Turning to God in Thanksgiving

When we imagine the 'first Thanksgiving' our minds turn to the classic image of dour Pilgrims gathered around a turkey in prayer. However, the first national Thanksgiving holiday was not instituted until 1863 by President Lincoln. Lincoln had been urged by Sarah Joseph Hale, the spirited writer and editor of that era’s most popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. As early as 1855, Mrs. Hale urged on her readers and the elected officials to create a national day of thanksgiving, the last Thursday of November. This day would celebrate the prosperity and growth of the United States, honor the work and industry of the people, and, according to an 1860 editorial by Mrs. Hale, promote, “the perpetual political union of the States.” Less than a year later, the American Civil war began.

In his proclamation creating the holiday, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called on the nation to observe a day of repentance and thanksgiving.

“It has seemed to me fit and proper that [our blessings] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation...” (emphasis added)

President Lincoln as he called a whole yet fractured nation to celebrate that first national holiday of thanksgiving, urged a nation to do so with penitence, that is repentance. For a nation deeply divided by war, political power, regional economics, a sense of unease about the future, and the death of family members in combat, Lincoln called a nation to both repentance and thanksgiving.
Repentance is a return. Repentance is not a dreary self-flagellation mulling over our myriad motives and mistakes. In Greek the word literally means, “to turn around.” In repentance we stop and do an about-face, a complete 180 degree shift of movement, of perspective, and of focus. Repentance challenges us to perhaps turn our whole lives but more likely to turn our priorities, our views or our relationships. Repentance means a return, not to fun or sadness or loneliness but a return to God.
In November of 1857, Sarah Hale in another editorial wrote that to celebrate Thanksgiving is a “return...to the gayeties of childhood... when the noise and tumult of worldliness may be exchanged for the laugh of happy children, the glad greetings of family reunion and the humble gratitude of the Christian heart.”
Thanksgiving, like repentance, is at its root a return. For some today is a return to the memories of childhood, a return to the warmth of family and home, a return to the simplicity of cherished traditions and favorite recipes. For others today is a return to memories of trusts broken, to the pain of family shattered, to the loneliness of faces that no longer grace our tables or our lives. Thanksgiving is a returning.

Of course, it’s important to know why we are turning. Every year at Easter, there is a church that practices an odd ritual in turning. After a rousing trumpet fanfare the congregation in unison faces the large rose window at the back of the sanctuary and turns its back on the 50 voice choir standing proudly on the chancel and their beautiful rendition of Handel’s famed Hallelujah Chorus. As long as anyone can remember, turning around has been the tradition. Few people know why they are turning around they just do. Only one old parishioner was able to explain...”well,” he said, “we turn around because in the old days the choir was in the back.” It’s important to know why we are turning around.
When we repent, we remember that it is not through our effort, but God’s work that protects us, God’s work that provides for us, God’s work that sustains and even disciplines us on our journey together. When we turn toward God, we too come to the place where we can recognize God’s blessing and bless God in return.
True thanksgiving comes from repentance, remembering to whom we owe our blessings, even our whole lives.

In the children’s classic The Giving Tree, a boy grows up loved by a tree. The boy would visit her, play with her leaves, climb her trunk, eat her apples and nap in her shade. As the boy grows older he goes away, only returning throughout his life to take blessings from her - first her apples to sell, then her branches to build a house and finally her trunk to make a boat. The tree willing showers these blessings upon the boy, but each time it is not enough to make him happy. Each time the boy presumes that the tree will bless him, because of her love for him.

In the last scene of the book, the tree welcomes the boy, now and old man, saying, “I am sorry, Boy, but I have nothing left to give you.” The boy answers that now he is old, he only needs a place to sit and rest. The tree offers the only thing she has left, her stump. The boy sits. “And,” the story says, “the tree was happy.”

Each time he returns, she does bless him. But both are blessed when as an old man, the boy returns to her, content to sit on her stump and rest in her presence and thankful for the gift, not yearning for more.
Today, as we celebrate the bounty and blessing that surrounds us, we can rest in God’s presence, thankful for the gift of life and the abundance that has been showered upon us. We can turn toward God and remember to whom we owe our lives. We can turn toward God and remember our God who has protected and provided for us, who has sustained and saved us. We can turn to God in thanksgiving.