Most US churches will devote the entire month of December to Christmas festivities. It's what we all do in hopes of recapturing the true meaning of Christmas. But I just gotta say this: if we have not been able to rekindle that flickering flame in three centuries of trying, it's probably not going to catch fire in 2009 either! We tend to forget that most congregations in the American colonies banned Christmas more than 300 years ago because it had nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with drunkenness and irreverence.
We will always have the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the fact that the Word became flesh, but we've probably lost 'Winter Holidays' forever. The same is true of Easter. Americans have come to associate that Spring festival with the change of seasons, new Spring fashions, pagan eggs and bunnies, or a week of vacation. People who don't show up for worship on Easter Sunday have no clue they were supposed to be celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ all along.
The only truly Christian holiday that's left for us is Thanksgiving. It's a national day of gratitude to the God of the Bible. It was He who went to such great lengths to guide Christopher Columbus to these shores when he was trying to find India! It was the Almighty God who enabled the poor, unlearned Pilgrims to survive their first brutal winter after they relocated from England to these hostile shores. The Indians who would have massacred them had died suddenly. The ones who dropped by to visit actually felt sorry for them and taught them to plant corn and trap beavers. Their survival and eventual success led to the original creation of this day of Giving Thanks.
A couple of years ago, I asked some school children what they thought Thanksgiving was all about. Their schools had taught them it was about being thankful to the Indians for helping the Pilgrims grow corn. That's wrong! It's not quite as wrong as the idea that Thanksgiving is about turkey and football, but it's still misguided.
The first Thanksgiving Feast was about giving thanks to the Heavenly Father who had provided for his people in mysterious ways during arduous times. There will be a lot of handwringing this year about where America is headed, and justiably so. But don't forget where America came from. Perhaps if we were more intentional in giving thanks and more deliberate in retelling the true story of Thanksgiving, we might eventually recapture the right stuff that has always made us great: faith in Jesus Christ and character forged by fire.
Don't miss the wonder of Thanksgiving. Start practicing today and you might just be ready when the big day arrives.
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