Thanksgiving Eve

A Homily for Thanksgiving Eve

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The older I get, the more I appreciate Thanksgiving. It’s not flashy, as holidays go. It doesn’t have the same panache as a Halloween or a Christmas. But, Black Friday sales aside, it has proven remarkably resistant to consumer co-optation. Thanksgiving remains, at heart, a simple celebration of faith and of family. And that sort of thing is very hard to sacrifice to the gods of industry and entertainment. Faith and family withstand the test of time despite our reflexive skepticism. When all else fails, they hold true.

Thanksgiving as we know it began as a New England tradition, a way for the children of Puritans to celebrate Christmas, while still claiming not to celebrate Christmas. National days of thanksgiving were common enough in the early days of the Republic, but they were hardly festive. The Continental Congress declared more than half a dozen of them, and various Presidents followed suit. But Thanksgiving with a capital T—the nostalgic Thanksgiving of Puritan Pilgrims at Plymouth—was set in stone for us by none other than Abraham Lincoln.

He did so in the midst of our Civil War, a time of bloody strife and seemingly insurmountable division. Lincoln, a man who wrestled with the purposes of God throughout the war, called us all to remember the shared heritage and values that made us a people, made us Americans. And he called us to humble ourselves; to admit our hubris, our wickedness, and our sin. He called us to give thanks for all the material bounty entrusted to us, wealth and power far exceeding any previous civilization, while acknowledging that our own success had led us to neglect God—most notably God’s demand for justice.

Lincoln believed that God’s love for us places demands on us. We are blessed not simply so that we might have good things, but so that we ourselves might be good, and especially be good for others. After all, to whom much is given, much is expected. This is the sort of penitent humility that we rarely hear from leaders today, be they secular or religious. It represents a call to liberty very different from the sort we are used to hearing.

We speak of being freed from things—from responsibilities, from expectations, from societal obligation—but true Thanksgiving calls us to remember what we have been freed for, freed to do: freed to live rightly, freed to love God by loving our neighbor, freed to lay down our lives for those whom we love. Lincoln could see this with cannonballs flying all about him and bodies piled five-deep. We cannot see this past the screens of our smartphones and our five-dollar lattes. That’s why we need Thanksgiving. That’s why we need faith and family.

Faith and family humble us. They bring us home. They remind us that life is not about all the stuff we buy or the trips we take or the certificates hung on our walls. They remind us that happiness is not to be found in self-actualization or fad diets or an Amazon account.

Faith and family rescue us by tearing us out of ourselves—by pounding into us the stubborn realization that our world does not, in fact, revolve around us—and that the only way to truly be happy, to truly gain the world, is to give it all away: to live for others and for the world God has made; to make daily sacrifices for the ones we love, even when they drive us crazy; to wake up from the stupor of the world’s wealthiest society, which somehow always feels so poor, and to be thankful for all the blessings we cannot hope to itemize and auction off on Ebay.

Thank God for good food. Thank God for good government. Thank God for grandparents and parents and children. Thank God for a country that can admit the depth of her flaws while still remaining true to her real accomplishments. Thank God for a warm fire and a strong roof and the kids who remind me daily that I have such a long way to go, but they still love me anyway. Thank God that I have a good wife who works hard even though she never has it easy. And thank God that I have the freedom to pray. It’s the only way I ever feel free.

Faith and family, folks. That’s where it’s at. It may not be flashy. It may not be fashionable. But it sure as heck is real.

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