The “Who” of Thanksgiving
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Psalm 106:1
As I recall our first Thanksgiving here in Worthington two memories stand out.
First, a few days before the event I was listening to the radio and heard an announcer say, “Thanksgiving is America’s biggest non-religious holiday.” I took exception to that. After all, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation establishing the holiday said:
They [the growth and blessings America enjoys] are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins [he’s talking about the war], 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 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.
All things considered, that sounds like a pretty religious holiday.
The second memory I have of that Thanksgiving is wondering what we were going to eat. It was our first Thanksgiving away from Texas where Pat’s family either came to Dawn or we joined her family in Amarillo or Lubbock (or occasionally, Fort Worth). We decided it was too far to drive either to Texas or to Missouri to spend the holiday with my mother. So, we decided it was time we saw Cincinnati. Thanksgiving morning we set out, planning on eating somewhere along the way. Sometime after noon we wondered if we had made a mistake. Restaurant after restaurant we stopped at was closed. Then, just as we reached the outskirts of Cincinnati and had decided we would buy some bologna and bread at a convenience store—assuming we found one open—we discovered a Cracker Barrel. It was open. Not only that, their Thanksgiving meal included corn bread dressing—the only kind of dressing having Pat’s blessing. It was our first experience with this restaurant that has been described as “a garage sale with food at the back.”
Things have changed over the years. Malls have gone from opening at dawn on so-called “Black Friday,” to opening at midnight Thanksgiving night, to opening at five Thanksgiving Day. Now, one major retailer based in Columbus has announced its stores will be open on Thanksgiving Day. I’ve begun to wonder if that radio announcer was right.
Like you, I’ve heard the claims that references to the pilgrims thanking God are excluded from the story of the first Thanksgiving as it’s told in our public schools. I don’t know how reliable such reports are. In any case, we don’t need to blame the schools for secularizing Thanksgiving. The blame is ours.
No, not because we shop on Thanksgiving Day. Certainly not because we watch parades on Thanksgiving Day (of course the most famous of these parades is intended to implant a certain store’s name on our minds as the shopping season begins). It is not because we watch bowl games on Thanksgiving Day. True, the pilgrims did not watch bowl games at their most famous thanksgiving but, of course, there wouldn’t be a college in America until fifteen years later and it would be nearly sixty years before there was a second college. You have to have two for a bowl game. Of course, even then not everyone would want to watch Harvard clash with William and Mary. I’ve seen a post card commemorating college football on Turkey Day—it was printed in 1900.
My point is, if our attitude toward Thanksgiving has changed, it’s not because of the culture, it’s because something changed within us. To explain what, let me risk spoiling part of the Thanksgiving story.
You know the story; it goes something like this:
In 1621, when their labors were rewarded with a bountiful harvest after a year of sickness and scarcity, the Pilgrims gave thanks to God and celebrated His bounty in the Harvest Home tradition with feasting and sport (recreation). To these people of strong Christian faith, this was not merely a revel; it was also a joyous outpouring of gratitude. (http://www.plimoth.org/learn/MRL/read/thanksgiving-history)
But remember this, the “First” Thanksgiving with the Indians and the pilgrims was, almost certainly, not the first thanksgiving.
The pilgrims regularly took time to thank God. Scholastic, the magazine for elementary teachers, recognizes this aspect of the pilgrims’ lifestyle: “The English colonists we call Pilgrims celebrated days of thanksgiving as part of their religion. But these were days of prayer, not days of feasting.” The huge feast was what was new, not the thanksgiving. The pilgrim worldview was one of gratitude because even in the hard times they found reason to be thankful.
When we get together on Thanksgiving, we generally have to pause a moment and think of reasons to be thankful. Not the pilgrims. You see, they weren’t thankful because it was Thanksgiving, they had days of thanksgiving because they were thankful. So, if Thanksgiving has lost some of its meaning for us, it’s because we have lost our “attitude of gratitude.”
This is not a cultural or educational problem. The poor are not necessarily more grateful than the rich. The old aren’t inclined to be thankful while the young are naturally ingrates. It’s not a Republican versus Democrat issue. Gratitude doesn’t belong to one political ideology. In fact, liberals may not be thankful because they think everything they have is an entitlement; conservatives, on the other hand, may lack gratitude because they’re convinced they have earned everything they have.
The pilgrims knew pride is the enemy of thanksgiving. The pilgrims, like their Puritan cousins, were keenly aware they deserved nothing. Everything they had was a gift. And every gift was a reflection of the good God they served.
Here again one of our good traditions needs a little tweaking. At a lot of Thanksgiving Day gatherings someone asks the people sitting around the table to name something they’re thankful for. It’s not a bad tradition but maybe the proper question is, not what are you thankful for, but “To Whom are you thankful?”
The Wampanoag, the Indians who shared that meal with the pilgrims, has a tradition of regularly thanking the Creator for his gifts. The Apostle Paul, who had never heard of Massachusetts, would have said that makes sense; in fact, anyone with sense could look at the world and see evidence of a benevolent God.
In the end, the holiday is about recognizing the Who of Thanksgiving.
The psalmists understood this.
In Psalm 138, we read of gratitude for God’s faithfulness.
I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart;
before the “gods” I will sing your praise.
I will bow down toward your holy temple
and will praise your name
for your unfailing love and your faithfulness…
They were thankful for God’s salvation.
Then my soul will rejoice in the Lord
and delight in his salvation.
My whole being will exclaim,
“Who is like you, Lord?
You rescue the poor from those too strong for them,
the poor and needy from those who rob them.”
Like the pilgrim farmers, the psalmists knew it was the goodness of God who sent the rain they needed for their crops.
Sing to the Lord with grateful praise;
make music to our God on the harp.
He covers the sky with clouds;
he supplies the earth with rain
and makes grass grow on the hills.
Above all they were thankful for who God is. That is at the heart of my text, Psalm 106:1. The verse could be translated as
“Praise the Lord!
Thank the Lord because he is good.
His ·loyal-love continues forever.”
I don’t intend to unpack all this verse has to say but I do want to underscore some key points.
We are first called on to “Praise the Lord!” Literally, that is “Hallelujah.” We all know that word. It’s so familiar we can forget it is a call to celebrate. In fact, the Contemporary English Version translates the command as “We will celebrate and praise you, Lord!” While the Bible sometimes speaks of worship being a time of solemn quiet, worship can also be a time of jubilant excitement over God and God’s works. This is why so many of the psalms call on us to “make a joyful noise.”
This joyful noise was likely a shout of excited praise. The idea is that when the worshippers thought of the Lord, they just couldn’t contain themselves. They couldn’t keep quiet.
A couple Sundays ago I mentioned our trip to Benton Harbor; the year before that we went to Delbarton, West Virginia. On Wednesday we attended a small Baptist church a few miles out of that small mining town. It wasn’t a Southern Baptist congregation on a typical Wednesday night. The worship service included guitars and lively music led by an enthusiastic young man wearing a Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt. (That’s the wrestler, not the Six-Million-Dollar Man,) The good people of that church shouted “Amens” and “Praise the Lord” all during the service. They clearly weren’t rich but their excitement about God was undeniable.
In a sense, the attitude inspiring thanksgiving at its best is an attitude that can’t not be thankful.
Before I move on, let me make one more point. The psalmist called on the people to celebrate “Jehovah” or “Yahweh.” Most of our English translations follow the old custom of substituting “Lord” for God’s personal Name, but the “jah” in Hallelujah comes from “Yahweh.” The fact the people of Israel knew God’s own Name reminded them God could be known. Their God was not a remote Power who was an Impersonal Force. They could enter into a relationship with their God. They could know God’s character. And what did they know of that character?
What is clear about God’s character inspired the psalmist, as it inspires us, to say, “Thank the Lord because he is good.”
That mysterious English woman Julian of Norwich, who lived from the mid-fourteenth to the early fifteenth century, was both a mystic and a deep theologian. She once wrote of God, “In his love he clothes us, enfolds and embraces us; that tender lover completely surrounds us, never to leave us. As I see it he is everything that is good.” The good we encounter in life is God’s good.
But there’s more than that. Whatever comes our way God is able to either use it or defuse it to accomplish our good. We’re not always able to see that at the moment but that’s because our perspective is so limited.
Max Lucado compares some of the puzzling things that happen to us to ingredients in a recipe. We may wonder why we should add ingredients like vinegar to a cake or cookies, yet these “goodies” aren’t the same if you omit the sharp, bitter liquid. In the same way, God can take the bitter experience we would have just as soon left out of our lives and produce something wonderful. For those who trust him, nothing can keep him from his goal of our good.
The psalmist declares God’s goodness as a starting point for what follows. And what follows is a confession of Israel’s sin. He knows there are tough times ahead as God chastens them for their sins but he also knows God’s good will prevail. God will “save” them and “gather them from all the nations” so they may once again know peace.
Why does he know this? He knows this because God’s goodness is so often manifested in “steadfast love.”
In the midst of tough times, like the psalmist, we can be thankful because “His ·loyal-love continues forever.”
The word translated as “loyal-love,” “steadfast love,” or “mercy” is the Hebrew word chesed. It is an important word in the Psalms where it is used some 125 times. It is roughly equivalent to the New Testament term “grace.” Luther described it as “goodness in action.”
In the context of the psalm, the idea is that God will be faithful to Israel—His people—even though they have been unfaithful to Him. The troubles they are enduring were intended to bring them back to Him. So, in a strange way, the psalmist is telling his fellow Jews they can be thankful for their particular trouble because it proves God has not abandoned them.
Of course, the Bible makes it very clear we are not to assume tough times are chastisements. They certainly weren’t in Joseph’s case. But they were the way God used to bring about good for Joseph, his immediate family, the Jews; and, ultimately, us.
I haven’t told this story in a long while. I originally heard it from Dr. Millard Ferguson who taught philosophy at Southwestern. It came out of his experiences as a pastor.
Shortly after he had baptized a young boy in his church, the youngster became gravely ill. The boy, who was about nine, was not expected to live very long. His father spent as much time with him as he could, reading to him, and just sitting with him in the hospital.
One day, as the end of the boy’s life neared, the father came to Ferguson. He said he needed advice. His son had asked, “Dad, why is God letting this happen to me?” The father said he knew he couldn’t pass it off to the pastor so he answered it the best he could. Now, he was afraid he hadn’t given a very good answer.
Naturally, Ferguson asked, “What did you say?”
“Well,” the father said, “I told him, ‘Son, I don’t know why this is happening, I just know it doesn’t mean God has stopped loving you.’”
The future philosophy professor said, “I can’t think of a better answer.”
“His love lasts,” as The Message says, that’s reason to be thankful.
CONCLUSION
So, is Thanksgiving a “non-religious” holiday or a “religious” holiday? Must it be one or the other? We are both a religious people and a secular people. We Christians are part of the “saecularis ,” the age in which we live, “the world.” The Bible is not so quick to separate life into the sacred and the secular as we are. The Bible tells us God shows up in both places. “The rain,” Jesus said, “falls on the just and the unjust.” The atheist farmer benefits from the rain God sends, even if he’d never imagine saying, “Thank you, Lord” as his crops drink up the water.
The joy we feel as “our” team takes the field, even when they don’t leave the field as victors is a gift of God. The love we feel as family and friends crowd around the table to eat more than they should is a gift of God. The peace we feel as we contemplate the leftovers and file away new memories is a gift of God. And, perhaps, the hope we feel as we set out to begin the quest for Christmas presents is also a gift of God.
And what if your Thanksgiving isn’t the Hallmark card holiday. You can be thankful that God is who he is and “his steadfast love lasts forever.”
So, as you count your blessings, remember the Who of Thanksgiving. Remember the God whose love endures, the God whose good purpose for you cannot be thwarted by circumstances, the God you may know.
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