I first celebrated Thanksgiving in 1992 when I was teaching in Kenya, sharing a house with a guy from California and working with an organisation where Americans outnumbered everyone else. Americans celebrate Thanksgiving - and they generously invited us to join in too.
According to Wikipedia, which is often my first port of call when I want to know something about something that I know nothing about, Thanksgiving was traditionally a harvest celebration - see here for example. And similar to a harvest festival in the UK involved giving thanks to God for his provision.
Having worked with other Americans since 1992, that was not my only exposure to Thanksgiving traditions - most recently being involved in the making of a sweet potato and marshmallow casserole a couple of years ago.
I wonder how many people in the UK, wandering along our high streets realise that today is Thanksgiving. They can't miss the fact that tomorrow is Black Friday - the posters are stuck in every single window - but how many realise the 'link' between Black Friday and Thanksgiving.
On Tuesday I was taking an RE lesson, exploring the meaning of Christmas and why Christmas is important to Christians, and in the Q&A session at the end one girl asked, 'why do people celebrate Christmas if they don't believe in Jesus?' What a great question - and my answer was something along the lines of, 'I don't know, it makes no sense to me, you'll have to ask them'.
Of course, Christmas and Black Friday/Thanksgiving, as well as Halloween and Easter have become just another opportunity for the retail industry to try and trick gullible customers into parting with their cash by convincing them that this is a really good deal that will bring them satisfaction which they could not otherwise experience.
I'm not surprised that the retail industry in the UK plays up Black Friday whilst ignoring Thanksgiving. If they were to get people to focus on the things that they are really thankful for on Thursday, those people might be less inclined to spend their cash on Friday.
Thanksgiving is an important theme in the Bible - but it is the kind of thanksgiving that would want no part in Black Friday. Harvest thanksgiving celebrations were an important part of Jesus' life - three of Israel's annual feasts were linked to different harvests in the agricultural calendar. And so thanking God for his blessing and his provision, rather than taking things for granted, is an important discipline for Christians. But biblical thankfulness is not just limited to God's physical or material blessing.
In Philippians Paul writes '...in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God...'. For the New Testament writers, their focus was on an eternal future. Their joy was based not on getting a few hundred pounds off the latest flatscreen TV, but on the hope they had for the future. A hope and a future that meant that they could rejoice, even in the face of genuine suffering, persecution and even death. They were thankful for and/or looking forward to:
- the free gift of complete forgiveness for all their sins (Romans 6:23).
- never having to earn their justification by keeping the law (Galatians 2:16).
- the grace they would need at all times so that they could abound in every good work God had for them (2 Corinthians 9:8).
- that God would complete the good work he began in them (Philippians 1:6).
- eternal life (1 Corinthians 15:52–53).
- being with Jesus and being like Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:8) (1 John 3:2).
We have so much to be thankful for. Of course, it is right to be thankful for the 'stuff' that we have. But the celebration of Christmas without a belief in Jesus, or the marketing of Black Friday without any reference to Thanksgiving alerts us to the danger of becoming so focused on the things that we see that we lose sight of the things that we can't see - the things that really matter.
Let's give thanks to God for the ways he has truly blessed us.
If you wanted to read some more about this theme of thanksgiving you could start here.
