Thursday Theology: A Timely Reason for Thanksgiving

Co-missioners,

Today we send along—what else?—a Thanksgiving Day reflection. It was first thought out eleven years ago when Barack Obama was president of the United States. Its pertinence to the waning weeks of 2024 is eerily obvious, we think. God grant that this particular angle on the promises we have in Christ will cheer your hearts and spur your thanks.

Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community

______________________________________________________________

A Thanksgiving Day Reflection

by Jerome Burce

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.

I want briefly to pass along something that cuts to the heart of why you and I have every reason to spend this day in high thanksgiving, with God Almighty as the One we thank and praise.

It’s why you and I can take Christ our Lord seriously when, for example, he tells us in one of the standard readings for Thanksgiving Day not to worry about tomorrow (Matt. 6:34).

Then there’s Psalm 100. It’s easily one of the shorter psalms. It’s also another standard reading for a Thanksgiving Day observation. Here’s how it goes:

.indented { margin-left: 50px; }

Let’s think about this.

“Worship the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with [Thanksgiving].” In the day and year a Psalmist first sang this, these were astonishing words. They still are. Not that people notice.

Worship the Lord with gladness. The key to the astonishment lies in the opening word, “worship.” In the day the Psalmist used it, it meant something different than it means for us now. You could say we’ve been too spoiled by what God with that word in and through Christ Jesus.

In the Psalmist’s day worship was an attitude. Not a mental attitude. Not an attitude of the spirit. Worship then was far more down to earth. The word described a physical attitude, a position of the body.

Worship was the way a lesser person, a no-name creature, displayed her subservience to a greater person. It’s how a petty king announced his complete dependence on a high and mighty king, the one who ruled the armies that ruled the world.

Worship was this person stretched out on the ground, his face in the dirt, not daring for a moment to raise his head, and still less to look the high and mighty one in the eye.

Worship was this person lying helpless and exposed to the mighty one’s whim. It was a fearful thing to undertake. You could never know what mood the mighty one was in. Could be he’d send another servant to raise you up. Could be, on the other hand, that he’d send that servant to step on you—or to lop off your head. Who could say what he might do?

The kings of ancient Persia demanded worship from their subjects. They expected it from their queens. The drama in the book of Esther turns on the question of whether Queen Esther will live or die when she dares to enter the king’s presence uninvited. In ancient Persia nobody came into the king’s presence with a song on their lips, and they didn’t worship the king with gladness. Instead they shivered with anxiety and fear. In the imperial courts of ancient China they would rap their foreheads on the ground as they shivered. The word for that was “kowtow.” It meant “knock head.”

So here’s the first and best of reasons for high thanksgiving on this great Thanksgiving Day. The Lord is God, and the Chinese emperor is not. The Lord abhors kowtowing. He has made us, the Psalmist sings, and we are his. Knocking head is not the activity he made us for. It’s not the attitude he requires of us.

Quite the contrary. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all you lands.” “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise.” In other words, it pleases the Lord no end to see his people on their feet, not on their bellies; and if bellies are used instead for the joyful noise of gentle patting when feasts are done today, the Lord will be delighted.

“We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” The Lord likes his people happy, and his sheep fat, a credit to his pasture. To find us otherwise is embarrassing to him. This is what his Psalmist implies. The Lord invites us to hear this, and better still, to believe it.

He wants our children to take it for granted that “his steadfast love endures forever.” He wants our grandchildren to understand that his faithfulness extends “to all generations.” (Now there is something to talk about around today’s Thanksgiving table.)

Four hundred years ago a little band of displaced English Calvinists decided to worship the God we have in Jesus Christ by packing their families into a tiny ship for a trip across the vast Atlantic Ocean. What lay on the other side, they did not know. They opted nonetheless to count on God’s mercy, and to rely on his care. They trusted the Lord, in other words. Trusting the Lord is the true worship, the kind that pleases God. It’s the worship God seeks.

Other rulers take pleasure in the sounds of high anxiety. That’s what the fear-filled groveling in ancient courts was finally all about. Bullies of every kind crave it in our own day. Some of them wear expensive suits and ride in limousines. Others stalk the streets, spraying bullets now and then to stir the fear they feed on.

The greatest bully of them all in this and every age tempts you to add your voice to a mounting chorus that wails loudly about the future. You can hear that lament most any day when you turn on the radio. It blares from the TV. The movies scream with it. So does the internet. “The world we know is headed for ruin, and after that perdition”—that’s what the voices keep saying. “The world will reach its ruin more quickly unless you hand the reins to us and give us our way”—the voices say that too. Now they say it from the left, now from the right. The surface aim is to ratchet up anxiety. The deeper goal is to get you prostrate on the ground with a tyrant’s foot on your neck—their own tyrant, if they can get away it.

I repeat: the Lord God did not design you to lie in that position.

In the Lord’s design your eyes are bright, your back is straight, your shoulders squared. When old age or injury ruin this design, the Lord points even then, especially then, to that baptized inner being, his new creation, the one wrapped even now in God’s promises of feasts and joyful noises in the banquet halls of the age to come.

Stand tall, God says. Don’t grovel to anyone. Don’t fret about your future. And he says this first and foremost in the person of his Son, our Savior Christ.

Notice once again how Jesus invites you to adopt his attitude; to share his Spirit; and on his account to recognize yourselves and each other as the daughters and sons of the most high God, dear to God beyond all understanding.

And you should worry, Jesus asks, about what you will eat and what you will wear and what your future might hold? As if God is nothing more than a souped-up version of Xerxes the despot, and not the One who raised me from the dead so I can do the same for you?

Enough already, Jesus says. Relax. Enjoy yourselves. Today eat turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce. Don’t forget the pumpkin pie. As for tomorrow, it rests in God’s good and gracious and promising hands.

Let’s aim to take that for granted when tomorrow arrives. And in this trust that the Lord is good, let’s worship him with joy through Jesus Christ our Lord.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.