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Pastor · Sunday Schedule · FBC
News
2001
From the Pastor
THANKSGIVING REFLECTION
There is something distinctively American about our Thanksgiving holiday and this year more than we have known for a long, long time that distinctiveness is also what causes us to feel a compelling need for it. There is the need to be able to find reason for Thanksgiving so the forces of uncertainty and chaos if not tammed are at least seen in subjugation to a higher power.
To be able to give thanks connects us to what is eternal. It soothes. It heals. It brings order out of the chaos. It renews our sense of vision, the principles for which we stand, and why sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice for the sake of these principles.
Our Thanksgiving this year will have less to do with thinking about our opulence and more about our ideals. We might be poorer this year in the things we possess but we might find ourselves richer in regard to our ideals.
It might mean that this year we are more aware of family. We might be more aware of the support they give us and how precious they are to us.
As conflict continues to rage it might be thoughts of freedom come more to the fore of our mind, knowing that never have we known a day of oppression, a time when we couldn't pretty much speak our mind, vote our conscience, and go or not to go to church.
This Thanksgiving we might be drawn more toward community. How selfish we have been, pretty much living our lives to ourselves, when all the while we could have been living in community. Oh, the blessed joy of gathering with neighbors, friends and people we don't know and singing, "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing," knowing that even as we sing it, we have it - the Lord's blessing.
I think this Thanksgiving can also give us pause to think about our own character, the kind of person we are inside. Perhaps we are not as tied to our wealth as what we thought we were or were afraid we were. In the aftermath of September 11 when so many things besides the towers tumbled, maybe one thing that didn't fall was what we discovered about ourselves. We are stronger, more resilient, more compassionate, more an idealist than what we realized. We went deeper into ourselves and came out feeling better about ourselves, yet not arrogantly so, but humbly so, gratefully so.
Thanksgiving is a distinctively American holiday. It is also, in a country that furiously protects the separation between church and state, the closest the two come to an official, sanctioned, common, recognition of a link between them.
The link, however, is not forged by politics or power. It is a Proclamation that there'll be a day of Thanksgiving, a time in which we give thanks for both the grain of harvest and the seeds of liberty and justice planted in the soil of what it means to be an American. It is a days of Thanksgiving, uniquely American, in which we pause to recognize how blessed we are.
Dr. David W. Andersen
          
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