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By Chris Brennan Homiak America’s Thanksgiving seems to be mostly about food, family, football, parades and shopping. And sometimes gratitude manages to make a brief appearance. Growing up, my day began with watching the parades with fancy floats and Broadway samplers, then flipping to the Detroit Lions game. Mid-afternoon, a turkey and/or ham would be ready, along with three or four big casseroles, fruit salad, rolls and pumpkin pie. Most years, before eating, we’d go around the table and share some things we were grateful for, then share a prayer. I’d stuff myself until ‘tired-turkey syndrome’ kicked in, and then I’d retire to the couch for a nap. When I got up, I’d eat some tasty leftovers. The day after Thanksgiving, we’d join the frenzied crowds at the mall to start off the Christmas shopping season. This year, I’m trying to look at Thanksgiving with new eyes. Wikipedia reminds me that Thanksgiving has roots in an annual Harvest Festival, an organic feast of gratitude celebrated by people who had worked the land for their food and had just finished an exhausting preparation for winter. Today we’re such passive consumers of our food, so isolated from and ignorant of the growing process, that it’s hard to really feel gratitude for “the end of the harvest season.” Produce and canned goods stay in our grocery stores year-round. I wonder how participation in harvest, or a greater connectedness to seasonal and local food sources, might reawaken harvest gratitude. What if we primarily bought locally-harvested meat and vegetables? Or what if we paused for a few minutes before stuffing our faces to consider the whole life journey of each menu item? I’ve also been asking myself what challenge Jesus might offer me for this cultural holiday. In the familiar story of the native Wampanoag people hosting the Pilgrims at a 3-day feast is a picture of radical hospitality. People who were intensely different from each other were able to share and feast together, depleting their winter storage in a generous act of welcome and community. The original celebration was more ‘outward-focused’ and boldly inclusive than our feasts usually are today. At best, my Thanksgiving tables have included estranged cousins or classmates far away from home. What if we invited the homeless, the widowed and the stranger into our own homes to share this meal? Throughout the gospels, Jesus is eating with different outcasts and even gives banquet instructions in Luke 14. Rather than inviting your social network of friends and family who can pay you back, Jesus says to invite the poor, crippled, lame and blind. He blurs boundary lines and preaches an inclusive banquet. The servant is sent to the streets and lanes, and even beyond the city gates, inviting the destitute and disabled, the prostitutes and refugees, the homeless and jobless. Jesus urges us to invite those who can teach us something about gratitude, who can humble us and show us a new kind of self-giving and simplicity. For me, real gratitude involves recognizing God’s generosity, but it also demands relationships of redistribution. God is creating and sustaining a world that has enough resources to meet everyone’s needs, but we live in a world of tragic inequality. God’s care, concern and provision are for the whole world, thus my ‘blessings’ come with a tremendous responsibility to look beyond to those who have fewer material resources. Jesus challenges us to turn this holiday feast inside-out: from passive consuming to inter-connectedness and care for creation; from self-serving gluttony and greed to others-focused generosity and gratitude. Chris Brennan Homiak recently moved back to Kansas City after mentoring at CrossTies Community and the Gospel Cafe in Waco, TX. He is currently visiting/volunteering at a church called Revolution.
Original content by: http://www.inwardoutward.org/?p=230.
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