Theme: Where does the "happy" come from in Happy Thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. What do you do -- how do you celebrate it, when your harvest seems bitter, small, or unusually full of weeds?
Thanksgiving is different in our family this year.
No
turkey dinner and an evening of rummoli, euchre and other games with my sister
and her family. She gets a chemo
treatment this Wednesday and even with the drugs she expects to feel pretty sick
through the weekend. The most we might
manage is a lunch out together before she retires home to rest.
And I
know we’re not alone in this. I think of
other families in our congregation struggling with illness and loss right
now. Of families of our area devastated
by two recent highway pile-ups on the 401 near Whitby. Of people in our city living daily in poverty
and homelessness.
What is Thanksgiving, really? What do
we remember and celebrate it in the midst of illness, loss, loneliness, sorrow, injustice and
anxiety?
In
this Sunday's Gospel reading, Jesus says to consider the birds of the air
and the lilies of the field. Until this
year I hadn’t really thought about how birds don’t always have it easy,
either. We speak longingly of being “as
free as a bird,” but birds are also exposed to a lot of nasty weather, risks,
brutal exposure and sometimes harshly short lives.
I wonder what I can learn from them -- or from the beautiful but unprotected lilies, about living within the goodness and good purpose of God.
And then there are also the first-Thanksgiving stories of our country's three founding peoples.
On
the English side is Martin Frobisher. In 1578 on his third expedition to the New
World, he ran into trouble he had not faced before – freak storms, extreme
cold and drifting ice. One ship was lost
and those that remained were scattered.
When finally they were reunited and able to land together on the shore
of Frobisher Bay (now so called), the expedition’s resident priest led all
hands in a service of thanksgiving.
A
generation later and on the French side of our heritage, in 1604 Samuel de
Champlain was leader of the new French colony in Port Royal struggling to
survive an unexpectedly harsh winter.
His solution was to create the Order of Good Cheer, by which the members
of the community took turns in groups preparing and hosting a feast and an
evening’s entertainment for the entire community, including their First Nations
neighbours.
Passing through
adversity … reconnecting after separation … struggling with hardship and anxiety … creating
and enjoying community against the cold and across boundaries.
Anything
there relevant to our time? And Thanksgiving?
And
then there's the third (really the first) of our founding
nations’ thanksgiving stories -- no once-a-year-holiday, but repeated rituals in the course of ordinary life. In the potlatch of the West Coast First
Nations, for instance, it’s interesting that the emphasis is not so much on
giving thanks for and celebrating how much you have, but on demonstrating and
enjoying how much you are able to give away.
I wonder ... anything
there similar in spirit to what Jesus says about not focusing on what we will have
to eat and drink and wear, but on “striving first for the kingdom of God,” within
which all that we need will be given?
I
trust our worship this Sunday will only deepen our Thanksgiving spirit.
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