Remembering Thanks

What a wonderful time of year this is. We are at the threshold of a beautiful season, beginning with our thanks and transitioning into a time of gift-giving, all wrapped up in the celebration and warmth of friends and family. This is truly a blessed time. As we gather together to worship as a community of faith, I hope that we can take this opportunity to recognize that we have much to be thankful for. We have much to rejoice about, much that we can offer up to the Glory of God. But I must confess that although this season is new for 2006, it is also cyclical and repetitious in our lives, happening again and again and again with each new year. And that very cycle and repetition concerns me. It concerns me because like anything we do over and over again, it is easy to fall prey to that cliché phrase: “Going through the motions.” It is so easy to forget the profound meaning of Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas, that we often do not realize we have forgotten it. We simply do those things we have always done. So this evening I hope we can reflect upon the meaning of giving thanks, what it means for us as Christians who enter into this most glorious Thanksgiving holiday.

Thanksgiving does not mean football, although that particular religion does have a significant role in the holiday festivities for many families. Yes, I did say the religion of football, because it does have elements of religious worship and ritual which have become an influential part of our current society and culture. But as we, in our Christian tradition, interpret Thanksgiving, let us not think that the Bears, the Cowboys, or the Lions occupy the central meaning. Your Thanksgivings might easily be soured if your whole understanding is centered on football, because your team might easily lose. Thanksgiving is built upon the notion of Thanks, of offering up our Thanks, of celebrating in Thanks. So what is this thing we call thanks?

The definition of Thanks you might find in your dictionary--had you brought it tonight--would read something like this: Thanks: gratitude, recognition of responsibility. If we trace back the meaning of the word thanks in its history of use we will discover that “think” and “thank” share the same origin in Latin, stemming from the verb “to know.” As a result, “thank” gets developed throughout the history of Germanic and English language as a certain type of knowledge. In Old English, “thanc” is related to thought. Thus, the meaning of thanks, as we use it now, becomes clearer when we notice that the term is a type of thought, particularly a grateful one. Our definition mentioned gratitude, but it also mentioned recognition of responsibility; the deliberate thinking about who or what brought about our gratitude.

And gratitude needs to be further understood as well. Gratitude is a positive emotion of indebtedness. Often this emotion seeks to be satisfied with a return favor because it is so overwhelming. So when we put it all together, when we understand Thanks in light of gratitude and knowledge, we see that Thanks is a thought demonstrating indebtedness.

If you would turn in your bibles to Psalms 100: 4-5, I believe we will see a very famous example of how the Psalmist understood giving thanks.

Our Psalmist specifically recognized God as Good, Loving and Faithful. In using the term thanksgiving, the psalmist directs us toward an indebtedness that we should have to God's Goodness, Faithfulness, and Love. Why is God Good, Faithful, and Loving? The entirety of Psalm 100 praises God for being the source of life and for taking care of God's people. God has taken care of God's people through the redemption of our transgressions. In this, God has brought us hope. But what's more, God has provided us with the beauty of being in fellowship with the Almighty One.

So here we come to understand the way we use the term Thanks, what it means for us to give God thanks. But there is more to this holiday, for it has a historical origin. Every year in
November school children are taught about the first Thanksgiving. In this event the children of our nation are given the beautiful story of a peaceful feast between the newly arrived Pilgrims and the local native population of Wampanoag “Indians.” The Thanksgiving feast celebrated the gratitude of the Pilgrims toward their friendly Wampanoag neighbors. These Native Americans had not only been kind, but generously aided the Pilgrims by teaching productive farming techniques to the European new-comers. The welcoming relationship that was fostered and the food-stocks that were harvested were worth celebrating and feasting. Thanksgiving became an event to remember and enjoy the bounty of life's blessings by partaking in the blessing of sustenance in company and fellowship. The thanks that were offered positively “remembered” and rejoiced over the gift of friendship and survival. Now, many years removed from this historical event, we continue to offer our thanks, our remembrance, our joy. This is a day of feasting and celebration, often in new and unique ways which bring to the fore of our mind the provisions we have richly received. We give God thanks for being Good, Faithful, and Loving to us, God's indebted people.

There is a final aspect to thanks that is intimately related to the word's origin and use in terms of thought. In a sense, to give thanks is to remember. If there is an absence of thought, then there cannot be thanks. We cannot forget when we give thanks, for thanks requires the thoughtful confession of past fortune to appreciate present circumstances.

What good, then, is it to forget? I am sure many of you are better at forgetting than others. Some of you may have even forgotten that you forget. Now regardless of age or heredity, even the those of us who remember “everything” have difficulty remembering when we don't stop to contemplate and reflect upon the past. We have difficulty giving thanks for those things we appreciate when we forget why it is that these things are so valuable. Thanksgiving Day cannot be a day in which we forget the past circumstances which have led us to our present situation. For the bountiful richness of life we now enjoy is a direct result of our past fortunes. But it is not only a result of our past fortunes, it is also a result of our past mis-fortunes. The bounty of Thanksgiving resides in the realization that we have made our past mistakes and circumstances presently, positively meaningful through a God that is Good, Faithful, and Loving.

The idea of remembrance is a profound notion within the history of our Faith. It stretches back to the Israelites many thousands of years ago. But remembrance was also embraced by another religious tradition which traces its origin back to the Israelites. Within Islamic Theology, the idea of dhikr is both central and important to Muslim Faith. Dhikr is divine remembrance. For Muslims, one of the gravest sins is to forget God, Allah. Thus, there is a special place for Remembrance within Islamic Theology which places emphasis upon not forgetting Allah and Allah's divine goodness.

This understanding and focus upon Remembrance is central to our scripture passage this morning.

Turn with me to the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 4.

Deuteronomy 4: 23

In this passage we are brought back to Moses' teachings about Idolatry. As the second of the 10 commandments, Idolatry is considered a terrible, grievous sin toward Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But let's not dive into the idea of idolatry as much as recognize an important phrase used here in our text. The words, “take care, lest you forget” is a formula to designate importance. In an oral culture where words could not be recounted unless they were remembered, the memory served an important religious function. The memory provided the slate for recording the acts of God and God's commands in the life of the common Israelite. Thus, in order to keep the Law of God, one had to first remember and then do the Will of God. Simply forgetting the Law of God was a passive rejection of God with grave consequences.
Flip a page or so to Deuteronomy 6:10, reading through verse 12.

Once again we find the all-important phrase “take care, lest you forget.” But in this passage we find that Remembrance is directly linked to the blessing of the promised land. The Israelites are instructed to remember, to not forget, the God who removed them from slavery and delivered them into the bountiful riches of a promised land where they could live and worship. To uphold this remembrance, the Israelites celebrated Pesach, or Passover, to commemorate this very liberation from slavery in the land of Egypt.

This notion of remembrance should inform us in our celebration of Thanksgiving. Like the Passover, Thanksgiving should be a time of remembrance and worship. We should give God our thoughts of gratitude for being Good, Faithful, and Loving. We should recognize our indebtedness by acknowledging that it is God who alleviates our insufficiency. But notice this, if we do not remember our insufficiency, if we do not recognize that we are in debt, then we cannot be grateful, and we cannot give thanks. In our scripture passage, the Israelites were told to remember the God who delivered them from slavery, who brought them out of the evil that surrounded them. God gave their suffering new meaning by redeeming them into fellowship with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in a land flowing with Milk and Honey.

We too, cannot forget our indebtedness. We cannot forget the fact that we have been plagued by sin. We also, cannot forget that we have suffered and been surrounded by evil. Each of us here has a story of sin, the evil you are responsible for, and a story of suffering, the evil you are not responsible for. God is Good, Faithful, and Loving because God has brought meaning and hope to both of those stories. God has redeemed your sin and offered you hope and meaning in your circumstances. There is not one thing that we should not give to God in thanks. Like the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans, let us offer up to God our Thanks for the abundance of God's blessing in Goodness, Faith, and Love. We can give thanks to God for our nation, which provides a national holiday where we can reflect and remember the past. But let us not forget.

Before we close, I want to leave you with the often untold story of the Wampanoag. These Native Americans occupied a place among the estimated 40 million indigenous people of America. Despite the beauty and joy of the first Thanksgiving event, over the course of the next hundred years or so, by 1650, there were less than 10 million Natives. This was the direct result of disease on the one hand, but also a systematic slaughtering on the other. The destruction of more than 30 million people resulted from a genocidal sin that saturated the origin of our nation. We tread their blood beneath our feet. This is an equally important thing to remember as we celebrate Thanksgiving. For Thanksgiving marks a special day to celebrate the peculiar and uncommon friendly fellowship between Native and European. But it is not a day to overlook and forget the brutality and malice of our nation's history. We must give thanks because we have been redeemed despite our present sinfulness, and our past history of sin and evil. We are an unclean people of an unclean nation who need the cleansing forgiveness of a Good, Faithful, and Loving God. Let us not forget our past, our debts, our sin and our suffering. These things are equally important to acknowledge so that we might embrace our redemption by a loving and gracious God. A God who, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, gives us new hope and meaning.

So this Thanksgiving, as you celebrate with family and friends, “take care, lest you forget.” Take time to remember the truth of a Good, Faithful, and Loving God who is worthy of our gratitude. Give thanks to God, our Glorious redeemer.