Thanksgiving as my culture
It’s Thanksgiving in America. I am thank full. I’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving twice each year now for 25 years. My Canadian day comes in October and the American day comes — well today in November. That’s half my life, yet I still miss the way life is organized around this holiday in November — in America. At least I miss how it was organized in my family.
I realize that in 25 years even Thanksgiving in America has changed. The anticipation of shopping on Friday after Thanksgiving has given way to a whole week of ads and sales meant to agitate us because we are missing out, or there are new gadgets we really need, or our stuff is wearing out, and the special persons in our family need to know they are special to us and that is only possible if we buy them something — a lot of things. It’s not Thanksgiving in Canada, but this script is the cultural language of this very week in November!
So now I find myself asking, how do we make this week a genuine set of holy days?
Reckoning
I find the mythology of Thanksgiving to be insufficient for the demands we experience today to reckon with history as it’s told to children and to reconcile with peoples whose ancestors experienced the rush to occupy the land by whatever means. As hopeful as some settlers may been that settling could be a peaceful endeavour, their venture was often prepared through some kind of violence.
I don’t bring this up to generate guilt. Rather I bring up the rough centre of our history so as to generate humility and mercy.
The wealth enjoyed today came at someone’s expense. Not only did someone work hard, but someone else may have been displaced or denied an opportunity. The belief that we are each a self-made people is fundamentally flawed. Our economy has a context. For there is in our enjoyment of liberty in America (and in Canada) an idealism formed of complex thought and fundamental views of human rights. The ideals have many sources and can be traced to indigenous people in North America, to British and European philosophical streams, to the tradition of decision-making councils of North Africa and to biblical ideas extending back to Jesus and then to Israel. Yet, this idealism is fragile; it can be overtaken by blindspots, and it may even be dismantled. Our ideals have been selectively applied. If we are to name the blindspots one of them would be hubris.
When hubris and amnesia runs it course justice gives way to dehumanizing language and then oppression, slavery, and exclusion. Thanksgiving days have become for me an inescapable marker for hubris and selective amnesia and a counter play: the deliberate and desperate attempt to treasure what is more important in our relationships to God, to self, to people, and to the stuff of earth. These plays take shape as reckoning, receiving, repenting and remembering. And then hopefully rejoicing.
Receiving
Last night at a birthday celebration for one of my children we reviewed the gift that is in each person’s name. Two of my children have names that are derived from Micah. The question generated in the name “Micah” is “Who is like God?” The question is meant to generate humility and an attentiveness to God’s call by a people who historically had journeyed from a place of enslavement to a place of liberation:
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8
Early in the history of Israel God warned them of the deathtrap created by hubris and its accompanying amnesia. In Deuteronomy he says, “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the LORD you God… Otherwise when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your hearts and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you… He brought you… He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, to humble and test you so that in the end it might go well with you. You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth…” (Deuteronomy 8:10-18)
Repenting
Hubris is a terrible burden. It has many sources. One of its sources is greed. Some in our congregation were recently surprised by the power of four words, “greed which is idolatry.” Writing to the church in Colossae, The Apostle Paul assigned greed as one of the powers of our earthly nature that we must put to death, otherwise it will dominate our lives (Colossians 3:5). One of my friends was stunned by connection of greed with idolatry. But that’s how it is — our hearts will follow our treasure and our treasures will define our hearts. Our relationship to the stuff of earth is fundamentally a question of worship. It has been noted by others that you know some thing is an idol the moment someone tries to take it from you and you feel crushed at the core of your person. Such idolatry leads to the death of justice.
Sadly our histories and therefore many of our collective holidays are shaped by greed and by hubris. When holidays are shaped like that humility and mercy and then justice will slip away. Let’s redeem the holy days.
Remembering
Perhaps a good way to start is the very way we see Jesus dealing with the temptation to meet the desires of his body with a self-directed act of power. You may recall Jesus was compelled by the Spirit of God to go from His baptism in the Jordan to meet with God in the wilderness. After a long season of fasting and prayer we get to listen in on the devil’s temptation, “If you are the Son of God tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus defeats the devil by recalling the work of God in the wilderness, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:3-4). What has Jesus done? He has remembered.
The context for Jesus’ quotation of Scripture is Deuteronomy. He recalls the call Moses gave to the people of Israel to remember God when they are no longer pilgrims but have become settlers. The call goes this way:
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” Deuteronomy 8:2-3
Three questions to evaluate our memory
Thanks giving requires remembering.
Who are we remembering?
Who are we forgetting?
Does humility and mercy and then justice flow from our thanks giving into our relationships?
And then comes rejoicing.
Notes on the picture: For more on Danh Vo’s work, We The People, read his story in the notes provided by The Guggenheim.
