The Forgotten Holiday
Have you noticed a disturbing trend in the retail industry the past few years? Walk through your local Mall and see if you don't agree. It seems that in the great rush to get to Christmas, the holiday of Thanksgiving is receiving short shrift. As soon as the Halloween decorations come down, the Christmas decorations go up, with scarcely a thought to that special day in between. With Christmas arriving earlier and earlier each passing year, Thanksgiving is quickly becoming the "forgotten holiday."
Now I have no doubt that economic factors largely account for this benign neglect of Thanksgiving. If the season of Thanksgiving were as long or as profitable as Christmas, retailers, I am certain, would be happy to oblige! What concerns me most about our current neglect of Thanksgiving, however, is a much deeper reality: the neglect of gratitude in our hearts, both as individuals and as a people. In an age of "rights" and crowded courtrooms, in a day of endless demands and pressures upon the workings of government, we hear precious little today of people being thankfuL Someone once said: "A gift regularly given soon becomes a demanded right." Grace, unfortunately, is like that We can take it for granted. We can come to expect it. We can even begin to think we deserve it.
Yet a spirit of gratitude lies at the heart of the Christian faith. First of all, a thankful spirit is the only response we can have to receiving something wholly undeserved. When all is said and done, Christianity consists of two things: an act of grace and a response of gratitude. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8). At the center of our faith stands a lonely cross, beckoning a grateful response. As Alexander Campbell put it many years ago in his famous Sermon on the Law: "When we view the Son of the Eternal suspended on the cursed tree--when we see Him in the garden, and hear His petition-when we hear Him exclaim, 'My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me - in a word, when we see Him expiring in blood, and laid in a tomb, we have a monument to the demerit of sin, which no law could give, which no temporal calamity could exhibit." In light of such unmerited favor, such undeserved grace, how can we not but give thanks?
Secondly, a thankful spirit is a characteristic of the Spirit filled life. Thanksgiving is not something we try to manufacture at a particular time of year. It comes naturally and effortlessly to those whose lives are filled with the Holy Spirit: "Do not get drunk with wine ... but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father" (Eph. 5:18-20). The Holy Spirit produces a thankful spirit.
Thirdly, a thankful spirit gives meaning to the central act of our worship. The Lord's Supper is called the "Eucharist" in some churches. We need to recapture that word because it is a very lovely word. It means "thanksgiving." When Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples, he "gave thanks" (ellcharisteo) for the bread, broke it, and gave it to them (Lk. 22: 19). If Jesus gave thanks for the bread, how much more should we! At its very core, the church is a eucharistic community, filled with an overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude.
At the close of one Thanksgiving service a minister asked the congregation to say what they were thankful for that year. Blessing after blessing poured forth from the lips of that tiny congregation as each one recounted some past experience. Finally, as time wore on and people began to run out of things to say, one astute little girl piped up, "I'm thankful that I'm thankfull" What a profoundly true theological statement. Thanksgiving my be the "forgotten holiday," but, as our Christian faith reminds us, we forget it at our peril. Pastor Paul Leavens