Before Israel crossed the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land,
Moses preached them this sermon:
NRSDeuteronomy 8
7 For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills,8a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey,9a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper.10You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.11 Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them,13 and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied,14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, 16 and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good. 17 Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth." 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.
The Word of the Lord.
The problem with most Thanksgiving sermons is that they just end up saying, “Be thankful.” For your blessings, be thankful. For your trials and tribulations, be thankful. For all your days, the good and the bad alike, be thankful. The problem, of course, is that telling people to be thankful is a little like telling them, “Be happy.” Or, “Cheer up.” Or, “Stop crying.” True thankfulness comes from the heart, and unfortunately, our hearts don’t just snap to the moment we command them to be this, or that, or anything else.
The Bible takes a different approach to thanksgiving. Rather than insisting on thankfulness, Scripture instead commands us to remember. The Book of Deuteronomy is the Bible’s book of remembrance par excellence. As the last will and testament of the prophet Moses, all of Deuteronomy is, in large part, a summons to remember:
5:15Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
7:18 … remember what the LORD your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt,
8:2Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness.
9:7Remember and do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness.
11:2Remember today that it was not your children (who have not known or seen the discipline of the LORD your God), but it is you who must acknowledge his greatness, his mighty hand and his outstretched arm.
24:9Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam on your journey out of Egypt.
32:7Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you.
Deuteronomy assumes that without remembering what God has done, there is no thanksgiving for what God is doing. Without remembering God’s awesome judgment, there can be no thankfulness for God’s still more awesome mercy. Without remembering where God has led us, we can in no way thank God for how far we’ve come.
Remembering is the key, but remembering is, well, hard and, let’s face it, often painful. Forgetting, on the other hand, is like rolling off a log. When I was at LSU, I took a course titled “Law as a Humanity.” One of our guest lecturers was Baton Rouge attorney Ossie Brown, before he was elected District Attorney, but not long after his defense of Army Sergeant David Mitchell for his role in the My Lai massacre. Mr. Brown explained to us that time was the defense attorney’s best friend. The more you stalled and the more time you ate up, the more witnesses were likely to forget exactly where they were and what they saw and who they talked to. And of course, he’s right. Our memories are notoriously short. In today’s 24/7 news cycle, stories often come and go before they ever really sink in. This past week you couldn’t pick up a newspaper or turn on a news broadcast without a story on the current scandal surrounding General David Petraeus. Is anyone likely to be talking about this story a year from now? Even a month from now? I doubt it. It’ll be just more water over the dam, under the bridge, and on its way to oblivion.
Maybe our attention spans are just shorter. Maybe we watch too much TV. Maybe we’ve got a bad case of information overload. Maybe we’re just too busy to remember. But when Moses prophesied to Israel, he put his finger on something a little closer to home. As Israel was about to enter “a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey” (vv, 8,9), Moses also warned:
12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them,13 and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied,14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,17Do not say to yourself, "My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth."
Nearly three thousand years later, Abraham Lincoln echoed the same prophetic warning in his Thanksgiving Day proclamation of 1863:
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
That was 129 years ago, but it still preaches today
Forgetting who we are, forgetting whose we are, forgetting where we came from and forgetting wherever it was we thought we were going, the wealth given to us becomes the wealth that deludes us, that turns us cold, and arrogant, and contemptuous of others. The great social critic Homer Simpson put it best in a Halloween special, when on a trip to the zoo, he said the animals were, “bored, obese, and have lost their sense of meaning. The American dream.”
That’s why exhortations to be thankful just don’t cut it. You can tell people to be thankful until blue in the face, but when the malls open on Black Friday, all that sham thankfulness will disappear quicker than you can code your pin into the nearest ATM. The cure is not just in being thankful, but in remembering. And we are, as God’s people, above all things, a community remembrance.
We remember in order to grieve our wrongs. We remember in order to give thanks for our blessings. We remember in order to be re-membered, that is, in order to be restored to the wholeness we have sacrificed to filthy lucre and unrighteous mammon. Remembering the night in which he was betrayed, we come to this table for our Risen Lord to re-member us as the Body of Christ in this world, “the salt of the earth,” “the light of the world,” “a city set on a hill” (Matthew 5:13,14). Because as Jesus told us, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
