It’s an odd sort of thing we do this time of year.
I don’t mean odd in a bad way. It’s actually quite beautiful to set aside a day to spend with family “giving thanks” for all that God has given us. We all know that Abraham Lincoln signed Thanksgiving Day into existence as a national observance over a century and a half ago. We also know that the holiday itself has much deeper roots than that. Even on American soil, the holiday is over five centuries old, dating back to the classic feast celebrated by the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.
And it’s not like the Pilgrims made the idea up. God’s people have been sharing thanksgiving meals together since the dawn of written history. We’re all aware of the “animal sacrifices” of the Old Testament. In Christian theology, we usually speak of these sacrifices primarily in terms of the blood offerings which somehow foreshadow the work of Christ on the cross. This aspect of the sacrificial system is indeed important. But we often miss the equally important celebratory aspect of the offerings. Most of the required sacrifices commemorated some special act which God had done in the life of His people. All but a very few also involved a communal meal. The blood and fat of the animal was sacrificed, along with one hindquarter. The remainder of the animal was taken home by the celebrant and eaten together with family and friends, party style. When we read that Noah sacrificed on an altar after the flood, there was almost certainly a thanksgiving feast involved. Likewise with Abel, Abraham, Job, and Moses.
The impulse to give thanks is so primitive, in fact, that it’s really odd that we haven’t gotten better at it over time. Many families will gather, eat until they can’t move, plow through the Mall Mobs on Black Friday, and complain about bad calls in a myriad of football games without ever pausing to reflect on why we call the day thanksgiving to start with. Some of us will only be thankful when it’s over.
One day a year has been set aside for us as a nation to give thanks, and we struggle to meet that simplest requirement. We’re like gratitude camels, storing up our thank-yous all year long in hopes of remembering a few of them at the kick-off of the Holiday eating season.
By rights, there should be no Thanksgiving holiday. We should be thankful continually.
Maybe we should institute a National Day of Griping, instead. For 364 days out of every year we should be gloriously, exuberantly thankful. Then on the third Thursday in November, we could gather to voice all of the complaints we’ve been storing up all year. We could comment on how the Turkey is even drier than last year and how bad the crowds are at the mall. We could paste on dreary faces.
We could all become University of Kentucky football fans for the day.
Then, when it’s over, we could all return to our grateful, thanksgiving-filled lives, knowing that Christmas and basketball season are just around the corner.
Barring all of that, though, we should at least find within ourselves the grace to spend one day in joyful reflection for all of what God has done for us.
May your turkey be moist and your Thanksgiving Day truly blessed.
