Thanksgiving Eve

This Thursday is Thanksgiving, a time when we take a day off to celebrate with families reunited and get stuffed fuller than the Thanksgiving turkey. What are you thankful for? I am thankful for - the fork!

As table utensils go, the fork is a recent invention. The knife was first, of course, dating to prehistory. The spoon also dates to the Stone Age, literally. But forks date only from ancient Greece, and then they were large cooking utensils, not for the dining table. Table forks were invented only about 1,400 years ago in the Middle East and did not appear in Europe until the eleventh century, and then only in Italy. The Italians were very slow to adopt them, not using them widely until five hundred more years passed. Forks did not reach France until 1533, but the French thought using them was an affectation and their adoption was very slow. The first table fork reached England in 1608, where they were promptly ridiculed as being effeminate and unnecessary. Over many years, forks came to be adopted by the wealthy, who had them made from expensive materials intended to impress guests.

The first Thanksgiving dinner celebration in Plymouth Colony was in 1623. Its table was bereft of forks. The pilgrims and the Indians invited to the feast used knives, spoons, their fingers and cloth napkins to manipulate their food. So I am thankful to have a fork to make eating Thanksgiving dinner easier.

There is a connection between giving thanks and food that reaches back thousands of years. As the children of Israel prepared to cross into the Promised Land, Deuteronomy chapter eight records that Moses told them,

10 When you have eaten your fill, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. 11 Make sure not to forget the Lord your God. Do not fail to obey his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. 12 Otherwise, when you always have plenty to eat and when you build fine houses and settle down, 13 and when your herds and flocks grow large and your financial assets increase and all your wealth compounds, 14 then your heart will become too proud for God and you will forget the Lord... . 17 You may say to yourself, "Everything I have I have gained by my own skills and efforts. I have done it all myself." 18 But God gives you the ability to produce wealth in the first place. It is a way God confirms the covenant that he made with your ancestors, just as it is today. (8:10-13a; 17-18)

The children of Israel knew, as we do, that life was sustained by food. But they emphasized as well that their lives were sustained by the presence of God. After all, God had not only delivered them from slavery in Egypt, he had also sustained them with manna from heaven as they wandered in the Sinai. They understood that filling the soul was as important as filling the plate.

I wonder what this Thanksgiving will really mean to Americans. I don’t mean this question in some cynical sense. I know that the holiday is deeply significant to many people, including, I imagine, everyone here tonight. Yet these are not ordinary times, at least not as we have thought of them.

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We are beleaguered by the deepest recession since World War Two. Unemployment is near double digits and likely to stay there, say economists, for a long time. The federal deficit, just the deficit, of this year alone is greater than the total, combined costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 until now. Some of the uproar over the new, invasive security measures at our airports comes, I think, from the perception that there will be no end to increasingly severe restrictions on us in the name of safety.

We have a growing unease that we are at the beginning of a new normal and that whatever normal should be, this ain’t it.

It is helpful, I think, to take a long view, in fact, an eternal view. There is a story of an eastern potentate who demanded of his court philosophers a statement of truth that would apply in all times, places and circumstances. The men conferred briefly and reported they had the answer. "What is it?" demanded the potentate. "And this, too, shall pass," answered the philosophers.

So as we read headlines this week, no matter what they are, we might remind ourselves that, yes, things aren’t like they used to be, but then, they never were. This, too, shall pass. What matters is whether we remember to fill our souls and not only our plates, whether we stay true to the God who abides in all circumstances.

Baby boomers like me were raised by the Depression and World War Two generation. There is a lot my parents’ generation went through that is out of place with how my age group or younger knows life. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer William Manchester wrote of how his mother would cut and re-sew bed sheets to make them last longer. My grandfather told me of men he knew who worked ten- or twelve-hour days on a farm to make a dollar a day, and were glad to do it.

Farmer at the auction, Oskaloosa, Kansas, 1938, John Vachon, photographer.

Yet my generation saw none of this. Robert J. Samuelson once wrote of us baby boomers, “We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. In our new society most workers would have rising incomes and stable jobs. . . . Poverty, racism and crime would disappear. . . We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. After a while we thought we were entitled to them as a matter of right.”

Yet, as author Mike Bellah points out, when our parents told us how things were, they failed to tell us how things usually are. In telling the stories of the Great Depression and the Great War, the generation who lived them wanted to create in their children a sense of gratefulness that those tribulations were over, but what they often created in us instead was a sense of entitlement. Why? Says Bellah, “Because of what they didn't say. What our parents failed to tell us is that conflict and want are part of humankind’s future as well as its past. There have been no utopias in history, and as long as the human condition remains the same (imperfect people living in an imperfect world), there will be no utopian tomorrows either.”

Bellah’s words are several years old, but can we doubt now that the human condition has remained the same – imperfect people living in an imperfect world? What happened to the end of history, when freedom would prevail and a computerized Age of Aquarius would be inaugurated?

One answer is that we had no right to expect such a utopia. Our sense of entitlement took us over.

Perhaps, as Moses said, it is easy to forget the Lord when times are good, but in tough times it’s tempting to wonder whether God still cares. There is a story of a man who was critically injured in an accident. He was rushed unconscious to a hospital and went immediately into emergency surgery. The surgeon barely saved the man’s life after four hours on the operating table. The victim regained alertness five days later. The day after that, the surgeon went to see him and was taken aback when the injured man launched into a litany of complaints about the care he had received since awakening – the food was cold, the nurses were slow when summoned, the TV was too small and too far away, the room was either too hot or too cold, and so on.

The surgeon interrupted, “Look, you were almost dead when you got here! I worked on you for four hours! I surgically repaired both your shattered legs, set your broken arm and three ribs. One lung was punctured and I saved you from suffocating. You were gashed across your head and I sewed it up. Your heartbeat was irregular and I got it stabilized. A little gratitude might be in order!”

“Okay, doc, thanks,” the patient answered, “but what have you done for me today?”

Have you ever felt like asking God, What have you done for me today? After Jesus fed the five thousand, a lot of people followed him around, leading Jesus to remark that they probably followed him because they saw him as a sort of walking grocery store. It was time, Jesus said, for the people to work for the food that endures for eternal life. The people asked what they needed to do to perform the works of God. Jesus answered they needed to start with believing in him, because God had sent him.

They asked what sign, or miracle, Jesus would perform so that they may see it and believe in him. The day before the people had miraculously eaten their fill because of Jesus’ power, but now they said to him, what have you done for us today? It seems people’s tendency to a strong sense of entitlement is no new phenomenon.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus does not perform miracles on demand; in fact, John doesn’t even describe Jesus’ works of power as miracles. They are signs that attest to Jesus’ identity as the one sent by God, on whom God has set his seal, the mark of authenticity. The constant theme in John is that those who believe without seeing miracles or appearances are blessed. When we say, however we phrase it, what has Jesus done for us today, what sign can he give us so that we may believe, Jesus’ answer is always the same: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes will never be thirsty.”

Christ has nothing to offer us except himself. And that is not merely enough, it is more plentiful than we imagine. Perhaps we should be thankful this Thanksgiving not for things; I doubt that this year mere stuff is what we desire, anyway. Despite the violence, despite the threats, despite the uncertainty, we may be thankful that we can rejoice in the Lord always and that the Lord is near. The peace of God, which really does surpass all understanding, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Not the point of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, then is not really a once-a-year celebration, except in a secular sense where it handily marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Thanksgiving is for Christian people a continuous state of praise that acknowledges to God what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Thankfulness enables us to face the future with hope, for it is by thanking that we remember. To thank someone is to remember what he or she did for you. To remember what God has done is to be filled with hope, because God isn’t finished with the world or with us. As God has done, so God will do, and as God has given, so God will give. Thanksgiving is a joyful noise, a glad worship. Despite outward circumstances, our hearts in faith do heed what the psalmist announced: The Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness lasts to all generations.

For that may we be ever thankful.