As a nation, we gather in our homes today with friends and family members to celebrate Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, there will be far too many celebrations that are missing key members or are simply far less joyful than they should be, given the deep divide created during this last election cycle. Whether your candidate won or lost, I expect that the one thing that we can all agree on is that the hyperbolic rhetoric used during the campaign ads was designed to create support for one candidate at the expense of vilifying not only the opposition, but those who supported the opposing candidate. That approach cannot help but create division amongst people who would otherwise care deeply for each other.
Yet it was during an even more divisive period in our nation’s history that the official proclamation for a National Day of Thanksgiving was first proposed. In 1863, two years into our Civil War that saw families on opposite sides of the battlefield from each other, President Abraham Lincoln declared the following:
“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
As Lincoln pointed out, humans are regularly engaged in all sorts of horrible behavior that has real-world repercussions that are painful and lasting. Such behavior cannot help but result in division. However, that is not how we were designed to operate. Properly functioning, the human heart seeks after “our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” thereby allowing us to dwell together in “the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
Lincoln’s wise suggestion during a time when neighbor was trying to kill neighbor is equally applicable in a time when neighbor votes differently than neighbor. A day spent not giving thanks for food on the table, but rather a day giving thanks to the God and Author of life and our salvation. In times of division, we need to look far outside of ourselves, to the One who made us in His own image – the One who so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16). Spending the day giving thanks to God should hopefully reset our hearts, so that we can love our neighbors as ourselves, living together in peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.
Peace, blessings, and Happy Thanksgiving – Pastor Aaron