2021 11 24 Sermon

Sermon for November 24, 2021 Thanksgiving Eve House of Prayer Lutheran Church

Joel 2:21-27; Psalm 67; Matthew 6:25-33 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone

The earliest method of worship described in the Bible is of people building an altar and making an offering to God by sacrificing some of their best grain or livestock. They did this not to persuade God to bless them, but to express their thanksgiving to God because God had already blessed them. This is the essence of worship—to say “Thank You” to God. In Christian worship, one of the words that we even use to describe Holy Communion is “the Eucharist”, which derives from a Greek word meaning “Thanksgiving”.

As Americans, we have a special place in our hearts for our own Thanksgiving holiday, which became a national holiday in 1863 with President Lincoln’s “Thanksgiving Proclamation”. He acted at the encouragement of Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor, who had been making this request of whoever happened to be President for 15 years! It was Lincoln who finally saw the wisdom in it. In a country torn by civil war and traumatized by hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, not to mention countless widows and orphans, what better way to promote unity and community then by asking every man, woman, and child to turn to God by finding something to be thankful for, and celebrating with a big feast?

I think it’s noteworthy that our national Thanksgiving holiday was born out of a time of such hardship. The writer of Lincoln’s Proclamation was actually his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. It’s a brilliant and honest description of the highs and lows of a nation in turmoil, and it seeks to rally the prayers and assistance of people of goodwill in healing the wounds of a nation.

What we now call the “First Thanksgiving” also grew out of a time of hardship. [https://plimoth.org/for-students/homework-help] Of 103 Pilgrims who settled at the place they named “Plimoth”, only 52 lived through the first winter. As so many were dying, they still had to learn a new way of life since most had no prior experience with farming, which was now essential to their survival. The native Wampanoag people shared their ancient knowledge about how to grow crops in an environment very different from England. Yet the Wampanoag themselves were living through an incredibly traumatizing time, as well. Between 50 – 90% of their population of 40,000 people, living in 67 villages, had died over the previous 5 years from a devastating plague, for which they had no immunity. There is no direct evidence of what caused the plague, but it may have been leptospirosis, which would have been spread by rats who had come ashore from the ships of European traders. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957993/]

The situation of 1621 may have been unique, but a big thanksgiving feast—this time celebrated by 52 Pilgrims along with 90 Wampanoag men—was an old custom native to both cultures. From antiquity the English celebrated a festival known as “Harvest Home”, while Wampanoag celebrations included a “Strawberry Thanksgiving” and a “Green Corn Thanksgiving”.

What all of these notable Thanksgiving feasts had in common was something that Adam Hamilton pointed out in his book The Walk: Five Essential Practices of the Christian Life (p.32): “We’re not called to give thanks because everything in our lives is going wonderfully,” he writes. “We’re called to give thanks because our life itself is a wonderful gift from God. When we pause to recognize this and to give thanks, we find that our hearts are uplifted. Gratitude reorients us toward happiness, taking our eyes off of our complaints and focusing instead on the blessings we have received.”

This message resonates from 1621 to 1863 to 2021. Like the Wampanoag, today we are in the midst of a plague from a disease for which we have no natural immunity. Like the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, many of us know sorrow and grief from losing friends, relatives, or neighbors. Like the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, we’ve needed to learn and adapt during this time of hardship. In the case of the Pilgrims it was to adapt to a different climate and unfamiliar surroundings as compared to England. For the Wampanoag, their surroundings were the same as they had always known but had been emptied of vitality by so much death and suffering because of the plague. And like the United States during the Civil War, today we too live in a time of polarization, where many feel a woundedness within our nation, and the need for healing even close to home. Two years ago, how many of us would have pegged Waukesha or Kenosha as places that would have been through so much trouble?

Many may long for renewal along the lines of the Proclamation of 1863: That (in the words written by Henry Seward) we receive “the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” And that “while offering up the ascriptions justly due to [Almighty God] for such…blessings,” that we also “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.” [http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm]

For us today, as it did the past, the healing begins with giving thanks: to turn to the God who has given each of us the miracle we call life. This God is worthy of worship, thanksgiving, and praise. Not only that, but our own souls need to worship—to reach up beyond ourselves, and our own narrow perspectives, to our Creator whose perspective is truly universal, and who gives us life; and not only us but (as the prophet Joel put it), who gives life to the soil, to the animals, to the pastures and wilderness, to the trees and the vines. Reaching up to our Creator in faith then compels us to reach over to our neighbor, and to recognize that we each have a responsibility to a community that is bigger than ourselves. We may not agree with one another about everything, and we may even have different perceptions about reality. But we still share a common humanity, and when we reach over to a neighbor in faith, we have no choice but to see how that person has been created in the image of God. We share one Heavenly Father.

As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, your Heavenly Father already knows everything you need. Spend less time worrying, and more time striving for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness—which is healing for the broken, compassion for the anxious, mercy for the sinner, comfort for the grieving, and love for neighbors and enemies alike.

Life is made of more than what you eat, drink, or wear. Life is about how we treat one another. It’s about cultivating a spirit of cooperation and community that tries to leave things better than we inherited them. It’s about learning to grieve our losses—and we’ve all had lots of different losses these past 18 months—so that that we make enough room in our souls for the grace of God to fill us with what we truly need. Life is about taking time to celebrate and feast together and enjoy the blessings God has given. And it’s about giving thanks to God, who sent his Son to die and rise again, so the blessing of hope would continue to be born within us. Amen.