minerals, good houses and abundant livestock. We have grocery stores with a tremendous selection of goods, reliable utilities that service our homes and for the most part, multiple cars in the driveway. We have some of the best medical care in the world, a retirement system that supplements our income in our golden years and the freedom to come and go as we please. Our Constitution guarantees us the right to free speech, to elect our government officials and enables us to worship without fear of harm. In every way, this, too, is the promised land. Yet how often do we forget the One who provides all this?
Our Old Testament reading for this evening is calling us to remember, to pause long enough, to think about what God has done for us. Yet how many actually do? It’s so easy to lose track of our blessings in the helter-skelter environment in which we find ourselves. How often we forget to give God thanks for our daily bread, for the hands that prepared it, for the homes that shelter us as we take our daily bread. How often we forget that all we have is a gift from God. As Paige said, “This food, friends, is coming to you through the courtesy of almighty God.”
A man went to his physician complaining of pain in several places. The doctor asked him to indicate where it hurt. He pointed first to his leg, then to his back, then to his side, finally to his head. “Every time I press on these places, it hurts.” After a careful examination, the physician diagnosed his problem. “You have a broken finger.” When we’re ungrateful, it’s usually not our circumstances that are to blame. We’re like that man with the broken finger focusing on his leg, his back, his side, and his head when his problem lay in the appendage he was using to examine each of them. Ungrateful people are usually troubled in their hearts and souls. The problem isn’t outside but inside. And the cure is to remember what the Lord has done for us.
The roots of Thanksgiving go back to 1621 when grateful Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts, thanked God for a modest harvest that pulled them through a very challenging time in their journey and quest for religious freedom. Unlike Bart Simpson, they returned thanks to God for they knew that without God’s help they would never have survived. Thanksgiving Day is a special day. As a national holiday it’s different from all others. On it, we don’t celebrate a great victory in battle. Nor do we honor a great person. It’s a day when we thank God for the blessings we, as a nation, enjoy. And with that in mind, I’d like to share three considerations on how we might find the way to Thanksgiving and thankful living. First, for thanksgiving to take place in our lives, we need to focus on the presence of God.
In Deuteronomy we read, “When you have eaten and are satisfied, you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.” Izaak Walton once said, “God has two dwellings, one in heaven and the other in a meek and thankful heart.” It’s so much easier to have a thankful heart when we focus on God and what God has done for us.
The story is told about a boy named Paul who grew up in West Texas. One spring day, a tornado touched down near Paul’s home. He was only three or four years old at the time. At the first hint of trouble, his father hustled all the children inside, laid them and their mother on the floor together and covered them with a mattress. His father explained that they would be safe there. But as they waited out the tornado, Paul realized that his father hadn’t climbed under the mattress with them. Paul peeked out to discover his Dad standing at the window watching the funnel cloud turn and twist across the prairie. When Paul saw his father by the window, he crawled from under the mattress and ran over and wrapped his arms around his father’s leg. Years later, Paul recalled that day and he said, “Something told me the safest place to stand in a storm was next to my father.”
The Pilgrims knew the safest place to stand in the storm was in the presence of God. They knew that God was the source of their blessings, and they kept their promises to God and gave thanks. This was as important to their well-being as the food on the table. It kept their souls refreshed and full of joy. It was this same focus on God that allowed St. Paul to write in I Thessalonians 5:17-18, “Pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” It was this same focus on God that allowed Jesus to give thanks even in His darkest hours. Each time we gather at the Lord’s table we hear these words, “On the night in which he was betrayed, he broke bread and gave thanks . . . .” The way to experience true Thanksgiving is to focus on God. Second, for Thanksgiving to take place, we need to be aware of the needs of others.
Not everyone is as fortunate this Thanksgiving season as you and I. If we’re to truly experience the joy of this season, we need to remember the needy and less fortunate. Our Thanksgiving will not ring true if we don’t. In a recent comic strip, a son asked his father, “Why do we always have turkey on Thanksgiving?” The father hesitantly answers, “Well . . . because it’s a tradition.” The son asks: “What’s a tradition?” His brother interrupts to say, “Something we’ve been doing so long we can’t even remember why.”
That’s the danger isn’t it? That we will forget what Thanksgiving is all about. When we give thanks, we’re reminded of our responsibility to others. That’s why people open up their hearts this time of year to give to the homeless and to families who don’t have the bounty that most of us enjoy.
Of course not everybody gets caught up in this spirit of giving. I realize that. Some Christians remind me of that humorous scene in the movie Sister Act in which the Reverend Mother is approached by a priest about keeping a show girl (played by Whoopie Goldberg) in the convent for safekeeping. Sensing her reluctance, the priest says, “You made a vow of hospitality to help the needy.” The Reverend Mother replies, “I Lied.” Thanksgiving reminds us of our interdependence with others and our need for one another. No one is an island. We share a common humanity, and if there are those in need, it’s our responsibility, as followers of Jesus, to see that their needs are met.
A Thanksgiving Day editorial in the newspaper told of a school teacher who asked her class of first graders to draw a picture of something they were thankful for. She wondered what little these children, from poor neighborhoods, actually had to be thankful for, but she knew that most of them would draw pictures of turkeys or tables with food. The teacher was taken aback with the picture Douglas handed in. It was a simple childishly drawn hand. But whose hand?
The class was captivated by the abstract image. “I think it must be the hand of God that brings us food,” said one child. “A farmer,” said another, “because he grows the turkeys.” Finally, when the others were at work, the teacher bent over Douglas’s desk and asked whose hand it was. “It’s your hand, Teacher,” he mumbled. She recalled that frequently at recess she had taken Douglas, a scrubby forlorn child, by the hand. She often did that with the children, but it meant so much to Douglas.
We sometimes forget that God chooses to use our hands. A hand stretched out in love to “one of the least of these” is a hand that reflects a thankful heart. Maya Angelou once said something very beautiful and meaningful: “Giving,” she said, “liberates the soul of the believer.” I believe that’s true. We don’t help others that they might be saved, but that we might be saved from the greed and the insensitivity that captures the soul of the ungrateful. Thanksgiving takes place when we focus on God and when we share with the needy. Finally, real Thanksgiving takes place when we yield our hearts to God.
Dr. Tom Long, a Homiletics professor at Princeton University, attends a rather wealthy Presbyterian church in Nassau. The church is full each Sunday of people who have great financial capabilities. Their church takes an offering every month for the cause of world hunger. They invite the worshipers to bring their gifts to the chancel. One Sunday, as they got to this part of the service, an older, oddly-dressed homeless woman came forward. They knew they were taking this very offering for people like her. In fact, they were afraid she might help herself to some of the gifts as she approached the altar, so they watched her closely as she drew near. Then she fell down on her knees and clasped her hands in prayer.
She prayed intensely and then she rose and went back to the pew. There were few dry eyes in the church house that day. Why? Because they had experienced an offering like they had never seen before. They had experienced a real Thanksgiving. Yes, the woman may have been poor, but she knew the kind of Thanksgiving offering that really matters, the yielding of our hearts to God.
Thanksgiving isn’t just one day in the year when we pause to say thanks, it’s a reminder of all that God has done and is doing in our lives. The Thanksgiving holiday is a reminder that real Thanksgiving takes place when we focus on God. That real Thanksgiving takes place when we share with the needy. And best of all, real Thanksgiving takes place when we yield our hearts to God.
Amen