Thanksgiving--A Spirit To Keep

"the Lord Has Done Great Things for Us, Whereof We Are Glad." Ps 126:3

Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, that great Methodist preacher and writer, tells how he once stayed at a farmhouse and was served a delicious meal: grilled trout and all the lavish extras that a farm can provide. After the meal he thanked his host warmly. She seemed a bit embarrassed and took a sly look at her husband as she remarked, " My husband never says things like that!" Dr. Weatherhead was even more embarrassed; but not so his host who rubbed his nose and said to his wife: "Aye, luv; but I'd soon tell yer if I didn't like yer cookin."

Sir Winston Churchill used to relate the story of the sailor who dived into Plymouth Sound to rescue a boy near drowning. Later that day the boy was walking in town with his mother when they passed the gallant sailor. The lad nudged mum and said: "That was the sailor who saved my life." Mother walked up to the sailor and asked abruptly: "Are you the sailor who rescued my boy this morning?" "Yes, Ma'am," replied the sailor modestly. With mounting indignation, mother then demanded: "Where's his cap?"

We are an ungrateful lot, on the whole.

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude.... Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot: Though thou the waters warp, Thy sting is not so sharp As friend remember'd not."

Just as bad is gratitude that is not genuine--the cursory, perfunctory words of appreciation that mean nothing and cost nothing. So Wordsworth lamented:

"I've heard of hearts unkind, Kind deeds with coldness still returning. Alas, the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning."

Ingratitude, and insincere token gratitude, is shameful enough in human relationships; but ingratitude or mere token gratitude to God, to whom we owe our very existence in this incredible world, with new life and hope reaching out to us through Christ, this is the ultimate shame.

Thanksgiving is a marvelous American tradition, a time when a whole nation stops in its tracks and is reminded of the everyday blessings of seed time. and harvest, food and drink, safety and freedom, home and loved ones. The habitual grumblers stop their complaints, at least for a few days, and learn to say the simple words they had almost forgotten--"Thank You"--not just to their fellows, but above all to God the bountiful Giver of all things. At least, that is the idea, the intention behind Thanksgiving. But the danger is that the celebration itself can obscure the One whose love and mercy we are called to celebrate; over indulgence in turkey and pumpkin pie and all that goes with them can make us less, rather than more, capable of real thanksgiving. A celebrative party is OK but there are parties and parties! Genuine gratitude can be suffocated in gluttony.

But gluttony is only the symbol of a greater abuse of Thanksgiving: when celebration becomes self-congratulation. Arnold Toynbee has accused the Western world of the sin of Titanism. The Titans, you may recall, were the sons of Uranus in Greek mythology, who rebelled and tried to rule the world till they were deposed by Zeus, king of heaven and cast into the depths below Tartarus. Modem Titans' says Toynbee, assume that the world owes them a living. They are a new breed: arrogant, aggressive, grasping. Intoxicated with their own dazzling technology, even the sky for them is no limit. Luxuries become necessities and the cargo cult of materialism is paraded through the pages of glossy magazines. No one is immune from Titanism--the very antithesis of thanksgiving. We are in danger of raising a new generation of children who are losing the capacity to wonder. No longer wide-eyed, they work their pocket calculators, play their computer games and know so much more than their parents about everything.

The urgent calls for us to recover the true spirit of humble Thanksgiving, not only as an annual holiday celebration, but as a basic attitude to life at all times. That spirit inspired those first settlers in a strange new land to lift up their hearts to their Creator and to Christ their hope of salvation. This is the spirit that pervades the Bible from the days when Noah, after the flood, saw the first rainbow as a symbol of God's covenant of grace with a world He would no longer destroy. The spirit of thanksgiving gave the people of Israel a perpetual sense of gratitude to the God who had delivered them from slavery and led them to their Promised Land. The same spirit inspired the Psalmists, even out of suffering, to lift their hearts in gratitude and declare: "The Lord has done great things for us, whereof we are glad." Thanksgiving recalls every Christian to lift up heart and soul and voice to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than we could ever ask or think.

How then can we truly enter into the spirit of thanksgiving, not only for a family celebration once a year, but for LIFE?

1) First we must recognize that genuine thanksgiving comes from an acceptance of GRACE BEFORE GREED. Humans can be divided roughly into two types:

The Gracious and the Greedy--though I suspect there is something of both in most of us. The greedy are not necessarily over-consumers of food, but of all the good things of life they can grasp . They are rather like that libelous description of the Scotsman who "keeps the Sabbath and anything else he can lay his hands on!" The Gracious, on the other hand, meet life with great humility, with a sense of awe and wonder at the miracle of being alive in this amazing world, concerned to return an enormous debt of gratitude. "I asked of life: what have you to offer? The answer came: what have you to give?"

Sir Christopher Wren, in his old age, would sometimes return to the great cathedral of St. Paul's that his genius had created. He would sit there under the vast dome, not bloated with pride, greedy for more glory, but humbly and reverently. He would gaze up at the immense arch of stone, with a prayer on his lips: "If I glory, it is in the singular mercy of God who has enabled me to begin and finish a great work." Such is the spirit of all who have achieved true greatness in any field of human creativity. They have been overwhelmed with the conviction that their achievement was not so much theirs as given to them from beyond. "From above it has come!" cried Joseph Haydn after hearing a performance of his oratorio 'The Creation,' "From above it has come!"

To live thus is to live by grace rather than by greed, recognizing total dependence on the Power through whom this mysterious universe is not only created and wound up like a dock, but sustained moment by moment. To live and eventually to die--by the grace of God is to keep the spirit of thanksgiving, to be released from the strain of the rat race, to keep wide-eyed with wonder at the miracle of being alive. The spirit of thanksgiving helps us to be gracious to our neighbors and to see them, not as threats but as fellow-pilgrims, in a precarious existence in which we are all equally vulnerable and equally dependent on the grace of God who reaches out through Christ to meet all our needs.

2) Secondly, true Thanksgiving springs from a sense of DETACHMENT and STEWARDSHIP rather than of POSSESSION.

Behind most human problems is a desire to possess, to claim this piece of land, these mineral resources, this property, this inheritance, these profits, this person, these people. The cry goes up: these are mine, mine, mine! But the spirit of detachment means that while we give thanks for the material blessings of life, we do not let the things we possess master and manipulate us. We know that our possession is only a leasehold not a freehold. When people waken to this sense of detachment and stewardship they can no longer say, "This is my land, my money, my property, my life, for they know a deeper truth: in the final reckoning this is God's earth, God's world. My life is not my own to do with it as I please, still less do I own anyone else. My life is lent to me, it is God's gift for which I am responsible to my Creator and to my Lord. So it was no figure of speech that led Paul to cry: "I live--yet not I--Christ lives in me." He meant it and he lived it!

It follows that the annual call to members of this church, to give sacrificially for its work and witness, is not like any of the other appeals that beset us from countless good causes. Our gift is not simply a gift to our church, but also to God. Here we are constantly reminded that all we possess is held in trust as we respond to God's unspeakable gift to us in Jesus Christ. Such giving is also necessary for our spiritual growth. There is a need for the giver to give.

For many people, the worst thing that could happen to them is that their "standard of living" should fall. But what do they mean? I fear, not so much that the real spiritual quality of their life should deteriorate but whether they can keep three cars in the garage and a TV in every room and their diary filled with a giddy round of social engagements. Such people could not begin to make sense of the comment that we are happy "in proportion to the things we can do without." Henry Thoreau called possessions "leg-irons." "Beware," he said, "of all enterprises that require new clothes. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only dispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." A bit severe and puritanical, you might say, but certainly in the spirit of that famous unwritten saying of Jesus: "The world is a bridge. The wise man will pass over it, but will not build his house upon it." Or as an old prayer goes; "Help us, 0 Lord, so to live in this life that in your perfect time, we may be ready to leave it." That is the true spirit of detachment, rather than of possession, for here we have "no continuing city."

So far in our quest for a Spirit of Thanksgiving to retain for more than an annual feast day we have discovered the need to cultivate grace rather than greed and detachment rather than possession.

3) Thirdly, RESPONSIBILITIES SHOULD TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER RIGHTS. Never before in the history of the world have we heard so many voices clamoring for their rights: human rights, women's rights, rights of racial minorities, children's rights, workers rights, voters' rights, rights of senior citizens, rights of developing countries. All this is to be applauded. We need the Bill of Rights, for too often in the past, rights have been tramped on. The Christian has a duty to denounce racism, injustice, physical and mental enslavements and to uphold human dignity everywhere on earth.

But the other side of the coin of rights is responsibility. "Liberty means responsibility," said Bernard Shaw, "that is why most people dread it." A demonstrator, blocking the approach to Sydney Airport some time ago, told an angry motorist: "We're exercising our rights, mate." But does anyone have a right to obstruct the rights of other citizens? If everyone does their own thing the result is total chaos.

Solon, the great lawgiver of Athens, encouraged citizens to hold protest meetings, not for the sake of trumpeting their own causes, but to rouse themselves to a fever pitch of indignation because of injustices done to others: "Those who are uninjured by a crime must be trained to feel as much indignation at it as those who are injured." I would question the possibility of holding a well attended meeting of workers called to champion the rights of management or of managers convened to champion the rights of workers! We should applaud the charter of the United Nations reaffirming fundamental human rights; but if those rights are to be realized, it will mean that many in this mixed up world may have to reappraise what they consider to be their rights if the rights of others less fortunate are to find expression in a free world. If I am truly grateful for the privileges I enjoy, then I am obliged to help others to share that privilege too. So if we are to discover and capture the true spirit of thanksgiving we cannot celebrate alone. We are part of the whole and we have an obligation to see that others are in a position to give also, that they too might come to say: "The Lord has done great things for us too, whereof we are glad."

We have been trying to find the secret of perpetual thanksgiving rather than a sporadic festival once a year--wonderful as Thanksgiving time is. We have seen the need to cultivate a sense of the grace of God to replace the greed that is such a universal enemy of real gratitude. We have discussed an attitude of detachment that replaces the craving to possess, an attitude that refuses to be enslaved by the lure of material possessions and finds thankful enjoyment in the miracle of life itself; we have thought about putting our responsibilities higher on our priorities than our rights, so that we are more sensitive to the rights of others and again foster true thanksgiving as a shared and universal experience.

4) Finally, let us help to keep the spirit of Thanksgiving through SERVICE ABOVE SELF, discovering afresh that word of the Lord: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." The ultimate discovery is that in the end of the day, we have no rights at all in the sight of God--but only privileges and the obligation to service when the self is lost in love. As Jesus put it so dramatically, you must lose your life to find it.

One morning in 1896, one of the most gifted men of this century woke to a glorious new day. The birds were singing their hearts out. The air was filled with the scents and sounds of summer; the warm sunshine poured through the lattice windows, bright geraniums and petunias overflowed from the window boxes in this little cottage at Gunsbach in Alsace. This man had become famous as a musician, the greatest performer of his day of the organ works of Bach, but equally brilliant as philosopher and theologian and lecturer. As he lay there, drinking in the ethereal beauty of a new day, feeling life had been so good to him beyond all his desserts, suddenly there came to him an irresistible desire to give out to others. "I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course; I must give something in exchange." He could almost feel the hand of God lifting him up to see horizons of human need far beyond his own circle of interest.

He picked up a magazine and read about an urgent need for medical help in what was then French Equatorial Africa. A compelling voice seemed to be directing him to meet that need. But he was a musician and a theologian and a teacher. He had no medical knowledge at all. How could he respond to this appeal? So in mid-life, when most would have felt it too late to start a new. profession, he entered medical school. In a few years, Dr. Albert Schweitzer was on his way to Africa to use his new medical skills in one of the most primitive places on earth. "What a waste," people said," to bury his musical talents in darkest Africa and his brilliant mind among primitive people." But to Schweitzer there came a great sense of fulfillment. With his own hands he helped to build a simple hospital in a jungle clearing at Lambarene. He returned to Europe to give concert tours to raise money for his enterprise and became the living embodiment of his own dictum: "The only ones among us who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." "Our greatest mistake in life," he said, "is to walk through life with closed eyes. We do not notice our chances. If we deliberately search, we see so many who need help, not only in big but in little things."

May we make that same discovery this Thanksgiving time and as we approach the Advent season telling of God's breaking through the hard crust of human selfishness and pride to enter the stream of our earthly life in great humility, born as a refugee child, and rejected by the smug and self-satisfied of His day. But to those with eyes to see comes the greatest revolution in all life, to be transformed by God's presence and power--"wonder upon wonder, and every wonder true!"

Graham W. Hardy