What Are You Thankful For?

Next week we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is not an official Christian holiday but we usually do hold special services to commemorate it. We will be doing that here at 7 p.m. on Wednesday the 23rd and then we are going to have a Pie Social afterward. So if you are in the area join us for worship and some pie. I will be conducting the worship service and I preaching on how thankful we are to be, that is usually what pastor’s do for Thanksgiving services. I am not staying for the Pie Social though because I have to be in San Diego for Thanksgiving with my extended family. So we will be leaving a few minutes after the benediction. I am actually looking forward to the drive because I know the kids will fall asleep quickly and I won’t have to stop for sixteen potty breaks between here and California. Plus I like to drive at night when everyone is asleep, it lets me think my own thoughts and not be disturbed. Our CD player and radio went out in the van awhile ago so there will be no music either. It will just be me, the headlights, the ribbon of road, some wildlife and maybe a few illegal aliens trying to sneak across I-8 in the middle of the night. I have never seen that yet on the drive, although I often look over into Mexico at times when we are near the border. Whenever I see the hills of Mexico off in the distance I am reminded of Clint Eastwood in all those spaghetti westerns, which were really filmed in Italy, hence the name spaghetti western, but always seemed to end up in some dusty little village in Mexico. But that’s another topic, back to Thanksgiving.
I am looking forward to Thanksgiving because I am going to spend it with a large part of my family this year. That hasn’t always been the case for me. I have spent a number of Thanksgivings in other places in the country without family. I always had friends mind you but family was thousands of miles away. Over the years I have spent Thanksgiving with close friends in Nebraska, with congregation members in Michigan, North Dakota, and Indiana, all of them nice but not the same as with family. I had three Thanksgivings that were to say the least strange. The strangest one was in Cambridge England when I was going to school there. It occurred to my friend and I that the Brit’s don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We didn’t know what to do. The Brits somehow picked up on our confusion and threw a Thanksgiving dinner for us with all the trimmings. That was nice, I still remember that. I don’t remember much about the dinner but I do remember with great thankfulness their hospitality and what it meant to my friend and me. I spent another Thanksgiving in a restaurant in North Dakota. I was supposed to join a farmer and his family for Thanksgiving but the night before it snowed two feet and they shut everything down. North Dakotans are a resilient group though and someone talked to someone who talked to someone else who arranged for the entire town to eat Thanksgiving dinner at the local diner together. There were 250 people in the town so it was a little confusing but again, it was wonderful. I will never forget my Thanksgiving on the road though. It was also in North Dakota but several years before the one I just talked about and before I was a pastor. Another friend and I left Idaho together, he was headed for graduate school at North Dakota State in Fargo and I was headed to Seminary in Fort Wayne Indiana. He was going to start after Christmas break and I was going to start after Thanksgiving break and so we decided to drive out together in the bad weather. We got caught in a horrible snow storm right before Jamestown North Dakota, in which we came very close to getting killed, and so we ended up staying the night there. The next day was Thanksgiving. As we filled up at the gas station we both grabbed a frozen burrito and heated them in the station’s microwave. We nodded to each other and said, “Happy Thanksgiving.” In this case it was just good to be alive. As we left Jamestown and headed East we realized how blessed we were, the roadside was littered with overturned trucks and cars. Many people have similar Thanksgiving stories; many probably have stories of Thanksgivings in faraway places such Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or a number of other places that have left indelible memories. I have been blessed for the past fourteen years to spend every Thanksgiving with my family, sometimes it was just me and my wife but we were family. For the past six years it has been at the very least the four of us and there has also been a lot of extended family and friends at times as well.
I am looking forward to Thanksgiving this year because the four of us are going over to join my mom and my nephew and niece for Thanksgiving north of San Diego in San Marcos. As the years go on and I attend more and more funerals of family and friends I realize how important and precious times like these are. The people you value the most aren’t always going to be there. You never know when you are spending your last Thanksgiving with them. We have a tradition at Family of Christ here in Phoenix. Right after the sermon we ask people to stand up and tell everyone what they are thankful for. If you understand anything about Lutherans you know that is pushing the envelope. We Lutherans don’t usually talk about our feelings, especially in front of groups of people. Therefore I am always amazed at the number of people who do stand up and express, sometimes very emotionally, what they are thankful for. Many times what is expressed is that they are thankful for their families and for each other. I know that is what I am thankful for. I am thankful for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the family he has given me both inside and outside the church. In fact I am thankful for so many things I have that I can’t begin to list them.
As I said before Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday, at the same time thankfulness is a Christian virtue. We have so much to be thankful for. As Christians we have been adopted by Christ into his family. We have been saved from death and damnation through our faith in Jesus. If there was ever anything to be thankful that would be it. In addition to that he has given us so much more, namely our families and our friends that we share our lives with. He has also given us homes and jobs and health and food you name it. Too often we take those things for granted and we only think about them when they are gone. The holiday of Thanksgiving is a way of guarding against that. So this Thanksgiving wherever you are, gathered around the family dinner table with those you love, at a friend’s house, at a roadside gas station in the middle of nowhere, take the time to think about what you are thankful for, and also take the time to thank God for them, and then thank the people around you for being who they are in your life. Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday, but maybe it should be.

Pastor Fred