Thanksgiving 2021
Happy Thanksgiving.
As you are eating, napping, cooking, or gathering at the table now, let’s pause for a minute and reflect on the cross and tomb. We normally do that at Easter, but let’s do it now.
The world is decidedly against the things of God. The world is prone to wonder how God could be good if there is death and misery. The world concludes God must either not be real or God must not be good.
But we know God is real and always good.
We live in a fallen world. This world is infused with our sinful nature. Disease, destruction, doubt, and despair all come flowing through our sin. There is no escape for us from all of it. We must just endure and hope to glorify God as we endure.
But God so loved the world that he sent his Son. The second person of the trinity was born of a virgin in a feed trough. He lived as we live. He suffered. He despaired. He was tempted. He died innocent of all crime with all the crimes of the world placed upon him.
On that day the world went dark. God himself could not look upon the sins of the entire history of the world past, present, and future piled up on that innocent man turned greatest sinner the world will ever know. All our crimes against the divine were put upon him that we might endure because he himself endured.
God so loved the world that though he offered us no escape from its misery till the grave, he endured with us, lived like us, and suffered with us and for us. He bore our sins.
We should truly be thankful.
In the desert of Sinai, God dwelled in a tent with his people as they wandered. He had no need for a temple, a palace, or the finery of royalty. He wandered the desert in a tent with the people he made wander. Then he wandered again, incarnate and with us, suffering death and conquering it. That’s how much he wants a relationship with us.
So this Thanksgiving, there is much in the world and perhaps around our table today that brings us some depression, sadness, worry, or melancholy. But look up. Christ lives that we might live.
God’s got this, so have a happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving. Glad you and your family are on the mend and getting rest. And I have to add this. I am 67 years old and up until about three years ago I could not make gravy to save my life. Then I read your recipe. I now make great gravy and have adapted your recipe to also make a great gravy to go with beef.
Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas