Celebrating Thanksgiving with a spirit of ingratitude

In just another two days the better part of America will set aside the activities of normal everyday life and in one way or another participate in those activities that set this day apart from all the rest, it being the day of national thanksgiving.

In many homes it will be a day of feasting with family and friends, the preparations for which may have already begun. Others will leave their homes for larger, more public gatherings and will lend their aid in helping those less fortunate than themselves. But whatever the activity, it is a day of introspection; that is, a day of looking within ourselves and realizing that what we possess is what has been given to us, and this ultimately by Almighty God himself.

But while this should be a day of thanksgiving, what is painfully clear to me is that some will be coming to the table with a spirit of ingratitude. Theirs will not be a celebration with any deeper meaning than a day off from work or school. They will not have an appreciation for those who have put that food on the table or the hands that have prepared it. They will give no thought to the origins of the day, the presidents who proclaimed it or the Congress that enshrined it. Neither will they consider the people who established it and the God they worshiped.

It is a mark of ingratitude to forget about the Pilgrim fathers. While the vestiges of the Pilgrims can still be found adorning the halls and windows of schools, churches, public buildings and private homes, what largely goes unreported and untaught is the lessons they learned through hardship. Many people have no idea that they floated the idea of communism and that it failed miserably, such that they nearly starved the second winter as well as the first. You would think that in a small “Christian” setting that the idea of everyone supporting the community would have worked, but with women in short supply and single men having to work for another man’s family, the disparity led to failure.

Despite its failure, that idea is being floated again today. It is floated in the workplace. While not every workplace will have it, government jobs are notorious for it. What it effectively does is mask the effects of the unproductive worker by forcing those who care about their jobs to pull more than their share of the load. And it is floated in the classroom under the guise of group assignments. Again, it masks the effect of the unproductive student forcing those who care about their grades to do more.

To their credit and our chagrin, the Pilgrims were quick to learn from their failures, and after only two hard winters demonstrated for us the benefits of private property capitalism. At the end of that second winter, each man was given his own parcel of land and seed.

Though there was the issue of taxation, when every man saw that his own prosperity was in measure to his own exertion, he put his heart and soul into it. Families labored together in support of the family and the single men labored for themselves.

Folks, while capitalism is not perfect and anything tainted with human nature will have its flaws, private property capitalism is the biblical model. II Thessalonians 3 says “… that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.”

It is also a mark of ingratitude to forget about the God of our Pilgrim fathers. There is absolutely no way you can genuinely celebrate Thanksgiving while rejecting the Judeo-Christian God. It was to him that they offered up thanksgiving. It was for him and his worship that they made their pilgrimage across the sea, enduring great hardship, death, disease and privation.

The truth is that Thanksgiving, as a national holiday, testifies of a Christian heritage. That it took until 1963 for anti-Christian forces to remove Christ from our classrooms only strengthens the assertion. Personally, I cannot fathom observing a day designed to honor someone I despised. But what is clear to me is that if I did, it would be without thankfulness; there would be no real thanksgiving in my heart.

But such will not be the case in my home. In two days when we gather with family and friends, it will be with thanksgiving in our hearts to Almighty God, who alone deserves our thanks. Not only does he deserve my thanks for so great a salvation through Jesus Christ, but that he has allowed me to be born in so great a nation.

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla; contact him at 357-4229 or rghamman@mtaonline.net