Thanksgiving Preaching

Elizabeth won’t let me preach Thanksgiving. At least not anymore. Apparently, I’m too dark with my words.

There’s a skill to preaching Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving meditation should be a simple, short message. Uplifting. Just tell people to give thanks. That gratefulness is an important characteristic of our lives as Christians. This is not one of my gifts as a preacher.

I still remember the first Thanksgiving I preached. The text was Matthew 6:25-33. The part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount where he tells us not to worry. Not to be anxious about anything. It wasn’t a bad sermon overall—it was just a terrible sermon for Thanksgiving. Somehow I got into all of the things that we have to worry about in life—hitting the grief and the job loss and the health concerns—and then made the point that God doesn’t promise that life will be easy for us—just that God will provide what we need. And that’s cause for Thanksgiving, no matter how dark your life might be right now. Expressions on people’s faces were all a bit shocked as they filed out that morning. Not quite what they had prepared themselves for as they headed off to church that morning. My notes for the sermon that day read simply, “Thanksgiving—a bit heavy.”

Another year I preached the story of the crossing of the Red Sea from the book of Exodus and the song of deliverance Miriam sang after the Israelites were safely on the other side. I emphasized how our deliverance should be a deep source of thanksgiving in our hearts—and then spent most of the sermon emphasizing all the dark and evil things we had been delivered from.

Then there was the Thanksgiving sermon on the ten lepers Jesus heals in the book of Luke where only one of them came back to thank Jesus. Somehow the sermon ended up being a stern warning not to be like the nine who didn’t bother to give thanks.

And who could forget the infamous Thanksgiving sermon from the book of Job? (Okay—I made that one up).

But the point is, Elizabeth won’t let me preach Thanksgiving. Because I tend to be too dark. And regardless of what passage I pick, my message usually ends up being something along the lines of: no matter how dark and gloomy your life might be, it’s still possible to give thanks. Most years, that doesn’t work so well for a Thanksgiving meditation. It’s perfectly true—but it’s not the simple, uplifting message people need to hear most Thanksgivings.

But this year isn’t like most Thanksgivings. This year, we’re in the midst of a pandemic. And we’ve already lost so much—we’ve given up holidays, vacations, time with family and friends. Some of us have lost jobs and others of us loved ones. It seems like everyday there’s a new sense of grief as a new loss takes hold in our lives. This year, perhaps more than any other, we need to hear that Thanksgiving message that no matter how dark our lives might become, we are still children of God. We are still redeemed by God. We are still deeply loved by God. We are still held by God. And that—that—is indeed reason to give thanks, no matter what else is going on in our lives.

Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to preach a simple, uplifting Thanksgiving meditation. Maybe one of these years, Elizabeth will let me give it another try. But until then, I was born to preach Thanksgiving 2020.