November 2024
From Pastor Eric’s Study – November 2024
This has been an extraordinarily beautiful fall! The weather has been uncharacteristically warm, and now the colors are bursting forth in celebration of the changing seasons — how glorious! This change of season also portends the coming of Thanksgiving (or, for some, the chance to sit in the woods and watch nature wake up as another hunting season approaches). The Thanksgiving holiday holds a special place for us as a nation. The history of the first Thanksgiving is incredibly complicated and linked to histories within our nation that are unredeemable, broken alliances, broken treaties, and a government sanctioned genocide of our Indigenous brothers and sisters. That history is painful and not something to hold with pride in its entirety, but it was also a moment when people gave thanks for forming relationships across differences.
Our faith has always put gratitude at the very center of our story. In the first creation story, in Genesis one, God consistently assesses the creative progress and proclaims, “… and it was good… and it was good… and it was very good!” That proclamation of affirmation holds a sentiment of gratitude and wonder for what is emerging from God's creative flair. Our story continues with the command for us to offer “first fruits,” the first portion of each harvest or gathering, as an offering to God. It is a practice that is meant to remind us that the blessings we receive aren’t merely the product of our toil, but rather a gift from God's ongoing creative energy.
As a child, I remember my great-grandmother speaking about beginning each day with gratitude for being alive for another day, and then at the end of that day, giving thanks for what had unfolded. Over the years, I’ve found that people who live with this attitude are very special gifts in my life, and there have been many of them. People who live with gratitude as the heart of their being are a joy to be around. While those people may be wonderful inspiration woven into the fabric of my life, it’s not always as easy to practice that spirit of steady gratitude. Often enough, I find that I need to practice a lesson that our first exchange student offered and “pick an attitude.” The attitude we should always begin with is one of thanksgiving. There is always something for which we can be grateful, even in circumstances or relationships that test us to our limits.
Even as we hear and feel the tensions in our nation and our world, I pray that we can take a deep breath and admire the changing colors of fall, to hope for the best in humanity, and look at our lives and our world and find those things that call forth gratitude… even if that takes some real searching. Then I pray that we can share that spirit of thanksgiving with those around us. This life is an incredible blessing. Those with whom we share it are gifts, imperfect though we all surely are. Each day is filled with wonders large and small that are just waiting to be celebrated as good and very good.
Together we are given the opportunity to bear God's witness of love in the world.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving we will gather again at Cedar Ridge for an ecumenical Thanksgiving service at 7 p.m. Following the service there will be a chance for a pie social. It is an opportunity for us to gather with others from our wider community — Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, UCC, and Cedar’s chaplaincy — to remember again how good it is to reorient ourselves toward gratitude.
May God bless us, lifting up a humble, thankful song that crosses all boundaries!