Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

How many people here remember Thanksgiving decorations?

I remember one in particular we had growing up, a venerable old cardboard turkey with a body and tail made out of that folded tissue paper—you opened it up in a 360 degree circle to form the body and fan so you could set him on the dining room table.

And Thanksgiving was a big deal in school as well—I remember we were given a pile of construction paper, scissors, glue and crayons, and had the choice of whether we wanted to make Pilgrim hats or Indian headbands so that we could play out the first Thanksgiving dinner in class.

But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?

As we’ve remarked in the past, this is a holiday that nobody seems to know what to do with anymore—as soon as the Halloween decorations disappear from the Walmart shelves, it’s all Santa and snowflakes.

The old tissue paper turkeys are hard to find anymore—and good luck finding an elementary school teacher with the intestinal fortitude to let kids dress up as Pilgrims and Indians!

Such a culturally appropriating and bigoted display of white privilege and systemic racism would be deeply shameful to a lot of government school educators today.

(Unless maybe they have Governor Bradford portrayed as a drag queen—that would probably make it okay for school children!)

Beloved, it is no coincidence that a day devoted to thanksgiving has fallen out of favor in our day and age.

We are a people who are in full-bore rebellion against God (to the point of denying that He even exists).

And a people who deny the existence of a Creator are a people who have no one to thank!

In other words,

Thanksgiving can only EXIST in a world CREATED by GOD

If you search the Scriptures, you will see several places where the proper response to God’s creative activity is thanksgiving, The psalmists regularly made the connection between thanksgiving and God’s creative activity.

The psalm we read earlier in worship directly connects God as Creator with our duty to thank Him:

Psalm 100:3–4 (ESV)

3 Know that the Lord, he is God!

It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise!

Give thanks to him; bless his name!

The same truth is echoed in Psalm 95--

The psalmist calls God’s people to come with thanksgiving, with thankfulness:

Psalm 95:1–2 (ESV)

1 Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

And what is the reason we are to thank Him?

Psalm 95:3–5 (ESV)

3 For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

4 In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.

5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.

The proper response to God as Creator is thankfulness to Him; gratitude for what He has done.

This is why we say that Thanksgiving is only possible if God is the Creator; Thanksgiving can only exist in a world created by God.

This is why the Apostle Paul makes that same connection in our text this morning:

Romans 1:20–21 (ESV)

20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Mankind should have responded to the knowledge of God’s creative activity with thanksgiving, but since they refused, they have become foolish, dark and futile.

The world we live in is rejecting the truth that God is the Creator; and without God as creator, thanksgiving (whether the act or the holiday) makes no sense.

But because God is the Creator,

I. Thanksgiving is made POSSIBLE (Gen.

1:1)

Because Genesis 1:1 is true:

Genesis 1:1 (ESV)

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

then it is possible to be thankful.

It stands to reason, but it is still worth establishing—Because God is the Creator, Thanksgiving is made possible because

You have SOMEONE to THANK

If there is no Creator, if all of reality is nothing more than time and chance acting on matter, then thanksgiving is pointless because there is no one to thank—in fact, even your thoughts of “thankfulness” or “gratitude” are nothing more than the effects of the neurons and chemicals in your brain bubbling and fizzing in a particular way—they are no more meaningful or significant than any other chemical reaction.

Drop a few Mentos into a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and watch it fizz—it may be making a mess all over the table, but you can’t say it’s being thankful, can you?

Thanksgiving is only possible if we live in a world created by God.

If you deny the existence of God, you deny the only possible foundation on which the idea of thankfulness can exist.

The fact that God is the Creator means that thanksgiving is possible—and secondly, the fact that God is the Creator means that

II.

Thanksgiving is not “PRIVILEGED” (2 Cor.

9:6)

This is probably one of the biggest reasons that Thanksgiving is so out of favor in our current cultural moment—it offends just about every sensibility of the Critical Race Theory/ Social Justice narrative that wants to fundamentally re-define our nation’s history.

As one university professor puts it:

"One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting."

(Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin, cited from Wikipedia, The Independent.

November 27, 2019.

January 13, 2020.)

“How dare you sit there with your white privilege, enjoying your turkey dinner with all the trimmings, celebrating the brutal repression of the Native American people by the white colonialist religious bigots who came and took their land from them!!

You sit there at your Thanksgiving dinner, benefiting from the systemic and institutionalized racism that they brought here, while People of Color are impoverished by all your excess!”

As we have observed before, all of the Critical Race Theory, Social Justice philosophy is built on a carping envy that presumes that if you have wealth, it necessarily means that someone else has less.

If you have a full table on Thanksgiving and a loving family to sit around it, that must mean that somehow, somewhere, you prevented someone else from having that full table.

And, once again, the answer is found in the fact that God is the Creator.

What I mean is this: When God created the heavens and the earth and everything that is in them (as the Scriptures never tire of telling us), when He was done, He was not diminished by it.

In other words, God is the infinite source of all things.

Everything that has been made was made by Him, and when He was done creating He was just as infinitely full and complete as when He began.

In other words,

The world is not a ZERO-SUM GAME (2 Corinthians 9:6)

God has not designed this world as if it were a big pie that you slice up, with only so much to go around.

Since God—the source of all things—is infinite, that means that he has created a world where blessings and graces multiply.

The “pie”, as it were, grows!

And that means that greed and grasping stinginess winds up with less, and open handedness and generous faithfulness winds up with more!

2 Corinthians 9:6 (ESV)

6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

As one author puts it:

So someone else is rich, and you are not?

He is not wronging you.

Someone else is a man, and you are a woman?

He is not wronging you.

Someone else comes from a class that has had historic privileges?

He is not wronging you.

You can multiply examples, and it will always come out the same.

Thanksgiving for what you actually have is the key that will release you from the dungeons of carping ingratitude (Doug Wilson, “Making America an Ingrate Again”, https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/ingrates-and-gratitude.html,

retrieved 11/10/2022)

Thanksgiving is not an exercise in “white privilege”, because the world is not a zero-sum game that necessarily excludes some people—it was created by an infinite and inexhaustibly open-handed and generous Creator!

Because God is the Creator, Thanksgiving is possible.

Because God is the Creator, Thanksgiving is not “privileged”.

And because God is the Creator,

III.

Thanksgiving is your DUTY (v.

21a; cp.

Deut.

28:47-48)

Paul makes it clear in verse 21 that God’s creatures have a duty to thank Him for all His creative acts:

Romans 1:21 (ESV)

21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

We see the same thing in the Old Testament, where Moses warns the people that they are duty-bound to worship God in gratitude for all of the abundance He has given them, and that they would be held accountable for neglecting that duty:

Deuteronomy 28:47–48 (ESV)