The remarkable thing about the biblical command to praise and thank God, to make a joyful noise and come into God’s presence with thanksgiving, is that it is mostly written by people who had precious little to be cheerful and joyful about. Many of the most glorious psalms of thanksgiving were written at times of tragedy, exile, and suffering. In fact, there is something about the doxology that is more powerful and more authentic when it is experienced and expressed not in the good times, when it’s easy to be grateful, but in the not so good times. There is something absolutely authentic when words of gratitude are uttered in the face of loss and diminishment and tragedy, something almost magnificently defiant about gratitude in adversity. That, after all, was the way it was originally.

Peter Gomes, reflects this in his new book, The Good Life: “That first winter in New England was a terrible one for the Mayflower pilgrims, who were hardly prepared for the ferocity of the weather and the hard work of establishing a new colony. More than half their number died that winter in what they called ‘the starving time,’ where a ration of five kernels of corn was apportioned to each adult for a meal.”

It was the next year, when a successful harvest was in, that they set aside a day for Thanksgiving. It’s important to remember that just a few months before they were facing starvation, digging graves in the rocky soil for their children, wives, husbands; that as they sat down to eat a Thanksgiving feast together their hearts were still broken from the grief and trauma.

Gomes, who grew up in Plymouth, says that a local custom is that on Thanksgiving Day, in the middle of the bountiful tables, five kernels of corn placed on a red maple leaf are set at each place to remind people, who now enjoy a good bounty, of the “starving time“ of long ago (p. 151).

For some of us, Thanksgiving will be a time of joyful reunion with dear ones, a time of being together with precious friends, a time of feasting, laughing, rejoicing, a time when doxology, “Baruch atah Adonai,” will fall easily and gracefully from our lips. For others Thanksgiving will be lonely, a time of loss and grief, a heightened time of anxiety, perhaps fear and worry. For those, particularly, doxology, thanksgiving, will be an occasion of integrity and faithfulness and blessing.

For all of us, it is an occasion to praise God from whom all blessing flow, to express our gratitude for love and mercy beyond our comprehension, for all the blessing of our life, for Jesus Christ, our Lord, and for God’s amazing grace in our lives.

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.
Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell.
Come ye before him and rejoice.

Amen

John M. Buchanan

November 24, 2002

Full Sermon

https://fourthchurch.org/sermons/2002/112402.html