Episode 301: Thanksgiving

As familiar as it is to many, Thanksgiving really is a strange sort of a holiday, if you think about it.  As an American celebration, it points backward in theory to Puritan colonists being grateful for surviving in a harsh new setting, but it wasn't until Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War still raging, that we had a declaration of a national holiday observing Thanksgiving.  On the other hand, societies have been giving thanks in celebration of harvests throughout human history, across cultures, centuries, and religious traditions.  And even though the notion of giving thanks--presumably to the divine--for the good in our lives isn't unique to Christianity, Christians certainly are called to gratitude as a whole way of life.  Even our celebration of the Lord's Supper, or Holy Communion, is sometimes referred to as "the Eucharist," which simply means, "Thanksgiving."  So how do we own our unique vantage point as Christ-followers, who address our thanks to the God we know in Jesus, while also recognizing that there is something universally human about the practice of gratitude?  And how do we make sure we don't confine that gratitude to a day of overeating in November?  That's the conversation we're having this week here on Crazy Faith talk, with pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve around the microphone as usual.