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So, it’s Thanksgiving Sunday here in Canada. Happy Thanksgiving! That out of the way and getting to the point, I think that in today’s Canada which would be best labelled secular and multicultural, having a national day for the purpose of giving thanks begs a couple of obvious questions: to whom are we thankful and for what. A quick look at history might be helpful.
Being an insular American, it pushes my patriotic ego a bit to admit that Thanksgiving didn’t begin in 1621 at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts when Puritan Pilgrims and some very helpful First Nations neighbours thankfully celebrated a harvest that would keep them alive through the coming winter. Actually, the feasts of thanksgiving were commonplace among the First Nations peoples here on Turtle Island long before Europeans showed up. Those feasts usually happened after Winter and gratitude was expressed to the Creator for their surviving the winter and for crops to plant and game to hunt.
The first recorded European Thanksgiving actually happened in Nunavut in 1578 celebrated by English explorer Martin Frobisher and his crew for their safe arrival. They feasted on a meal of salted beef, biscuits, and mushy peas and gave thanks by celebrating Holy Communion. That’s 43 years prior to Plymouth Plantation.
The next recorded Thanksgiving celebration happened in what was New France on November 4, 1606 hosted by Samuel de Champlain. It was a French and Mi’kmaq feast at which cranberries introduced by the Mi’kmaq played an important role. This is why we have cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. People didn’t know about Vitamin C and how it helped ward off scurvy which killed many European colonists, whole villages. Yet, the Mi’kmaq knew that cranberries had something to do with preventing scurvy so Champlain listened and started having thanksgiving feasts every few weeks to get people to eat them. The Order of Good Cheer grew out of organizing such things.
An official day for Thanksgiving wasn’t declared until 1879 when Parliament declared November 6 as the official date. Prior to that, sporadic Thanksgiving celebrations happened around harvest time. Also, Loyalists to the British Empire started coming up from the States after the Revolutionary War and began to change the menu considerably to be more American, inclusive of turkey, squash, and pumpkin pie.
After the World Wars, a need to move the date of Thanksgiving Day arose to prohibit Thanksgiving celebrations from occurring on the same weekend as Remembrance Day. So, on January 31, 1957 Parliament declared that the second Monday of October would be our national day of Thanksgiving. The body of the declaration answered our two questions very well saying that this day is to be “a day of general thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed.”
Well, not to be a bummer, I suspect that if parliament made a Thanksgiving declaration for today’s Canada the stated purpose for the day would likely sound more like “a day of general thanksgiving for such things as the bountiful harvest, friendship, family, community, health, safety, etc.” You will notice that any reference to a god is missing and the list of things to be thankful for has grown. Why no reference to God? Well, we need to recognize the religious diversity of Canada today. Why a larger list? There’s a current trend in our culture arising from “Wellness” circles noting that we’ve a lot more than the harvest to be thankful for and thankfulness plays a vital role in mental health. So, be thankful for everything.
I wholeheartedly support the notion for an expanded list of things to be thankful for. Taking time daily to stop and note the things for which we are thankful truly does change our outlook on life benefitting overall health. Finding things in other people to be thankful for changes relationships. Getting spouses in a hurting marriage to stop pointing out the negatives and rather finding things to be thankful for can go a long way in healing the brokenness. Thankfulness is good for physical, mental, emotional, and relational health. Dwell on the good and you will see your way through the bad. In the practice of thankfulness, there will even come a time when you can find reason to be thankful for the bad. And of course, take some time to be thankful for the food we eat, the harvest, the land, and those who work it.
Thankfulness is essential to human well-being, but it concerns me that in so much that is written today on thankfulness God is left out. There’s no “whom” to direct our thankfulness too. I get it that we are a religiously diverse culture and we don’t want to offend one another’s beliefs and religious sentiments. But I can’t help but feel that there is a bias against a Christian understanding of God that serves about the same purpose as shooting oneself in the foot.
I do truly understand that there are legitimate reasons for this bias and topping the list is the conduct of the Church throughout Western history; primarily its lust for power, its greed, its colonializer mentality, its racism, its sexual abuse of vulnerables. The list is long here. It also doesn’t help when governments and nations align themselves with a deity they identify as “almighty God” and call it the Christian God. History has taught us the power of the State undergirded by an “almighty God” is always evil. Regardless, I will take my lumps in today’s world by saying if one wants to know what God is really like, you have to look at Jesus because Jesus is the self-revelation of God. Jesus is the one in whom “I am” said “this is who I am”.
Looking at Jesus we find that God listens. God becomes one of us to fully know what it is to be one of us in all our tarnished glory. God heals. God casts out evil spirits. God forgives even tax collectors and adulterers. God confronts religious and political hypocrisy. God feeds, often miraculously. God loves indiscriminately. There are no favourites when it comes to God’s love. God seeks the lost. God is concerned about what wealth, particularly the love thereof, can do to a person. God cries. God grieves. God laughs. God parties. God reconciles. God raises the dead. God touches those considered untouchable. God does not want big business in his houses of worship. Because God’s power is a vulnerable, wasteful love that we cannot understand, God allows himself to be betrayed, wrongly accused, spat on, beat with a stick, flogged with a leather strap that has nails in it that rips the skin from the body, then crucified all the while being mocked. God dies. Yet, by some great mystery that only God can explain; by his wounds we are healed, by his death sin, evil, and death are defeated, by his resurrection all things are and will be made new.
Jesus tried to help us understand this by saying, “Very truly I tell you, unless a seed of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it becomes many seeds.” Friends look at the bread on this table. It comes from a seed that has passed through death and become many. It nourishes us. So, the seed of the grape. From one seed comes many and our thirst is quenched. This is Jesus. This is the mystery of life embodied by the God who in love provides the abundance of enough to us even when we are known to starve ourselves while growing fat on seeking life elsewhere. The first Christian Thanksgiving in Canada was celebrated by sharing this meal. Let us give our thanks likewise. Come to this table, the table of the Lord Jesus Christ, and live. Here is the God who truly provides. Amen.
