Church Curmudgeon @ChrchCurmudgeon I can’t believe they're putting out the Christmas weather before Thanksgiving.
Somewhere between the ads for turkeys and department store sales, the handy-dandy tips for cooking the perfect Thanksgiving repast, the promos for the football games, the giant inflatable lawn decoration pilgrims and turkeys, and the barrage of ads, we seem to have lost Thanksgiving as a day of reflection and, well, thanksgiving! Not even the elementary school reenactments of the first thanksgiving with pilgrims and native Americans sitting and eating together have prevented this Thursday’s holiday from being buried by Christmas decorations and catalogs. Singing the doxology as a table grace has been overwhelmed by the din blaring from store PA speakers. I don’t know whether it has to do with our society losing touch with the whole concept of thankfulness and expressing gratitude and trusting the God whose providence sustains us every bit as much as it did the first European settlers to the new colonies or whether it has to do with Thanksgiving being resistant to being manipulated into a marketing opportunity. You can’t sell Thanksgiving day like Halloween or Christmas, so it gets reduced to a fancy feast followed by football, the day before heading off for the official first day of Christmas shopping. And I think something important gets lost.
Thanksgiving.
Giving thanks gets lost. It’s a real problem, given that the church believes all that other stuff comes from the God who preserves, protects, and provides for us. You see, the big problem for mass marketing Thanksgiving is that it’s a holy day not based on us! Thanksgiving focuses on God, not humanity, and that’s kinda out of fashion right now. Mercifully, there are enough souls out there who do grasp the deep and significant nature of providence and thankfulness that in most homes it is still a day of gathering with family and friends and a celebration of togetherness and even a pause to recognize that we have been brought this far by a God who loves us and takes care of us. And in a way, I guess I’m glad that the advertising and retail industries have been unable fully to co-opt Thanksgiving. In fact, even those folks seem to have a residual recognition of the significance of Thanksgiving Day and thanksgiving. Even they realize it’s not all about us!
The distinctive thing about “thanksgiving,” to my mind, that goes beyond a mere “thank you,” is that it is a transaction between humans and God. There are psalms of thanksgiving, prayers of thanksgiving, and so forth. The point of the first settlers’ feast was thanksgiving to God that they had actually made it through the winter alive. Without getting into the debates about the historicity of it all, the Plymouth colonists were plenty thankful to the existing population for helping them survive in their new home. The real thanksgiving was to God for the providence and protection God had afforded them. Their piety was to rejoice in the good rather than question the bad. They saw a deep and strong connection to God in everything they did. They were aware of how dangerous their circumstances were and how unlikely to survive they were, so they counted it a blessing that they survived and were ready to continue. That is an amazing sense of providence. They knew they were dependent on God to make it, so they were also very, very grateful. Living much closer to God’s care and providence than our society, they were correspondingly more willing to express and celebrate that. Gratitude for God’s care and support and grace is what we call thanksgiving, transcending mere human thankfulness.
If you switch gears back to thanksgiving, the seasonal arrival of Thanksgiving Day and Harvest Home remind us that all we have, all we have received as gifts, all that we have harvested in our lives and received to our good are ultimately from God. Above all, it is a chance to refocus on God’s providence and providing and how we share the blessing. We recapture a sense of thankfulness and thanksgiving, and we thank God. Even very secular souls use that pilgrim language about blessing and thanksgiving. We recapture that pilgrim thankfulness, as we return to God a portion of what God has given us. And so, with genuine gratitude, with some thanks expressed to the people who have been blessings to us, and with a large portion of genuine, extravagant thanksgiving to our God who loves and saves us, let us all go to our Thanksgiving observances this week, filled with gratefulness and joy as we gather together... to share in God’s blessing!
In Christ,
David
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