In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Thanksgiving Day is listed as one of the major feasts of the Church year in the Prayer Book, and it’s rare for a secular or national holiday, which Thanksgiving is, to be officially recognized by the church calendar. But there is great wisdom in making sure that there is a religious component to this national day of gratitude, tradition, and family. As you likely know, the word “Eucharist” is a Greek word that means “good thanks,” so coming together to partake of God’s sacred meal of thanksgiving before we gather around a table later today to give thanks is most appropriate.
And as I’ve said before, the Thanksgiving Day Eucharist is one of my favorite liturgies of the entire year. Of course, we give thanks to God every time we worship, but by focusing the entire liturgy on gratitude and thanks, we are able to more fully honor the idea of giving thanks. Don’t get me wrong, the sentimental part of me loves watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, even if Advent hasn’t yet begun. Pass the stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie – those are all great. And though I ordinarily wouldn’t care about watching the Lions or Cowboys play football; on Thanksgiving, I partake of that national tradition. Gathering with family for a wonderful meal is a true blessing. The food, the football, the family, the festivities – these are all wonderful parts of celebrating Thanksgiving, and I commend those activities to you today.
But if we skip the Eucharist which undergirds all of these other things for which we are thankful, well, then we’re skipping the most important part of Thanksgiving. Now, we have no idea what the first Thanksgiving celebration was really like, but it’s a good guess that it was a meal in which thanks were offered to God. When Abraham Lincoln declared the first national day of Thanksgiving in 1863, he proclaimed it as a day of “thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”
The problem with celebrating Thanksgiving only as a national holiday, only with food and friends, is that it’s grammatically incorrect. In order to give thanks, there must be an object to which our thanksgivings are directed. As we often say, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” God is the source of our blessings and the proper recipient of our thanks. When we say “I’m thankful for health, a home, family, friends, work, financial security, for this and for that,” but we don’t address that thankfulness to anyone, we might start to think that it’s just our happy luck that we have something to be thankful for. Or worse, we might deceive ourselves into thinking that it was our own striving that led us to these good fortunes. The Thanksgiving Day Eucharist is a helpful corrective to the dangers of giving undirected thanks and praise.
Consider the passage that we heard from Deuteronomy this morning. The Hebrews have been brought out of slavery in Egypt into the land of promise. And it would have been easy for them to think that they were arriving safely in this land because they had been journeying there for years or because of their military battles with the previous inhabitants of the land. They could have thought “Wow, how lucky are we that this place is flowing with milk and honey.” But in this passage, the name of the Lord is abundant. Five times in this passage, we are reminded that it is God who has brought the people here and blessed them with this good land with water, food, resources, and security. It is from God that all blessings flow, and Deuteronomy makes sure that we don’t forget that.
Thanksgiving helps us to put God at the center of our lives. By remembering the source of our lives, our hopes, our blessings, and our eternal life, we can have God at the proper place in our lives – front and center. Often on Thanksgiving, we reflect on all the things that we are grateful for, and that is a very good thing to do. But we are invited to go deeper in gratitude by remembering that these blessings all have a source and they have a purpose. God blessed Israel not because the Jewish people had deserved God’s blessings more than another other ethnic group. Rather, God blessed Israel so that they might be the vehicle of God’s blessing to the entire world. Blessings are not to be hoarded, but shared. And in the same way, God has not blessed us for the sole purpose of our happiness, but rather so that we might be a part of God’s blessing to all the world.
This is why in Deuteronomy Moses shares God’s word to “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes.” Thanksgiving teaches us to trust in God to provide for us because all that we have comes from God. And the other aspect to trusting in God is being obedient to God. The commandments, ordinances, and statues of God do not exist as prohibitions but rather as safeguards. Disobedience leads to disorder. Here in Deuteronomy, we read about God’s blessings of streams, valleys, barley, figs, olives, honey, bread, iron, and copper. The people have everything that they need to thrive. God has blessed them with not just enough, but with abundance.
But as we know from the rest of Scripture, the people did not follow the commandments. They hoarded, seeing scarcity instead of abundance. They neglected the widow and orphan. They turned to other gods. They started to say things like “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” They forgot the Lord their God. Perhaps they were thankful, but their thankfulness did not have an object. Several books later in the Old Testament, we come to Hosea who writes “Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.”
All of those blessings which God had ordained for the people are gone. The fruit has withered, the streams have run dry, the animals are dying, and the people suffer. For one, we ought to recognize that our current ecological crisis is also rooted in the fact that we have turned away from God, that we have focused on profits, productivity, and possessions too much and the land is mourning as a result. This isn’t a divine punishment, but rather is the natural result of not being thankful and not remembering that God is the one from whom all blessings flow. When we misorder our thanksgivings, disorder follows. This collapse of these blessings of the Promised Land show us the importance of obedience in being thankful.
God is the source of all goodness, but when we hoard as private treasure all of these blessings which God so freely gives, we start to think that we are the masters of our destiny. When we forget that God is the one from whom all blessings flow, we might start to think that our work, our intellectual capabilities, our sacrifices are the source of these blessings. This is the sin of idolatry – to fool ourselves into thinking that we are self-made men and women instead of dependent creatures. We need Thanksgiving to remind us that God is the fount of all that we have and then orient our lives to God instead of ourselves. When we trust in God to provide and are obedient to God’s commandments to always remember God and to love our neighbors as ourselves, then we will live in the abundance that God intends for us. But God grants us enough freedom to create disorder, and that is something that we have done.
This is one of the most difficult aspects of our faith – to acknowledge our utter dependence on God. It goes against what we’ve been conditioned to believe as Americans about pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps and having a strong work ethic. Recently, when I was preaching about the fact that God’s grace is unearned, someone astutely mentioned to me just how radical and challenging that message is. It’s what makes thanksgiving so difficult – we have to admit that we are needy, that we are dependent on God and others, and that we have very little control over our lives. Thanksgiving really is a spiritual discipline that takes practice. It takes practice to notice all the ways in which our success is contingent upon others. It takes perseverance to keep our ego in check and maintain a sense of humility around our accomplishments. It takes fortitude to remain confident in God’s presence with us and blessings for us in times of trial.
So today, as best as you can, don’t say “I am thankful” and then rattle off a list of things for which you are thankful. Instead, say “I thank God for” and then name those blessings. Just that slight change in wording will help us to remember that it is God from whom all blessings flow. Having an object to address our thanks to will remind us that God has ordered the world so that we can experience the abundance of life, and if we are obedient to that order, we will come to know this abundance. By putting God at the center of our lives, we become faithful stewards of God’s blessing to the world. By naming God on Thanksgiving, we are reminded that God loves us beyond all measure, that God blesses us with grace, and beauty, and joy, and that because God is with us, we always have something to be thankful for. So to each of you, Happy Thanksgiving and thanks be to God!
