They celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada on the same day we celebrate Columbus Day. I did not know that. This past Columbus Day I heard that the way we were supposed to commemorate Christopher Columbus discovering America was we were supposed to pick a house at random, and walk inside and say, “I declare this is my property.” It would probably be best if you chose a house where you knew they didn’t have a gun. That would be wise. I’ve heard that the problem that Native Americans had was they didn’t have a very good Office of Homeland Security. They didn’t have a very good immigration policy either. But I don’t like to make jokes about the pain suffered by people who were almost wiped out.
This coming Thursday, as we celebrate every year, the fourth Thursday of November, we will celebrate Thanksgiving. Now that wasn’t declared a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln’s time, but the first Thanksgiving was celebrated about 400 years ago. Native peoples helped the Pilgrims learn how to plant seeds and learn how to fish. Back then, as now, it was a celebration of the harvest, and so many of us will sit down to a feast on Thanksgiving Day. Turkey, or for vegans tofu turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, green bean casserole (so thank God for Campbell’s mushroom soup), stuffing, dressing, perhaps a pumpkin pie, if there is a God: pecan pie.
Comedian Jim Gaffigan makes jokes about pretty much all the holidays we celebrate. He says of Thanksgiving, “It’s like we didn’t even try. Let’s have a holiday where we overeat. Oh, we do that every day. Ok, let’s have a holiday where we overeat and invite people over who annoy us.” That’s probably not very nice. I like Thanksgiving. I like having people over who are loved ones and I enjoy all the food. My only problem with Thanksgiving is we only celebrate it once a year. I think we should celebrate Thanksgiving every day of the year. I think we should give thanks every day of the year, 365 days a year, not just one day.
Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic from hundreds of years ago says, “If the only prayer you ever pray is ‘Thank you,’ that will suffice.” I think the first step to saying thank you is awareness. I think awareness is the first step along just about every spiritual path. It’s the first step to forgiveness. It’s the first step for loving your neighbor and loving your enemy. But it’s definitely the first step to thanksgiving because you have to be aware of what you’re thankful for. You have to be aware of all your blessings.
One of the best known psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures about Thanksgiving is Psalm 100. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness. Come into His presence with singing.” Tradition holds that this was written by King David, who says to give thanks and praise to God. The only problem I have with the word Thanksgiving is it’s as if you’re saying thanks to someone or something – God. So it might leave atheists out of the picture. The word I like better is gratitude, because you can have a feeling of gratitude, gratefulness, an attitude of gratitude, without being thankful to a Supreme Being or somebody. We could all be grateful or have a feeling of gratitude.
I think one of the best expressions of gratitude, one of the best calls to worship that I’ve ever heard was written by Duncan Littlefair, a longtime minister at Fountain Street Church. In fact, it’s all around the walls of the narthex of Fountain Street Church: “This is indeed a day which the Lord has made. Let us then rejoice in it and be very glad, and let us count our many blessings. Let us be grateful for the capacity to see, feel, hear, and understand. Let us be grateful for the incredible gift of life. And let us be especially grateful for the ties of love, which bind us together, giving dignity, meaning, worth and joy to all our days.” I think you’d be hard pressed to come up with a better call to worship or invocation than that. I know; I’ve tried. It tells us what we should do, too, we should count our blessings because we do have the capacity to see, feel, hear and understand. We are blessed with the incredible gift of life and we are blessed with the ties of love that bind us together. We need to count our blessings sometimes; maybe every day.
When I was a kid I remember watching a cartoon about a Canadian Mountie (I seem to have a Canadian theme today), Dudley Dooright. Dudley Dooright’s nemesis was Snidely Whiplash. Snidley Whiplash would plot and plan some evil scheme every time, usually involving kidnapping Dudley Dooright’s girlfriend, Nell, and tying her to a railroad track. Then Dudley Dooright would come along and thwart Snidely Whiplash’s evil plan by rescuing Nell. Snidely Whiplash would say, “Curses, foiled again!” Maybe a curse is the opposite of a blessing. But sometimes what seems like a curse can turn out to be a blessing.
Some of you may know my first church when I graduated from seminary was this little church in this little town about a half hour northeast of Grand Rapids, called Belding. When I took the call to that church, my daughter was in the ninth grade and I thought: this will be perfect; I’ll stay in this church for four years until she graduates from high school and then she’ll go off to college and I’ll go someplace else, if I need to. That was my plan. Their plan was to get rid of me after a year and three days. At the time I was devastated. I thought it was a curse. I thought, what am I going to do? Then I thought about the Sunday School class I’d taught, a Bible study, and I remembered one Sunday we read the story in the first chapter of Genesis, the creation story about how God created the heavens and the earth in six days. When we were done reading that I said something about how of course this isn’t a scientific textbook, this is a poetic way of describing the beginning of time, but scientists tell us about the Big Bang theory and Evolution. The moderator of that church, who was in the class, the highest ranking person in the church, like the president of this church, said, “Well I believe in creationism; I don’t believe in evolution.” [Noise of disbelief]
So maybe it wasn’t a curse that they fired me after three days, maybe it was a blessing, because if they hadn’t and I’d been there four years I was afraid that I’d be a Stepford pastor or something; I’d be a dead spiritual man walking. I’d be preaching sermons about “I don’t believe in evolution; I believe in creationism, that the earth was built in six days.”
Labor Day weekend was my last weekend there. I knew they were going to fire me the day after Labor Day. So Labor Day, when I still thought this was a curse, I was worried, what am I going to do? Now for whatever reason, Labor Day is a big deal in Belding. They hold a big parade – marching bands, floats, police cars, fire trucks, the whole works. I’m standing along the parade route going, “God, show me a sign! I’m going to lose my first church, this little church in this little town. Show me a sign!” Just then a fire truck went by. On the back of the fire truck were the initials: BFD. [Laughter] Now of course that stands for Belding Fire Department, but some of you seem to realize that in my mind it stood for something else. As I was asking God for a sign, there were the initials BFD, “Big Freakin’ Deal. You’re going to lose this little church in this little town, don’t worry about it.” I looked up to heaven and I said, “Thank you!” Now I don’t know if it was a providential thing or a coincidental thing, but it was a blessing for me. Sometimes what seems like a curse turns out to be a blessing.
Rick Warren is the pastor of a mega-church out in California. I read something about him once where he said he can’t tell if a song is Christian until he hears the words. I thought, really? Didn’t Bach write all kinds of Christian music that didn’t have any words? And Beethoven and Mozart? It seems to me that the most joyful songs of praise and thanksgiving to God or whatever that I’ve heard, I hear outside my window in the spring, birds singing. Now I don’t know what they’re saying, but it seems to me they’re saying thank you. They’re expressing gratitude. Now scientists would probably say they’re saying something else, to each other, but I prefer to think they’re expressing gratitude. And it’s beautiful.
Now I myself love music. I think many of you know that. I can’t hardly carry a tune and I can’t really play an instrument, except maybe a Davy Jones tambourine or something like that, but I like music; I like to sing. So every day, or almost every day, I do sing. I sing a song of thanksgiving and praise and gratitude. [Singing] “Oh, what a beautiful morning! Oh, what a beautiful day!” It drives my wife crazy, because sometimes I’ll sing that at night when it’s raining. She doesn’t understand that. My grandsons say, “Opa, it’s raining out,” or “It’s evening, not morning!” But that’s not the point. The point is expressing gratitude, expressing thankfulness, and I think we all need to do that as often as we can.
Now I’m not naïve. I know that not everything is something that we should give thanks for. I know that there are wars and rumors of wars; I know people have sickness and disease. I know people die. Obviously we’re not thankful for that. But it’s because of those calamities and tragedies in life that I think that when we do see something we’re thankful for that we should hold onto that, we should cling to that, that we should give thanks for that, that we should have a feeling of gratitude for that, because we know we have joys and concerns, but when we do encounter those joys, let’s be grateful.
What is it you’re thankful for? What blessings do you have? What expressions of gratitude do you make? I hope you’re thankful for life. I hope you’re thankful for love, for loved ones. I hope you’re thankful for the clothes on your back, a roof over your head. I hope you’re thankful for the earth that we walk on. I hope you give thanks as often as you can. I hope you don’t wait until the fourth Thursday of November to give thanks, but that you give thanks every day, or at least almost every day, that you find something in your life that you’re thankful for and you either say it within yourself or you speak it or maybe even sing it. That you’re thankful, that you’re grateful, that you appreciate life.
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