One of my preacher friends on Facebook reported last week that one of the children in his Sunday School class brought his Bible to him with a very puzzled look on his face. The young man said, “Pastor, I’m having trouble finding the Thanksgiving story in my Bible. Is it in the New or the Old Testament?”
That may bring a smile to the faces of those of us who are Bible students but it illustrates a very important truth - that it is impossible to separate the true meaning of Thanksgiving from some very profound tenets of the Judeo-Christian belief system, i.e. that God is sovereign, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He is faithful to the nations whose people are faithful to him.
There are many parts to a traditional American Thanksgiving celebration. If we wanted to alphabetize them it would be easy because we could put them all under the letter “F”.
First and foremost to some is the Food. We Americans love our turkey and dressing and gravy, potatoes (both Irish and sweet), cranberries, hot rolls, green bean casserole, corn, and of course pumpkin pie and whipped cream.
Thanksgiving also stands for Friends and Family. It is the most heavily travelled holiday of the year. For college students it is usually the first trip home during the school year. Many places of business close the following Friday, so it allows a long weekend. It is just a joyous time of fellowship and celebration around a heavily-laden table of caloric blessings. Many times we take for granted those most close to us, family and dear friends, but Thanksgiving allows us the opportunity to tell them how much they mean to us.
And we can’t forget Football. Sports fans are fanatic about the games over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Then there is the Fun of shopping on Black Friday. Personally, I don’t get excited about football or mass shopping excursions, but the majority of Americans do and it is the high point of their Thanksgiving holiday.
But amidst all the Frenzy and Fanaticism, Americans should never forget to put Faith first. It was Faith that led the Pilgrims to leave their home country in search of a place to practice their religion in peace and freedom. The Mayflower Compact, named for the British ship that brought the Pilgrims to America, stated that the voyage had been undertaken “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith.”
It was Faith that led Thomas Jefferson to write in the Declaration of Independence that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness....”
It was that Faith expressed in that document that eventually provided the incentive for our forefathers to take up arms against their home country when they felt their freedom was threatened.
It was the Faith of Benjamin Franklin that caused him to stand up in that July steaming heat in a building in Philadelphia that we now call Independence Hall, where the delegates had assembled to draft a Constitution that would forever bind us together as a nation, and make a plea that “henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business...” Franklin made the plea because the Constitutional Convention had become bogged down in dissension and confusion after five weeks of deliberation.
In only a short time after they began the habit of prayer, the Constitution, one of the most important documents of all time came together and this new nation was on its way to becoming the epitome of freedom and democracy throughout the world and so it remains today.
It was the Faith of John Winthrop, first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to write and deliver a sermon while crossing the ocean aboard the Arbella in early 1630 in which he coined the phrase “City On A Hill” referring to the new nation they were going to establish and admonishing his listeners that the eyes of the whole world would be upon them and if they failed to set a good example, they would become a shame to the entire world.
President Reagan used similar language in his farewell speech in 1989 when he talked about our history as “a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.”
It was his Faith that caused Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, an elder in his hometown Presbyterian church, to ask his pastor to prepare for him the elements of communion and he took them, along with a small silver chalice and his Bible on board the spaceship as part of the personal items each astronaut is allowed to have. Before he stepped out to make that “giant leap for mankind,” he celebrated communion, giving thanks that the first liquid ever poured on the moon and the first food ever eaten there were the elements of the communion service.
(This story was reported in The Huffington Post, and reprinted later in Guidepost magazine by Buzz Aldrin in his own words.)
And finally, as reported on NASA’s own website, on Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, became the first to orbit the moon, and as their command module floated above the lunar surface, the three men beamed back images of the moon and earth and took turns reading from the book of Genesis the first ten verses starting with “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
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