In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Generally,
we in the Church bemoan and worry about the secularization of religious
holidays. Christmas, largely, is a secular holiday with little to no emphasis
on the coming of God to be with us in Jesus of Nazareth, but rather is focused
on commercial interests and vague notions of having “holiday cheer.” Halloween
really has ceased to be a religious holiday, as it’s about candy, not saints.
Easter, while widely recognized as a religious holiday, has become the holiday
where Jesus, after he died, was transformed into a chocolate bunny and burst
forth from an egg, or so society might lead you to believe. And really, I’m
fine with all of that. So long as the Church doesn’t forget what lies behind
these religious holidays, it’s okay if capitalism does what capitalism does and
tries to make money off of anything it can. But part of the reason why I love
the Thanksgiving Day Eucharist is that the church strikes back.
Thanksgiving,
as you know, is not technically a religious feast of the Church, but a cultural
one. While the first Thanksgiving certainly would have had religious aspects to
it, the holiday that is celebrated today isn’t a Christian one. But if culture
can borrow our traditions for their purposes, then I see no reason why we can’t
borrow a tradition from culture and use it to glorify God. The Thanksgiving Day
liturgy is the religiousification of a civil holiday.
As
you might know, thanksgiving is nothing new to the Church. Thanksgiving is at
the heart of all of our liturgies; in fact, the word “Eucharist” in Greek means
“good thanks.” In particular, during the English Reformation, from whence our
tradition was born, services of thanksgiving became commonplace. Henry VIII
declared many such festivals of thanksgivings in order to counter the many
holidays of the Roman Catholic Church that he had left behind. Though there is
much debate around what the “first Thanksgiving” that we learned about in
school was really like, many historians date it to a feast in Plymouth in 1621.
And from time to time, subsequent thanksgiving festivals were held to thank God
for God’s providence. The first nationwide day of thanksgiving was held on
November 26, 1769. George Washington said the day was one of “public
thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts
the many and signal favours of Almighty God.”
In
the years and decades that followed, thanksgiving feasts were called for from
time to time. But I find it so fascinating and prescient that the establishment
of a national celebration of thanks and the fixing of this date on the calendar
came under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln in 1863. 1863 was the middle of
the Civil War, hardly a time to give thanks. Yet Lincoln sought to foster a
sense of unity between the North and the South through a remembering of the
ways in which God blesses us all.
In
his proclamation, he writes “In the midst of a civil war of unequalled
magnitude and severity… peace has been preserved with all nations, order has
been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has
prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.” Lincoln’s
life had to be oriented towards thanksgiving and graciousness for him to see
any blessings as he was the president of a truly divided nation. And he goes on
to write of the things are going well in life and says “No human counsel hath
devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the
gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for
our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and
proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as
with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.”
I
know we’re not in the midst of a civil war, but we are certainly in the midst
of a cultural war. Given the election of Donald Trump, and all that he said on
his way to winning the Electoral College, and the continuing political unrest, you
might wonder how in the world we can give thanks for the state of this nation.
With a humanitarian crisis in Syria, you might question whether or not it
appropriate for us to give thanks when so many are suffering. With the recent
report from the Surgeon General which notes that more people are now using prescription
opioids than tobacco, that 1 in 5 Americans binge drinks, and 21 million
Americans are dealing with a substance use disorder, and it is very likely that
someone you know, perhaps yourself, is dealing with this, it might be difficult
to give thanks.
The
thing about giving thanks is that giving thanks isn’t at all like writing a
thank you note, though we tend to think of it in those terms. Most of us were
taught at an early age that if someone gives you a gift, that you should write
them a note of gratitude. But no one teaches us to thank people who cheat us
and betray us. The problem with equating blessings with thanks is that when the
blessings run out, so do the thanksgivings. Being thankful isn’t about finding
the silver lining, it isn’t about ignoring all of the challenges of life to
find the things that are going well. If someone has cancer, a proper act of
thanksgiving isn’t “well, at least I have a house to live in.” Ignoring our
pain isn’t a good recipe for being thankful. Ignoring the tumult of this past
election by saying “well, at least we’re not like Syria” doesn’t bind up our
wounds or really make us thankful.
In
fact, our Gospel text from about a month ago was about the prayers of a
Pharisee and a tax collector. You’ll recall that the Pharisee’s prayer was “God,
I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or
even like this tax collector;” while the tax collector prayed “God, be merciful
to me.” Jesus tells us that it was the tax collector who went home justified
rather than the Pharisee. Giving thanks isn’t about finding something bad and
saying “well, at least I’m not that.” Rather, thanksgiving is really about
trust.
Consider
today’s Gospel text. This is a part of an extended dialogue that Jesus has about
bread. He has just performed the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 and the people
are spell-bound. To paraphrase Jesus, he says “don’t give thanks for that which
perishes.” If you give God thanks when you receive bread, what will you do when
you do not receive bread? Will you forget God? Instead, Jesus says “strive for
the food that endures for eternal life.” In other words, give thanks for the
fact that God promises to feed you. Thanksgiving, in this sense, is forward
looking more than it is retrospective; this sort of thanksgiving is about
trusting in God’s mercy and providence, trusting that whoever comes to Jesus
will never be hungry, and whoever believes in him will never be thirsty.
I
think this is what allowed Lincoln to give thanks in the midst of the Civil
War. It wasn’t that he was overlooking the war, it was all of the signs of
God’s promise of peace that he saw that allowed him to give thanks. In his
first inaugural address, which he gave a mere month before the Battle of Fort
Sumter, he wrote “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds
of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield
and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad
land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely
they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Lincoln, despite the
evidence of doom and gloom that surrounded him, trusted that our better angels
would eventually prevail. Thanksgiving is about a trust that the current
challenges of the world need not always exist. Thanksgiving is about a trust
that though the moral arc of the universe is long, that it bends towards
justice. Thanksgiving is about a trust that Jesus is the bread of life, even
when we are hungry. Thanksgiving isn’t about the past, it is about the future.
Thanksgiving is an orientation to the world coming out of a deep sense of trust
that God is God and that love, mercy, and grace always surround us.
We,
of course, ought to thank God for the many gifts bestowed upon us such as love,
life, mercy, grace, family, friends, and even material things. There is
absolutely nothing wrong with giving God thanks for these things, so long as
they are not the basis for our thanksgiving. Remember in the book of Job, when everything
near and dear to Job is taken away, he remains faithful to God, saying “Shall
we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” So even if
you find it to be difficult to give thanks given the circumstances of your
life, our politics, or our world, you can give thanks today that God will
always be with us and that God will always be for us. Amen.
