Improper Thanksgiving
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Well, Thanksgiving is here. Barrages of email campaigns, Hallmark thanksgiving quotes, and perturbed thanksgiving purists vie for the final word on properly giving thanks. Some insist on authentic thankfulness, while others point the finger at how you got what you're thankful for. This is an excellent week for a social media hiatus.
A holiday like Thanksgiving in America always seems to stir up self-righteous, religious rants and passive-aggressive, pious plays on words. All the things posted online from a self-evident perspective leave me feeling like I really deserved a good kick in the pants.
THE TROUBLE WITH THANKSGIVING
I'm not so much concerned about everyone's preferences about how to celebrate a holiday. But, I am concerned about the massive undercurrent most of us ignore as if our lives depended on it. That undercurrent is our hatred for the freeness of the Gospel and the love of God. We live such entitled lives that we've entirely lost the language of grace.
As always, few can say it as well as Robert Capon: "So deep is our need to derive our identity from our own self-respect - so profound is our conviction that unless we watch our step, the watchbird will take away our name - that we will spend our lifetime trying to do the impossible rather than, for even one carefree minute, consent to having it done for us by someone else" (Between Noon And Three).
Convinced that we might be capable of losing what Christ has offered, we manage what authentic thanksgiving is for us and others. We turn a holiday into a battlefield and a sacrament into an entry fee. Meanwhile, no one actually gives thanks because they're distracted by how bad they are at giving thanks.
…no one actually gives thanks because they're distracted by how bad they are at giving thanks.
THANKFUL FOR A SCANDAL
It is a fateful and dangerous thing to promulgate the message of God's scandalous grace in religious times. Nothing makes us quite as intolerant of other people as the ways we think we've got it right. To say that God's Gospel saves everyone is to say that religion saves no one. But this is an unacceptable claim for some.
It is a fateful and dangerous thing to promulgate the message of God's scandalous grace in religious times.
We love to turn the word "Christian" into an adjective, not realizing that always leads to a contradiction in terms. Again, as Capon explains, if there can be Christian religion, there must also be Christian gardening. But, there is no faster way to contradict a Christian than to make them religious. A gift-giver like God is more saddened by feelings of indebtedness in the receiver than their taking advantage of him.
The New Testament holds up the life of Jesus as the great and final usurper of all human religion. He replaced all self-justification with once-and-for-all justification. He did the impossible because we could not, and we would not. Jesus' life reveals that God's disposition toward us was never transactional. There is no exchange, no two-way street. Only one-way generosity to a degree we can only imagine.
The New Testament holds up the life of Jesus as the great and final usurper of all human religion.
UNDOING THANKSGIVING
So, why this impulse to point out how we're getting it right and how everyone else is getting it wrong? Why this society where you love yourself only when you get it right? Have we not grown tired of the never-ending search for the silver bullet? All the quick fixes only ever deepen the addiction and expand the alienation.
I wish I had a clever saying or a clear solution. All I can say, though, is what's always been is verified again. Intolerant of faith, humans are diseased with the desire for things that we are not made for. We want independence, self-referential certainty, and illumination that elevates us over others.
Intolerant of faith, humans are diseased with the desire for things that we are not made for.
The core problem never changes and manifests unrelentingly in whatever conflict we find ourselves. But, what if that's actually good news for us? According to the New Testament, the life and faith of Jesus have accomplished the reconciliation of all things, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the dead. If Jesus made us right with God when we were weak, ungodly, unrighteous, and sinners (Rom. 5), then all of life is thanksgiving.
None of life is about giving thanks correctly. None of life is insisting anyone become less weak, ungodly, unrighteous, or sinful - they have already become so in Christ. It's not the way we give thanks that makes us more or less included in all God's gifts. It's the gift we've been given that provides us with life. Leave it to us to turn even thanksgiving into a work, a scale, or an acid test.
If Jesus made us right with God when we were weak, ungodly, unrighteous, and sinners (Rom. 5), then all of life is thanksgiving.
WHAT IF LIVING IS THANKSGIVING?
We were not given a gift with a command to use it right or lose it. The object of our faith is the all-sufficient One who did something that cannot be undone by undoing all the effects of our distrust in him. Giving thanks is living life and closing the book on trying to make God proud. You can't make God more of something he already eternally is.
Giving thanks is living life and closing the book on trying to make God proud. You can't make God more of something he already eternally is.
If you want to experience the freedom of thanksgiving, resist the urge to patronize the grace of God. He is not appeased, pleased, or pacified by anything you say or do. He is everlasting life for anyone willing to receive him as a gift. Everyone can raise a glass to that.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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