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Thanksgiving

Deuteronomy 8
12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, 16and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. 17Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” 18But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.


Pollsters are worried. It seems that our friends who begin every sentence with “If the vote were held today…” are deeply worried about Thanksgiving. You see, rarely does the vote follow a family holiday in such close proximity. Rarely does the entire electorate adjourn from their regular lives and gather in family groupings: young and old, rural and urban, left and right.

Pollsters are worried such an electoral “mash-up” will skew all their hard work. According to conventional wisdom, opinions are getting close to set at this point in the race. Anyone tuning in now is simply trying to confirm the decision they have already made. Imagine the potent mixture of genuine family debate with a mixed demographic and a giant flightless bird.

So I began to wonder about the fairness of this meal. Is it fair that so much of the meal is green and orange? Do carrots and green beans amount to undue influence? Does the absence of tradition blue food hurt anyone’s chances on election day? And where is the red food, and will this party cry foul? (sorry)

My only advice for this interregional, intergenerational, intercultural melange is to ask questions. What do the others at the table have to teach you? What perspective do they bring to the task of voting? And how does the notion of thankfulness enter electoral politics?

***

Thanksgiving, I can say with some confidence, was an Israelite invention. Living so close to the land, living as they did with the endless cycles of seedtime and harvest, rain and drought, want and plenty, the Israelites paid particular attention to the need to give thanks. They developed layers of thanksgiving, finding different ways to express and convey a response to all of God’s gifts. One way was in verse:

You crown the year with your bounty;
your wagon tracks overflow with richness.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow,
the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.

The poet imagines that even the natural world turns to poetry to express thanks to the Maker of All. Valley and meadow, singing in a loud voice, express gratitude for the flock and the grain, for the opportunity to be the vessel of plenty, and the host of such gracious gifts. The song continues, of course, as we break bread and surround ourselves with others, knowing that hill and pasture will never be silent in the presence of the Living God.

***

Prose generally finds a voice after poetry, so it should not surprise that the Hebrew Bible has extended sections on the need to give thanks. In fact, fully one hundred of 613 traditional Jewish laws concern “sacrifice and offering.” And thankfulness, extended beyond sacrifice and offering, can be found throughout the canon of biblical law. We found it this morning in Deuteronomy 8:

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land…you shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.

Established in the land, the correct posture is to bless the Lord. The blessing, however, is always more than “thank you” and “let’s eat.” To bless the Lord is to remain ever mindful of the obligations that come with belonging to God:

Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.

It is never enough to simply give thanks, because thankfulness means keeping the Law and demonstrating a grateful response. Hence a hundred laws that govern the rituals of sacrifice and offering. It goes further: After the first forty or so laws that describe how to revere the Maker of All, the need for Torah, and the need for fellowship, there are another twenty that describe the need to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien. Immediately after the need to love your brother and sister give thanks for each meal is an entire set of laws dedicated to those on the very edge of society, those most vulnerable and in need of care. And this too is found in our reading for today:

12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery 15who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.

Remembering, in this sense, is an act of solidarity precisely because God once heard the cries of suffering of his people in Egypt and liberated them with an outstretched arm and power and brought them through the desert into a good land. As God remembered the Israelites in their time of suffering and need, so too must the Israelites remember the people in great need in their midst each day.

And while all of this is written on our spiritual DNA, and we can’t help but nod our heads at the idea of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It is interesting that these weeks of financial uncertainly have recalled so many stories of the past. Older people recalling a parent giving out a meal at the back door in the midst of the Great Depression, great public works projects and a grateful population desperate for work. Time and time again the storytellers say “I experienced generosity and therefore I must be generous too.”

There is, however, a further dimension to this discussion that goes beyond giving back because we received. It is found in the text, from the mouth of the God who knows us better than we know ourselves:

17Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” 18But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.

The greatest temptation in plenty is to thank ourselves before we thank God. The greatest temptation in plenty is to say “aren’t I clever” and forget that the Maker of All and the Source of All is truly the source of all that bounty. It is a great gift of self-control to stop yourself before you utter the words “my money” or “my power” and consider the real source of wealth and potential and power.

Related to this, and related to the past week that looms so large in our imaginations, is a wonderful quote from Walter Rauschenbusch. Writing during an economic crisis 101 years ago, he recorded these words, a quote from the wall of a prison: "The worst day of a man's life is the day he decides he can earn a day's wage without doing a day's worth of work." Don’t you want to take some sidewalk chalk and write it on Bay Street, Wall Street or the other streets I can’t even name?

"The worst day of a man's life is the day he decides he can earn a day's wage without doing a day's worth of work." Maybe we can call this our Thanksgiving motto for 2008. Giving thanks is not only acknowledging the gifts of God but also giving thanks for meaningful participation in these gifts. We give thanks for the harvest, but we also give thanks for meaningful work, and for the ability to be partners in all that bounty.

***

Peter Abelard, writing over 900 years ago, said that the very telling of the story of the cross of Jesus would change hearts. He said that as we hear the details of the story, and as we experience again and again the sacrifice and his willingness to lay down his life for us, we would be so overcome with thankfulness and praise that our hearts of stone would be transformed to hearts of flesh: hearts of flesh beating for God alone.

Abelard argued that thankfulness changes us, makes us whole, makes us more likely to live for God and others and less for ourselves. Abelard said that giving thanks would alter our very being, drawing us to God once more. In his version of atonement, we are released from bondage as the Israelites were: we are released from the bondage of self-love and self-importance to see the true meaning of gift: that Jesus would take to himself all the hurt and the sin and accept death so that we might be free, so that we might have new hearts, so that we can give thanks.

This is good news for us today, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 1:01 PM