The Christian Meaning of Thanksgiving

Let us pray, gracious God, thou from whom all good things cometh, beseech thee to follow the preaching of thy word, the ministry of thy spirit. And where it is an error, it may be quickly forgotten. And where it is true, it may be undergirded by thy power and by thy love. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen. We have assembled here this morning as the Christian community, but we give thanks with the larger community of mankind for Thanksgiving as an elemental virtue, which is not limited to Christian folk. One evidence of the universality of Thanksgiving is the very fact that this is a national festival. To be sure, it is not an unchallenged national festival. When Washington proclaimed the first Thanksgiving in 1789, two southern congressmen objected, saying that the people had nothing to be thankful for in the new government, and that if they did, the president and the Congress had no right to tell them when and where they should give thanks.

And a congressman from South Carolina said that he did not think very much of this mimicking of European customs anyway. And it is reported that Washington was somewhat disappointed in the use to which the festival was put. Jefferson so continued this southern opposition to Thanksgiving that a New England pledge him and once prayed for him thus, O Lord, endow the President of the United States with a goodly portion of thy grace, for thou, O Lord, knowest that he needs it. But Thanksgiving had too deep a hold upon the people and it survived, and today we have our Thanksgiving, our National Festival, along with the National Festivals of the Community Festivals of many other people, and the history of mankind. So thanksgiving is almost a universal virtue, and this is a national festival, but we have gathered here as a Christian community.

So let us take our Christian faith seriously, and let us ask this morning what special significance thanksgiving has for us as Christian folk. And let us begin with the mystery and with the wonder of human existence. Umphrey Lee declares that the most devout thanksgiving which he ever heard was from the lips of an old man in a country church, browbeaten by his wife, broken in business, suffering from ill health. He gave his testimony in a communal meeting of Thanksgiving, where individuals were explaining, often at great length, their many reasons for thankfulness. The old man finally arose and stated his case in one sentence. I am thankful, he said, that I am alive. Well, he could have said nothing more profound than that. Here is the simplicity, which is always profundity, and the kind of profundity with which children frequently confront us.

In his simplicity, he went to the very heart of the matter. I am thankful, he said, that I am alive. As Pitirim A. Sorokin has put it, life, even the hardest life, is the most wonderful thing in all the universe, a man alive, the most wonderful and also the most mysterious thing in the whole created universe. There is the mystery and the wonder of human personality with its power to organize all the energies and vitalities of human existence in the pursuit of a deliberately chosen God. There is the power to give up bread to feed the hungry, to say no to this native instinct to achieve a nobler purpose, to sacrifice comfort and pleasure to accomplish something truly worthwhile, to be alive, a human person with the power to live in love and loyalty, the most mysterious and the most wondrous thing in all existence.

And next to a life of love, the most wondrous thing in all the universe is the human mind. This power to understand the universe, this capacity for language, for memory, for conceptual thought and analysis. And so the old man went to the very heart of the matter. And he said, I am thankful that I am alive, alive amid all the mysteries and the wonders of human existence. And all this, the pagan knows. And in his better moments, he too is thankful. And yet, can we be thankful that we are alive, if this is all that we can say? Edna St. Vincent Millay put the question very well. Hard-hearted is this anxious autumn to lift the heavy mine from its dark forebodings, to sit at the bright feast and with ruddy cheer give thanks for the harvest of a troubled year.

There are folk for whom this is the question, this autumn. And if for us, in our inexperience with life, this autumn is not our autumn. We can be sure that sooner or later, it will be our autumn. And we sometimes say, if trouble comes, but there is no if. Trouble always comes. And on this Thanksgiving day, we must remind ourselves life is an uphill battle. And in the end, every one of us loses, unless there is something further which we can say. Is there anything for which the man who sits anxiously beside a sick bed can be thankful for this morning? Is there anything for which the man who walks through the valley of the shadow of death can be thankful this morning? Is there something for which the person whose life has been wasted in tragedy and defeat can be thankful this morning?

George F. Kennan, a very distinguished foreign policy expert in our country, after returning from a number of years abroad, made this observation about the meaninglessness of a life which can say nothing more than, I am thankful that I am alive. When a man dies in that dim world, he said, and by dim world, he meant the totalitarian world in particular Russia. When a man dies in that dim world, it is as though he had never been. In theory, there is nothing to grieve for because there is no soul, just an accumulation of chemicals. By the same token, there is nothing to hope for. Death becomes a kind of nasty and final joke played upon the human personality by the physical universe, to which it is assumed to exclusively belong. There is nothing more empty, nothing more shocking than the trappings of a totalitarian funeral.

For here, we see the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death. The old Thanksgiving prayer of the church puts the Christian faith very briefly, but very surely. So we bless thee for our creation, our preservation, and for the blessings of this life. But above all, for thy love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory. It is only because we believe that the Lord God loves us with an everlasting love and has visited us in Jesus Christ. And we can this morning be enthusiastic about his other gifts. God has given us life with its mystery and with its wonder, but he has done more than this. He has placed us in an economy of abundance in a world of incredible poverty.

In comparison with the overwhelming majority of mankind, every person here this morning is unbelievably rich. It’s hard for us to imagine our very richness. Recently, someone suggested that it becomes clearer to us if we imagine that the population of the world is 1,000. And of these 1,000 people, 60 will be Americans. These 60 Americans will have one half of the world’s income and will have 15 times as many possessions as the remaining 940 combined. Solid fact this morning is this, except for the Americans. And for about 200 out of our mythical 1,000 people who live in Western Europe and belong to the privileged classes in certain other nations. Mankind is poor and ignorant and hungry and sick. And thus, it is with good reason that certain theologians have suggested that the really great moral dilemma of our time is the behavior of a Christian who, in the providence of God, has been placed in an economy of abundance in the midst of a world of incredible poverty.

And we ought to be thankful today for the abundance with which God has surrounded us. The creation of God is good, and we ought to enjoy it. And yet as Christian people remembering our incredible wealth, we cannot help but be uneasy this morning as we give thanks for it. For one thing, we know that our incredible wealth is a great temptation to the conceit that our own skills and abilities have gotten us these things. We have a right to be sure, to be proud of the industry and the hard work and the achievement of the American people. But our wealth is ultimately God’s gift. He gave to us life, and he placed within the earth its fertility. He sustains life by his sunshine and by his rain. And in his providence, this country was settled and its industry grew in one of those propitious periods in the history of mankind.

Surely these words of Deuteronomy speak to our situation. Take heed lest you forget the Lord your God. Lest when you are eaten and are full and have built goodly houses and live in them, then your heart be lifted up. And you say in your heart, my power and this might of my hand have gotten me this wealth. And then to us Christian people, we know that there is something finally ironic about giving thanks for food and shelter and clothing. If this is all we give thanks for, we do not exactly live by bread. How important bread may be for those who do not have it. But sooner or later, we all die by bread. The stocks and bonds, lands and money, food and clothing are not the really important things of life. Over these, the sentence of death has been irrevocably passed, and to them, God promises no resurrection.

And thus, this morning, if we are to talk seriously about the goodness of God, we must talk about something more than bread, how important bread may be. And Christian faith raises still another disquieting question about our wealth. Why is it? Why is it that we, in the providence of God, have been placed to meet an economy of abundance in a world of poverty? What does this mean? How can we make sense out of this situation? How can we make sense out of this situation in a world which is governed by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this brings to focus our central concern that we see thanksgiving, that we see ourselves as thanksgiving day in the light of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How are we to understand our own lives and the abundance which surrounds us and for which we give thanks in a world in which Jesus Christ is the ultimate disclosure of reality.

A strange fellow boy has suggested that this comes as a shock for focus if we play a little game. Now let’s pretend, let’s pretend that you have not been born, but that you will be born today somewhere on this mighty planet, and let’s estimate your chances of being born as you were born. Well, the chances are very slim. You would have one chance in 22 of being born in the United States. Your chance of being born in the Soviet Union would not be much better. You would more likely be born in India. And if you were born in India, the chances of survival to maturity would not be too good. you would have only one chance in four of being born with a white face in a world where it goes hard with a man if he has a colored face. And the chances are overwhelming that you would be born in the midst of poverty and hunger and disease.

Well, then, why were we born as we were? Why were we born in the United States when the chances were so much greater that we might have been born in Africa or in India or in Tibet or China? Why were we born into Christian homes and nurtured in the Christian faith? Why were we born in homes which gave us an incentive for education and what we sometimes call the nicer things of life. Why were we born with good minds and sound bodies in a world in which some folk are born with defective bodies and minds? And so why am I the person I am and not someone else? Until we have taken this question seriously, we have never taken seriously the meaning of our own existence. And more than this, until we have taken this question seriously, we cannot really know the meaning of Thanksgiving.

And then, when we have taken this question seriously, when we have thought about it, we simply cannot discover any reason why we are the persons we are. Except this, God wanted us to be the persons we are. It is our Christian faith that God thought of us before we were born. And this is the reason we were born, and that his purpose lies behind our lives. But the question still persists. But how are we going to make sense out of this purpose of God which lies behind our lives in the light of what we know of God’s purpose for all mankind in Jesus Christ? H.H. Farmer, in commenting on the story of the rich man in Lazarus, suggests that we simply cannot make sense out of our lives. We simply cannot make sense out of the gross inequalities human existence, except insofar as we interpret these inequalities, these blessings of God in terms of responsibility for the Lazarus’s of the world.

In the story which Jesus told of the rich man and Lazarus, it is not stated that the rich man was sinful because he was rich. We can imagine that he had a good mind. We can imagine that he was honest and we can imagine that he was a hard worker. We can imagine that Lazarus had a weak mind, perhaps. Perhaps he was not industrious and certainly he was sick. But this is not the poet. The point is that the rich man interpreted the inequalities of life. The rich man interpret his wealth in terms of privilege for himself rather than in terms of responsibility for Lazarus. And the story tells us that he went to hell. The rich man’s life simply did not make sense in God’s world. The rich man never gave a reason in his life. The blessings which God had bestowed upon him and he went to hell.

And today, there is some reason for suggesting that if we do not make sense out of our lives, if we do not make some sense out of living in an economy of abundance, in a world of poverty, then we too shall know the meaning of hell within history as well as beyond. Why was I born as I was? Why am I the person I am well there simply is no reason except this God wanted me to be the person he made me and he put me by his providence in this particular place and my task this Thanksgiving Day is to see his purpose for my life in the light of his purpose for me and for all mankind in Jesus Christ. And unless I do this, the blessings for which I give thanks this Thanksgiving Day will continue to be an intolerable burden for the Christian conscience.

Well we’ve talked this morning about a great matter. The spirit of thanksgiving, our response to God’s goodness, and like all great matters, this lies beyond the power of our wills. We cannot compel the spirit of thanksgiving and gratitude, however much we may desire them. They come as God’s gift and as God’s grace and yet there are some things which we can do. We can remind ourselves this morning of the mystery and the wonder of human existence and we can remind ourselves of our incredible wealth in a world of poverty and we can try to see the mystery of life and the abundant blessings of life in the light of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and we can honestly face the questions which this light raises for our life. These things we can do, and if we do them, it is more likely that we shall be visited this day by the grace of God and we shall know the meaning of thanksgiving. Amen.