Let’s be honest, did anyone plan to have the year we did? There’s a great picture that floats around the internet every month that has a guy on a Vegas booky’s board turning around and calling out, who had murder hornets for May, or riots for June, or if you’ve been following the mysterious silver monolith in Utah, who had alien invasion for December.
This is year had been, to say the least, horrid. About 260,000 deaths from Covid, if you go with the official CDC numbers. 1 to 2 billion dollars in property damage due to the summer riots (https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/damage-riots-1b-most-expensive). 188 billion dollars in loss revenue just at the state and local levels (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/09/24/how-much-is-covid-19-hurting-state-and-local-revenues/). And over 100,000 small businesses prematurely closed because of all of it.
This has been a hard year, by every metric and everyone has been impacted in some way to some degree. But the very idea of the holiday of Thanksgiving was birthed out of such times as these.
Those first pilgrims that had that first thanksgiving meal did not do so out of the perfect world they had lived in. They weren’t privy to warm propane furnaces. They were not able to go to the local grocer and grab their turkey. The scars of death and defeat were throughout their community and yet, with what they had, they sat together to give thanks back to God for his supply.
Thanksgiving is celebrated for times such as these. Jim Elliot, along with several other missionaries died to share the gospel of Jesus. Elizabeth, Jim’s wife, later wrote, “God has promised to supply all our needs. What we don’t have now, we don’t need now.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran priest who died in a Nazi prison, once wrote, “It is only with gratitude that life becomes rich!”
John Bunyan, the writer of Pilgrim’s Progress, who had been imprisioned for his faith, once wrote, “A sensible thanksgiving for mercies received is a mighty prayer in the Spirit of God. It prevails with Him unspeakably.”
And Paul, writing to the Church at Philippi, who himself had spent years in chains for his faith, wrote this, “4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)”
The holiday of Thanksgiving is an expression back to God of all the things that he has given us, even as the world seems to spirals out of control. We gather right now to express this thanksgiving in the midst of the world that we’re in. We gather right now, to show our thanks to those that have served and are serving us in our military. We gather right now to be thankful for those that are police officers, our firer fighters, and our medical personal. But most of all, we gather to celebrate God, from whom all blessings flow. And in God only, can we have peace as the crashing waves of the world.
And that peace is found in Jesus, who said this, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14:27)”
Jesus’ peace is beyond virus’, beyond riots, beyond job loss, beyond anything the chaos of this world has. But we must put our trust into Jesus. He must be our Savior, to be our comforter.
So today, as we give thanks here and tomorrow, let us trust in Jesus, that all things are in his control, and though we may face a troubled world, we do not need to be troubled, but we do need to be thankful. Thanksgiving is made for such times as these. Amen.
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