Thought for the Week - November 17

Thought for the Week – Thanksgiving
(excerpt from Chick Lane, Director of the Center for Stewardship Leaders at Luther Seminary)
Thanksgiving is the ultimate annual stewardship festival. Every year, God's people stop to give thanks to God for God's abundance. God is owner of all that is, and thanksgiving is our response to God's generosity.  

The first lesson for Thanksgiving can be the occasion for a call for such thanksgiving in a culture of considerable affluence. Deuteronomy 8 contains a portion of Moses' speech to the people as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. The verses are all about forgetting and remembering. Moses' fear is that when the people arrive in the Promised Land, and when they begin to thrive there, they will forget all that God has done for them, and will instead take credit for all that they have.  

These words become all the more powerful, according to numerous commentators, when we realize that they probably weren't written down until centuries later, when precisely what Moses warned against had happened. The people have done well in the land, and they have forgotten God, the source of all they are and all they have.

In his commentary on Deuteronomy (p. 109), Walter Brueggemann has written, "The crisis reflected in the text, and in Israel's lived reality in the land, is that gifts given in abundance to the satiated do not finally eventuate in trusting gratitude, but in complacent self-congratulations. A gift kept long enough begins to seem like a possession. A gift kept long enough becomes separated in the memory from the giver, so that the giver is forgotten."

As we prepare to sing, "Now Thank We All Our God" in the richest land in the history of the world, Moses' words (and Brueggemann's) stand as a harsh challenge to us. How have we forgotten? How have we taken personal credit for that which God has entrusted to our care? How has this kept us from truly remembering the giver? What is the connection between remembering and thanking? And what is the connection between forgetting and self-congratulation?

The Thanksgiving festival holiday provides a powerful opportunity in the midst of unrivaled affluence to remember God, the source of all that is, and to remember to give thanks.