Thanksgiving Every Week

Sermon for Thanksgiving, Nov. 25, 2022

As many of you know, we had a funeral here Tuesday afternoon for parishioner Jennifer Furla.  What made Jennifer’s situation particularly poignant was that she was only 59 and had spent most of this year fighting leukemia.  Perhaps it was her age that prompted the intensity of the theological reflection I heard around her death and celebration of life.  Several people – more than usual – needed to talk about the injustice of it all.  Where is God when someone gets sick and dies young? 

It also may be that the stresses of the past two years have led us to reflect on, “Where is God when….”  We’ve heard so many numbers of COVID deaths that the reports bounce off my ears anymore.  But I spoke with a nurse who’d been treating hospitalized COVID patients, and her reflection was much more personal and intense.  So was the reflection of someone who’d moved into a new community in the midst of COVID and had real trouble building relationships when she couldn’t see people’s faces.  So was the reflection of an older woman with health challenges who, frankly, would be happy for her earthly life to end:  She asked, why does a young, beloved woman die when God won’t take someone who wants to go?  And those reflections just relate to the pandemic and its effects on us.  Don’t forget social injustice, and political divisiveness, and natural disasters, and, and, and….

All this is pretty heavy for a holiday morning, and I apologize for that.  But the heaviness is just out there.  We’re carrying a lot these days, personally and nationally – and then, here comes Thanksgiving, when we’re supposed to be grateful.  If we find ourselves with a little cognitive dissonance about that, I think it’s best not to sweep it under the rug as we clean up to welcome friends and family to dinner.  A lot of people are anxious about a lot of things – and it’s OK to name that truth.

Well, it turns out Jesus has something to say about anxiety.  In a nutshell, he asks us to trust God and choose not to worry about the things we need because God knows we need them and loves us enough to provide them.  In the midst of anxious times, Jesus is also naming a truth – that most worry is a choice.  Simply living faithfully day by day is challenging enough, Jesus says in the verse that follows what we heard this morning.  There, he reminds us:  “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matt 6:34)

That’s certainly true, though it may not offer as much comfort as we’d like.  So, it also might help to remember we’re not alone in making our way through anxious times.  And Thanksgiving is a good time to remember another couple of moments we’ve spent on the edge.

In fact, Thanksgiving is rooted in one of those times.  We learned in school that the Pilgrims at Plymouth celebrated a thanksgiving feast with their Native neighbors in 1621, 400 years ago. But it wasn’t great prosperity or religious freedom that made the colony’s leaders declare that holiday.  It was to honor the fact that those who hadn’t died the winter before thought they had a halfway decent chance of not dying in the winter to come.  The colony lost close to half its settlers in the first year.  Then, after their first cycle of planting and tending and harvesting, the Pilgrims were deeply grateful simply to have what looked like enough food to make it through the second winter alive. They’d come to the edge of disaster, and the experience made them thank God for giving them enough to bring them back to safety.  Wouldn’t it have been a blessing if European settlers had cultivated that ethos of being grateful for having enough instead of taking the land they came to…?

Two and a half centuries later, Abraham Lincoln also found himself and his nation on the brink.  It was 1863, and Americans had been killing each other in the Civil War for more than two years.  Tens of thousands had died on both sides without any resolution in sight other than the likely division of the nation — until July of 1863.  That’s when Union troops defeated the Confederates at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, within the space of a few days.  With those victories, finally, Lincoln could see light at the end of the tunnel, a real hope that these States might remain united.  So, he took the suggestion of a magazine editor and proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving. The Union had nearly dissolved.  We’d come to the edge of disaster, and that experience made people – at least Northerners – grateful to God for bringing them back toward healing and wholeness.

I think it works much the same way for us.  Sometimes it takes an experience of being on the edge of disaster before we’re ready to offer what God desires most from us – a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, the offering of our whole lives.  But how do we do that? 

I don’t know about you, but I often give myself trouble for not being grateful enough.  I look at the colored leaves we received when we came in today, and I think, “I’ve been given so much more than I deserve; I should be putting a hundred of these into the offering plate.”  Then, often, someone in a collar stands up in a pulpit like this implying we should feel badly if we just want to spend the day eating turkey and watching football.  Other people have such a rough time … if I were just more grateful for what I’ve been given, maybe somehow that would help balance things out…?

I don’t think more thank-yous are exactly what God has in mind.  I want to share an image I’ve mentioned before, something my spiritual director said once: that what God desires isn’t more tokens of thanksgiving; what God desires is us – the offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies, as the prayer book puts it.  Put yourself in the offering plate, she said.  Live in thanksgiving.

It's no coincidence that our worship points us that direction, too.  In fact, the term for what we do here every Sunday, and what we’re doing today, says it loud and clear … or at least it does if you speak Greek.  We come here, week by week, to remember God’s love in creating us, Jesus’ giving of himself for us, the Holy Spirit’s empowering of us day by day – we come to remember all this in a service called Holy Eucharist, which means holy thanksgiving.  We have Thanksgiving dinner here each week.  Our worship forms us to remember, first and foremost, to live in gratitude – not just for specific blessings but as the paradigm for our relationship with God, and one another, and the world. 

So, maybe this holiday can be more than a day when we list our blessings.  Maybe it can be a day to reset.  The time is right, after all, because Advent begins this weekend, too – our annual time of preparation for the coming of God With Us in Bethlehem, and in our hearts, and at the end of the age.  What would it be like if Jesus came and found us alive and well and living in the offering plate, despite the challenges of the present moment?  Not only would it make our Savior smile, but it would also empower us to confront those challenges of the present moment.  For gratitude is power – the power to move from the kingdom of anxiety into the kingdom of God, and to lead others to come along with us.