Thanksgiving Day-November 27, 2008
The Cathedral Church of the Nativity
Bethlehem Pennsylvania
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa


He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us; for the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God. II Corinthians 9


We are gathered together this day in one of the most interesting of intersections of Christian reflection on what is by its very founding and existence a secular or civic holiday! Thanksgiving! The traditions of enjoying the symbols of our well established cultural experience are well entrenched by this point. For many of us, we will enjoy a hearty meal as a reminder of our thankfulness for a hearty harvest yielded to us by the grace of God. Many of us also will participate in the rituals that express our deep connection and thanks to those we love, our families, for health that we enjoy, for shelter and warmth. The surrounding cultural temptations will accompany our celebration; the propensity to overdo our abundance, too much food, too much dessert, too much football, the opportunity and invitation to accumulate more things, and the occasional possibility of too much family. I offer the last as tongue and cheek.

But lest we take too far a leave of the origins of this civic thanksgiving, I am reminded that indeed here we are in this house of prayer and we as Christians are invited to be mindful that the origins of this national holiday came into being in one of the most desperate times of our journey as a united people in America. Though regional, state, and community observances of days of thanksgiving were not unique in the early American experience, a national observance was. A quick re-capture of history I pray will invite us into this unique opportunity for Christian reflection on this secular holiday.

Steeped in the heat of a war torn country, where battlefields bore witness to the fracture of values and identity as a country; in the terror, destruction, and at the height of man’s inhumanity toward man, the leadership of our country, especially Abraham Lincoln seemed to have a deep sense that this brokenness was an abhor ration to the very character and nature of God.

In the midst of this time, and at the plea of others, William H. Seward, Secretary of State, delivered a proclamation authored by the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln,

With a pre-amble that recognized the bounty of farmers, the industry of a country that was inventive and industrious, the security of a nation from outside aggressor, and a hope for an expanded freedom for its people----even in and especially despite the fractious and violent conflict this people found themselves in, comes a call for a day of national thanksgiving directed toward a creator of abundance and mercy!

A portion of the proclamation reads this way:

A Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

The Rev. John Woart, Rector of St. John’s Church Norristown Pennsylvania on the very first national observance of thanksgiving in 1863 addressed his congregation with these words,

“This annual festival is, the present year, invested with peculiar interest. Not only are we called upon by the Governor of Pennsylvania to return thanks to God for customary, and also, for peculiar, benefits bestowed upon us, as a fractional portion of a great people, but the President of the United States sends out a request that the day may be observed in every part of our county with special reference to the peculiar favors of God.
The leading purpose of our assembling together is manifest, form the fact that we are gathered within a house of prayer. We meet to pray to our Father in heaven which includes the offering of thanks. Many people go hastily, and, of course, with but little serious reflection into the Sanctuary of God. With the thoughtful Christian, however, it is otherwise.”


Here is the intersection I seek to lift up on this Thanksgiving Day, this civic holiday, the intersection of Faith, the same intersection I believe our forebears were seeking! With a thoughtful heart we look at St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. We are reminded that the seeds of thanksgiving are gifted to us by God and as we plant them, the fruit of thanksgiving is one that multiplies in abundance!


History has so much to teach us. In this case the reminder that at an intersection of human experience that was filled with challenge and despair, that shines unfavorably on the human propensity to err in ways that lead to harm rather than do good, to destroy, rather than to build up, that even in such moments, deep inside all of us is a gateway to another way that can transcend the limitations of our humanity. A spirit of thanksgiving! Isn’t it God inspired that in the midst of a darkest hour a people would be called to look deep inside themselves to discover a primary dependence on a power greater than themselves, and recognize that all that they are, all who they are, all that they have is dependent in a sacred relationship Martin Buber would describe as I and thou, and to live in thanksgiving for it!

You and I live in interesting and challenging times! Yet as Christians we also live in no less challenging times than those faithful who have gone before us. Is it not a “peculiar truth” for us that it does seem to be that when times are more challenging, we are more apt to have a workable lens that allows us to begin to understand just how blessed we have been and what opportunity for a spirit of thanksgiving we might offer. Just how peculiar God is as we are pursued by his generous love particularly when things are messy at best. This does not suggest that life’s struggles and challenges are not real and are not worthy of our struggle, it does suggest however that the power of paradox is that in discovering a sense of thanksgiving lives once overpowered by despair instead find transformation in hope. The 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice.” For Christian folk, a life well lived, begins and ends with a deeply integrated sense in our being of thanksgiving!

On this Thanksgiving Day, I leave you with inspired words of a preacher who found the intersection of Christian life with the secular and civic worthy of note, again, Rev. John Woart, on the first national observance of thanksgiving in 1863.

“Brethren! It is well for us to be in the House of God today! God has drawn nigh to us during the past year, and blessed us in our homes, and our neighborhoods—in our Commonwealth, and throughout the Union of which we are no unimportant part. Let it be our unceasing prayer of thanks, “that the Holy spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts!” Then will the world know us as Christians. We shall show forth our faith by our works, with cheerful hearts, and according to our ability. We shall be a light which cannot be hid!” Amen.