A Slightly Different Take on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Eve, 2010

It is normal for us to pause on Thanksgiving and think about all the things for which we are thankful, and I certainly recommend doing so. However, this evening, I'd like to ask you to think about giving thanks from a different perspective: I'd like you to think about God giving thanks.

What? you ask. Does God give thanks? That's a perfectly reasonable question, so let's look at it. I think that there are three things that suggest themselves in answer.

First, is God capable of giving thanks? Put another way, is the Supreme Being, Creator of the entire universe capable of having emotions? It's certainly reasonble to entertain doubts about that or to wonder how it could be possible, but I believe that all we need to do is to look at scripture. Countless times, we read that God is angry about something - sins, wars, injustices, and so on. Far too few times, we read where God is pleased or happy with us. If God can experience the emotions of anger and happiness, why is it surprising that God can also experience gratitude?

Second, we might ask to whom God would give thanks. It would make no sense for God to thank God! To answer this question, we should examine our own lives - to whom do we offer thanks, besides to God? Right away, we see that we give thanks to one another. When you do something for me, I say "thank you." Can God do this?

Remember that God is three Persons in one Being. I don't doubt for a moment that God the Father was grateful to Jesus for offering his life for our sins, or that God was pleased with that atonement. But what about being grateful to creatures that are far less than God's own Son? Is God ever grateful to us?

Imagine a small child, spending the whole afternoon with construction paper and crayons. At the end of the day, he hands his mother a card that says, "I love you, Mommy." Is there any doubt that the mother is deeply grateful to the child for doing this? Is that gratitude in any way proportional to the artfulness of the card or the cost of the materials? Does it matter that the mother is far more powerful than the child, or that she brought the child into this world? Of course not! Just so, God can be and is grateful to us, his children, when we offer anything that shows our love for God and each other.

The final question is this: what do we have that God would like to receive from us - something for which God would be truly grateful? We could spend the rest of the night listing the answers to this question, but I think they would all fall into one of three categories.

First, God is grateful for the good things that we do. When a husband gets up from the dinner table and tells his wife, "you just rest, honey, I'll do the dishes," that is a cause for gratitude. It's not that doing the dishes is such a wonderful gift, but rather that the love that underlies the offer is precious.

Second, God is grateful when we don't do something wrong, when we avoid a sin or the people who lead us into temptation. God is pleased and thankful when we turn from our sin and turn to Jesus. God is grateful when we accept God's love and receive him.

Finally, God is grateful when we do more of something good than we usually do. You are all here in church every Sunday, and God is surely pleased by that. But here you are on a Wednesday night, with snow in the forecast, doing more than you "have to" for God. I do not doubt for a moment that God is very pleased and thankful for every extra prayer we say, every extra time we worship, every additional moment we spend thinking about God and loving God's people.

I wish each of you a blessed Thanksgiving tomorrow. I pray for all of you every day, and as Saint Paul says, "I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you." [Philippians 1:3-4] I will pray for you especially as I make my thanksgiving prayers tomorrow, and I hope that you will pray for me. But I want to assure you that God is also grateful for each and every one of us. God is as capable of feeling the tender emotions of love and gratitude as he is of receiving them from us. So when you pray tomorrow, smile and know that God is filled with joy because of us. We give thanks, and so does our God. Amen!