On Really Giving Thanks
November 27, 2003 - Thanksgiving Day
By
The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland
-
Deuteronomy 8:1-3, 6-10
- Psalm 65:9-14
- James 1:17-18, 21-27
- Matthew 6:25-33
It was 16 degrees Monday morning at 6:30AM, so I decided to go for a run. There’s nothing unusual for me in the decision to go for a run, I decide that most mornings. Then again, most mornings aren’t 16 degrees. Coldness is not the only odd weather that I’ll run in either. Just last week I went running in the rain. To be fair it was only drizzling when I set out, but by the time I was a mile out from my house it was pouring and I was seriously thinking about switching from my usual jog to a crawl stroke. I wasn’t seriously thinking, however, about turning back.
I often feel like I have to explain myself to people when they discover I have gone for a run in 16 degree weather, or in a downpour, or at high noon on a 90 degree day. My usual explanation is that I dislike bad weather less than I dislike gyms and rec centers. I feel like I have to exercise, so I’m just being logical and choosing the lesser of two evils. Besides, I’m not the only one out there. During my soaking wet run of last week I was passed by an older man whose running shorts and T-shirt were plastered to his lean frame.
“Great day for a run,” he offered.
“Just the brave and the crazy out this morning,” I shot back.
I mention this habit of mine not in order that you might have evidence of my obsessive devotion to oddity, for most of you have ample evidence of that already. In fact, it’s worse than you think. Even though I offer explanation when asked, the real truth is that I like running under these conditions. I love the challenge of slogging through leaf-choked, backed-up gutters, dragging 15 pound running shoes along at the ends of my burning calves. I love the wide-eyed look of motorists stopped at a streetlight, warm and snug in their heated steel cages, as I trot past, headed toward the flashing red hand, mummified in layers of insulated underwear and Polar Fleece.
It’s possible I’m crazy. And yet, I prefer to think that I’m just keeping in touch with Thanksgiving. We live in a yin-yang world. Without wet, there is no dry. Without cold, there is no warm. I like to think that my adventures in odd-weather running keep me that much more in touch with all the simple things I have to be thankful for: a warm shower, a dry robe, a cool glass of water.
Which brings me to Thanksgiving. I love preaching these special occasion sermons, but Thanksgiving Day is a tough one. The challenge in preaching a Thanksgiving Day sermon to affluent, modern Americans (of which I am one) is not to convince them to be thankful for what they have (for they have so much), but to frighten them enough that they might experience thanksgiving as the early American settlers did. Or maybe as the wandering Hebrews did upon reaching the promised land.
And we know that we have too much to be thankful for. For most of us, our lives are so full of good things that we are subconsciously embarrassed about it at the Thanksgiving table. Maybe your family does the thing where you go around the table and each person says what they are thankful for that year. Nobody ever says they are thankful for the glass of water at their place. We all say things like, “being with my family,” or, “good health and happiness,” neither of which are inappropriate things to be thankful for, after all. Yet I think we miss the spirit of early Thanksgiving feasts, where being thankful for “being with my family” meant being thankful that your family hadn’t been eaten by a bear. Often we will give thanks for the food before us, yet I suspect that what we mean is that we’re thankful for the special, ostentatious display of food before us, not that there’s any food there at all. We’re thankful that there’s a giant, golden-brown Turkey legs up on the table and a couple of pies in the kitchen, not that we aren’t going to starve.
Perhaps I’ve overstated things slightly, but there is something to this idea that being really thankful involves remembering a time when you could not be thankful. As my commentary on today’s reading from Deuteronomy puts it, “…it is in the memory of years of famine and want that the value of an abundance of food and clothing is most fully appreciated." (New Interpreter’s Bible. Nashville: Abingdon, 1998, vol. II, p. 357)
That is, in a nutshell, what Moses was saying in today’s reading from Deuteronomy. He sets up for us three dichotomies: 1) abundance vs. scarcity, 2) The Promised Land vs. desert wandering, and 3) temptation vs. faith. The first dichotomy is broad, describing the difference between a generous abundance of natural resources and the terrible lack of same. Of course, for the Hebrew people, this first dichotomy is almost synonymous with the second, the difference between the Promised Land God had delivered them into and the desert they wandered in before. God brings the Hebrew nation into “a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters…, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey…(Deut. 8:7ff)” They are brought into this wonderful land from a bare subsistence in the desert.
The third dichotomy is my favorite, because it is unexpected. It is temptation vs. faith, where temptation belongs not to the desert, but to the abundant Promised Land, and faith is aligned with wandering the desert. This may seem counter-intuitive, but Moses is definitely on to something here. God may lead us into abundance, but it is in that abundance that we are more likely to neglect God. There is a sense in which Moses is telling the Hebrew people that real poverty is spiritual poverty, and that a life of prosperity and success carries with it spiritual challenges that may be even more subtle and insidious than those of the desert.
We needn’t go too far mentally to get from the wandering Hebrews come into the Promised Land to the early American settlers come into this land. It isn’t an exact parallel of course. The “New World” may have been a promised land for new settlers, but it wasn’t exactly flowing with milk and honey. Existence was hard, winters were cold, and food was something very much to be celebrated. The correlation is there, but there is also something particularly American about our Thanksgiving Day.
Along with Independence Day on July 4th, Thanksgiving Day is unique in that it is a national holiday that appears in our Book of Common Prayer. A prayer book specifically written for the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. And along with the usual harvest festival and the usual celebration of nature’s abundance, Thanksgiving Day carries particularly American values of striking out on your own, choosing your own life, and being joyful in the new friends and good things that come of it. Also typically American is the ironic way that we go about celebrating this holiday today. In the words of Sarah Vowell, a favorite author:
So I went on a little explore through the public library to learn something about our American Thanksgiving Day. I learned that it while the pilgrims may have eaten the first thanksgiving meal back in the 1600s, it was Abraham Lincoln who declared Thanksgiving Day a national holiday in 1863. For those of you whose memory for historical dates is as sketchy as mine, let me remind you that in 1863 these United States of America were in the midst of the Civil War. After reading Lincoln’s Proclamation For Thanksgiving I am haunted by the striking similarities between Lincoln’s time of war and the times we find ourselves in today. Just as our greatest President felt drawn to honor God’s gifts in the midst of human suffering and need, so too are we called. But I am just clouding the issue. Nothing I say could add to the words of the man himself, and so I quote:
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
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 do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly do to him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union." (Abraham Lincoln's Proclamation For Thanksgiving, 3rd October, 1863)
What more can we say?