Thanksgiving done right

Few American holidays are more deeply rooted in protestant and secular tradition than Thanksgiving Day. Color, food, football and the unofficial kickoff of the holiday season. On the surface, the idea of giving thanks to God is an undeniable objective good.

That's the rub, though, isn't it?

It is easy to be thankful when the kids are playing in the leaves, the Christmas lights are up, the TV is blaring the Macy's parade, and everyone is laughing and celebrating around a table of great food. The bills are paid, the 401 K is up, and everyone is healthy. Many people take these things for granted so I at least applaud you for being thankful for them.

Thanksgiving is simply giving God His due. It is the realization that God cannot do anything but love and every act of His ordained will or permissive will is ordered to the greatest end. This is an infallible truth that must be accepted in faith. Since it is an act of faith that must apprehend this fact, we are often subjected to a trial of faith. This trial of faith presents a crisis in the form of a direct conflict between what our faith demands and what our eyes see.

God is love and it cannot be otherwise. However, sometimes it just doesn't look that way and that's when the crisis of faith hits and the ability to be thankful becomes very difficult.

I'm sure the family of Bethany Magee would love to be spending Thanksgiving at home. Instead, they will spend it with her, in the burn unit of a hospital.

A monster walked on to a train, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.

This is where the idea of Thanksgiving gets messy.

How are we supposed to manage thankfulness in the face of such a horror? Are we to be thankful that she is alive because bystanders stepped in? Ok. She is alive and hopefully will remain so.

Even so, she endured a horror most of us cannot even imagine. She will be traumatized and scarred for life and her whole family as well.

How can they be thankful? How can they believe any good can come from this atrocity? How can they ever come to grips with the fact that God did not intervene at some point in the long chain of events that shaped this person into the monster he has begun? Why did God not throw up a roadblock somewhere that would have prevented this? Make the gas pump malfunction. Make Bethany late for the train. Make the perpetrator trip and fall so she could get away.

Sometimes it seems God allows every obstacle in the world to frustrate the lives of those trying to do good but when it comes to giving an assist to the helpless, He doesn't. We are left stunned in searching for the reasons why.

Are we the first to struggle with this question? by no means.

"We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being given up to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh." 2 Corinthians 4:8-11

If Paul, the most prolific of the Biblical writers, was afflicted and perplexed, we are in good company. It was Paul who begged God to remove the thorn in his flesh, but Jesus refused, citing the sufficiency of His Grace.

It is so ironic that Paul's epistles are cited by protestants as the heart of the gospel, even more than the gospels themselves. Protestant soteriology paints such a distorted image of Paul that it's hard to imagine we are talking about the same Apostle. Paul never believed or taught a salvation completely divorced from acts of the moral law. One only has to read Romans chapter 2 to see this. Paul never believed in a salvation without suffering. On the contrary, he understood that our suffering completes our salvation and aids the salvation of others.

Colossians 1

²⁴ Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, ²⁵ of which I became a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, ²⁶ the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now made manifest to his saints. ²⁷ To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. ²⁸ Him we proclaim, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man mature in Christ. ²⁹ For this I toil, striving with all the energy which he mightily inspires within me.

This is the confounding mystery of being a true Christian. Paul's sufferings were certainly not always inflicted on him by people doing God's will any more than was the suffering inflicted on Bethany Magee or countless other victims of horrendous crimes. The mystery lies in God's refusal to let the devil have his victory.

In the 5th chapter of his letter to the Romans, Paul declares that where sin abounds, grace abounds that much more. The logical end of that is astounding to try and contemplate because the truth of what it implies is incomprehensible to us.

What happened to Bethany was not ordained by God. It did not fail to grieve God. God's wrath awaits the person who did it, barring a miraculous conversion.

Despite all that, God's promise, in the midst of this atrocity, is that His grace is going to bring about a particular good that is so tremendous that it was even worth His not stepping in to thwart this unimaginable tragedy. I cannot even begin to imagine what that would look like, but I must accept it on faith. When you understand this real and genuine faith, you understand that an assent to faith and a profession of faith are not enough. Faith must be lived in the crucible where we are pounded and crushed for our own purification.

This transforms the entire concept of Thanksgiving from one for blessings received because some blessings are disguised curses and some curses are disguised blessings and we often can't tell the difference. As my very wise friend Dr. Fred Boley put it, with regards to Luke 11, ''Sometimes an egg looks like a scorpion''.

The truth is that, in full analyses of all things, there is only one gift from God that should be our whole and total focus. That gift is to hear those words

''Well done, good and faithful servant''.

That reward is worth forsaking every good thing we might receive and it's worth enduring any pain we may have to suffer. We cannot possibly know what they will be nor fully understand them when they come. Only the destination matters and only The King knows how to get us there.

Thanksgiving is transformed from what He does to who He is because we cannot fully understand either but have to trust both.

Lord, you are trying to save me. Through me and, sometimes, despite me.

Thank You.