Liturgies of Thanksgiving

 

November 23, 2023 – Thanksgiving Day, Year A

Deuteronomy 8:7-18; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Luke 17:11-19

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Dear God, we thank you for the food that we will eat this day and the hands that have prepared it. We thank you for the farmers that tended the fields and cared for the flocks. We thank you for the laborers who harvested the produce and packaged it for transport. We thank you for the truck drivers who delivered it and the shelve stockers who made it available to us. We thank you for the cashiers who may or may not have helped us purchase it and the marketing teams who showed us where to shop for it. 

We thank you for the oil workers and power plant laborers who make it possible for those trucks to run and stores to stay open. We thank you for the road crews and first responders who make safe and efficient transportation possible. We thank you for the financial professionals and software engineers who enable us to use a debit card or a smartphone to move money from one account to another whenever we buy something.

We thank you for the support staff who helped us do our jobs and the managers who trained us for them. We thank you for the HR professionals who hired us and the teachers and professors who taught us. We thank you for the investment managers who safeguard our resources and the government officials who protect our markets. We thank you for the labor organizers and creative geniuses and venture capitalists and bond issuers who keep our economy going.

We thank you for every sacrifice that was made in order for us to feast on the bounty that will be on our tables today, and we pray that you would make us mindful of the innumerable multitude that has contributed to our celebration this Thanksgiving. Amen.

It takes a lot of work to make a Thanksgiving meal happen. How much are you responsible for? Moses has an answer.

“When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God…Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.”

When Moses spoke those words to the people of Israel, they were nearing the end of their journey through the wilderness from Egypt to the land of Canaan. The snakes and scorpions they had encountered in that arid wasteland were memories that had not yet begun to fade. Everyone who heard Moses’ voice had a story of struggle and triumph that they could tell. They all knew where they had been and that it was God alone who had brought them safely to that point. But Moses knew that it would not be long before the people forgot—before the stories of struggle lost some of their historical precision and became mere legendary tales of the ancestors passed down through their families.

“Remember the LORD your God, for it is God who gives you power to get wealth,” Moses urged the people. That’s easier said than done. That kind of remembering takes considerable effort, especially when our tables are full of food and those moments of hardship have passed beyond our personal experience. To remember the way that God invites us to—in a way that brings the covenant between us back to life—is more than a conscious recollection. It means to reembody something—to reconstitute in our lives a truth that is more than the stories we tell. But how can we make real for ourselves something that none of us remembers?

We use liturgies to help us with that. Some of our liturgies are formal and religious. Think of the truths we bring to life each time we gather for Holy Communion or Ash Wednesday, for a baptism or a funeral. Other liturgies are personal and familial. Think about how you open presents at Christmas or what you do to celebrate a birthday. Think about what you communicate to the members of your family when you fall almost effortlessly back into the pattern of doing things the way that they have been done for years and years. Our liturgies are what tie us to the past and help us reencounter that part of our story that we can’t afford to lose.

Thanksgiving is a holiday full of liturgy, and I don’t just mean what we do in church today. Think about the hand-shaped turkey you drew in grade school and how you learned from childhood to name the things for which you are thankful. Think about the way each member of the family is invited to say a word of gratitude before the Thanksgiving blessing is said. Think about the people whose recipes you will enjoy today—a great-grandmother’s cranberry relish or a housekeeper’s famous rolls. Allow your sense of gratitude to spring forth from the child within you and fill those lives that stretch back even to before you were born. 

The kind of thankfulness that we are invited into this day is normally controversial. On almost any other day of the year, it is a hard thing to convince someone that every ounce of their success has been a gift. Whether it’s the college we got into or the business loan we received or the real estate holdings that were passed down to us or the property taxes that funded our education, we did not get where we are by ourselves. We had help along the way. Many of us had a lot of help. And even that bit of progress that we scratched out through our own sweat and toil is still a gift of God. It is all a gift. And we depend upon rituals of thanksgiving to help us remember that.

Moses did not tell the people of God to remember where their success had come from because God is expecting a thank you note. Neither do we come to church this day because we think that God will bless those who say the Litany of Thanksgiving once a year. We come because we cannot have a relationship with the giver of all good gifts if we have forgotten where those gifts come from. We cannot turn to God for help if we have forgotten that it is God who has helped us in every generation. Today we rekindle the spirit of gratitude that binds us to the God whose blessings have no limit. May the remembrances we offer to God this day strengthen our faith and sustain us in times of plenty and in times of want.