Thanksgiving: It’s not easy
Introduction:
Thanksgiving: we have celebratory day for it every year. It’s a very American holiday, and it is deeply ingrained in our culture. We devote a day just to thanksgiving - at least that is what we claim. That doesn’t sound so tough. In fact, you wouldn’t think it would be all that difficult. But it turns out to be harder than you might first think.
I. Thanksgiving is a tough assignment for us.
Think about what the origin of the word “holiday.” It is a day that is, for some reason or other, “holy.” We live in a society that increasingly would like to forget that anything can be “holy.” Besides the demands that holy things can make on us, there are other reasons why “holy” days are a little discomforting to our world.
The existence of the “holy” implies the existence of God. When you start talking about God, try as you might NOT to identify this God, it becomes very hard to avoid that question at some point.
You run into the especially at universities, such as the one where I minister. For years our university invited a campus minister to lead an invocation at each meeting of the Board of Regents. I used to take my turn, until one day I got a call from the President’s assistant. They wanted me to come to the next Regents meeting and lead a prayer, but they wanted me to “tone it down” a bit.
I wondered out loud what “tone it down” might mean. The person on the other end was very reluctant to say, but finally I got her to tell me that what they wanted was for me NOT to pray “in the name of Jesus.” Why couldn’t I just pray a “generic” prayer, she asked.
Well, a “holy” day brings up this very question, a question asked and answered very often in the Old Testament: just who is God? Is everything God? Are human beings their own god? Are there lots of gods, one for one locality and a different one for another locality? Is Allah God? And what about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Holidays bring up these very sticky questions that a lot of modern people would just rather avoid.
Still, people love “holidays” because we get to change our routines and can, if we allow ourselves, have a little rest from the normal “grind.”
So we run into a very interesting, and somewhat depressing, modern phenomenon. We want our holidays, but we wish they were just “days” and not “holy.”
I have noticed how this has been handled lately. Christmas has become just “the season” for which we send “season’s greetings.” It’s a pretty slick trick if you think about it. You don’t have to bother about that worrisome, politically incorrect “Christ” part of Christmas.
Thanksgiving has faired no better. It has become “turkey day.” This doesn’t do much to promote the happiness of the “animal rights” activists because it’s not a day when we honor or worship turkeys - not around here, at least - but a day when we EAT turkeys, and perhaps other assorted foul!
But this nifty little arrangement takes the “thanks” out of Thanksgiving.
There is, however, a little milder version of the holiness avoidance syndrome (you can call this H.A.S. if you like). This milder version keeps the word “thanksgiving” intact, and it even let’s us talk about being thankful, but we just don’t specify TO WHOM we are being thankful. While you can try that, at some point inquiring minds want to know, “thankful to whom?” It is not at all holy to be thankful unless you are thankful to the right person!
II Thanksgiving is NOT easy - especially for people like us!
There really can be no excuse for all of this. While the old saying tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the apostles Paul tells us that the skids to hell are greased with thanklessness. You can find that in Romans 1:21. People are sliding down those horrible rails all the time. Again, there is no excuse for this, but if you think about it, it has a certain kind of understandability because thankfulness is very hard for we humans.
Thankfulness is especially difficult when we have so much stuff. We are so accustomed to our abundance of stuff that we don’t even realize just how much stuff we really have.
When I take a moment to think about it, I am awed by what I see in department stores and supermarkets. Almost anything you could ever want is there, and even those of us the most modestly provided can buy everything we need and much of what we want. The only reason we don’t notice this abundance is that we are in the habit of having.
Even people like my parents, who lived through the “Great Depression” (hey, what was so great about it?) were VERY aware of abundance when they were younger. But the memory of depravation is fading, even with some of them. We baby boomers have no memory of depravation, nor does any generation younger than us. Let’s face it - we have STUFF, so much stuff, in fact, that it rather engulfs us sometimes, making us unable to move around in our houses, making it impossible to see some of the best things in life.
You might think that people with very little stuff would have a more difficult time being thankful. But surprisingly, the Bible presents just the opposite picture. Notice what the Apostle Paul says:
Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. (1 Tim 6:17)
This is a disposition of human beings not limited to one time or place. Deut 8:10-14 expresses a very similar idea when Moses was speaking to the Israelites:
Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God
It is those with much who are more likely to be ensnared by thanklessness. That’s a little ironic if you think about it, but it’s true.
Listen very carefully through the older-style English to what was said in a sermon preached to the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut in 1785:
“When we are favoured with a profusion of earthly good, we are exceedingly prone to set our hearts upon it with an immoderate affection, neglecting our bountiful Creator from whom alone all good is derived. We bathe and bury ourselves in the streams, forgetting the fountain whence they flow.” (Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, p. 852)
True in the time of Moses, true in the time of Paul, true at the founding of our nation, and true in the twenty-first century. It’s not only true, but especially dangerous for Christians in our society, because we have all the stuff, and we also have salvation that comes from the grace of God.
III Grace: the test case for thanksgiving
Grace is so abundant and free to us that it can be a very dangerous thing to receive. Remember, it is those with the most who are more likely to be thankless.
Think of how Paul began his letter to the Galatians: “I am astonished that you are so quickly turning away . . .” He uses a word that was also used to describe soldiers who revolted or deserted. We might call them “turncoats.”
From what had the Galatians turned away? As you study the Galatian letter, you discover the turn was from grace to law. God’s salvation in Christ is based upon grace, a gift, that comes freely through the efforts of Jesus Christ.
The whole concept of grace requires a certain way of understanding the moral and spiritual universe. The problem with this way of understanding things is that it is not very flattering to us.
It presupposes an ultimate Law-Giver and people who are subject to the law but have rebelled. It assumes this Law-Giver is a holy God, One who cannot, by His very nature, tolerate a violation of His law.
According to grace, the offended Law-Giver supplies the remedy for the rebels, who have nothing to bring to the table. All the giving necessary for the restitution of the rebels is done by the Law-Giver. The rebels need only receive with a humble heart. That is, in fact, all they can do. They have nothing to bring to the deal, nothing that could possibly be added to the arrangement.
That’s why it is called grace. And that’s why the only appropriate response is acceptance and thankfulness, thankfulness, thankfulness. Remember that thankfulness does not make us good - it only makes us grateful.
Grace, however, has always been a difficult concept to understand and accept: hard enough to understand, but even harder to accept. People throughout history have desired to do something to help “seal the deal” with God. That attitude seems ingrained in human beings. If only we could help God a little, well, perhaps we wouldn’t owe Him everything.
The Galatians had fallen under the spell of Jewish-oriented people who urged, as seen in Acts 15:1, “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved."
According to these teachers, salvation came to people by means of believing in Jesus and following at least some of the law that came through Moses. They taught that there was at least a little something we could do to deserve what God give us.
As we learn from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, anything following that “and” destroys the gospel. The only correct understanding of this matter is “trusting in Jesus and nothing else whatsoever.” We can only receive and give thanks. That’s all we can do. And that is a very humbling experience.
Today many people find it hard to understand, and even harder to accept, the concept of grace. Even those who do understand often find that doubts linger in the fringes of their hearts and minds. This should not, however, surprise us. After all, the very idea of grace, as well as the provisions of grace, come from God. Frail ones that we are in so many ways, we struggle to understand and accept. If we accept grace, all we can do is respond with thankfulness.
With STUFF it is easier to fool ourselves into thinking that WE did it. We mold and shape things; we plant, harvest, produce and all sorts of things to get our stuff - or so we imagine.
That makes it easy to forget the ultimate source of our stuff. It seems to give us a little “wiggle room” where we can delude ourselves that we provide all these things for ourselves.
The Apostle Paul once had to remind some people that God “has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy." (Acts 14:17)
With all the immeasurable spiritual blessings we have in Christ we have even less apparent “wiggle room.” Yet even we Christians would like to wiggle just a little sometimes.
Conclusion:
We find ourselves in a time and place where thanksgiving is a particularly difficult assignment. While we would like to give thanks to God, we are ever tempted to wiggle ourselves into the spotlight ever so slightly. We need to stop wiggling and just give thanks. We need to do what the Psalmist says: “Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done.” (Ps 105:1)
