November 27, 2008
The Feast of Tabernacles is the great Old Testament harvest feast. The instructions about Tabernacles in Deuteronomy contain one of my favorite commandments in the Bible, "Be joyful at your Feast" (Deuteronomy 16:14).
The passage does not seem to allow any exceptions. God's people were to gather each year—regardless of how good or bad the harvest (their economy) happened to be—and were commanded to feast and be joyful as they reflected on the goodness of God toward them.
That pretty much sums up my plan for tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day. We have church at ten and then in the afternoon we join family and friends for what promises to be an amazing feast on a lovely autumn day.
The sixteenth century reformer, John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion wrote:
The contemplation of God's goodness in his creation will lead us to thankfulness and trust. …It is to recognize that God has destined all things for our good and salvation but at the same time to feel his power and grace in ourselves and in the great benefits he has conferred upon us, and so bestir ourselves to trust, invoke, praise, and love him. (2.14.22)
"God's goodness in his creation" includes not only the natural world, but all we lawfully make of the natural world—our homes, cars, clothes, cities. And it includes the food we eat.
God in his wisdom made us creatures who need to eat several times a day. Perhaps it was because food preparation and eating remind us of our physicality. Human embodiment is not a handicap or a curse. It is the nature with which a loving Creator made us. From that thought it is only a short step to the Incarnation. God too in the first advent of the Son took on human physicality. Our bodies and our need for food are reasons for gratitude.
Preparing and eating food also reminds us of our dependence. We depend on God who, Calvin goes on to say, "created all things for man's sake." We depend on the Earth that yields us its fruit. We depend on farmers, processors, truckers, stockers, checkers, baggers, and chefs. These and others are our benefactors. We depend on their labor and owe thanks to our benefactors and to our God who supplies them.
Thomas Aquinas reasoned in his Summa Theologica that, "a debt of gratitude is a moral debt required by virtue. Now a thing is a sin from the fact of its being contrary to virtue. Wherefore it is evident that every ingratitude is a sin."
