As we cozy around our Thanksgiving turkeys, with fewer people perhaps this year than usual, my hope us all is that we’ll deeply connect with our gratitude for all God’s blessed us with.  For most of us, the Holiday season arrives, and we get a few moments of rest to survey the contours of our life.  There, like FD the other day before worship, most of us will be touched deeply in our hearts by a profound thanksgiving of our blessings.   We’re grateful for the burnished turkey which adorns our table and stuffing made with Neese’s sausage and green bean casserole and pumpkin pie, heavily laden with freshly whipped cream, and….

            Got off track there a bit, easy to do when I get to talking about food. 

            But there, at the Thanksgiving table, we are thankful.  For family, for friends, for health, for many things no doubt.  At the first church I served as an ordained pastor at, they had a tradition, which was awesome for pastor’s heading into the Advent cycle.  The tradition was that (and here’s why I loved it) INSTEAD of a sermon, the congregation members would rise and tell everyone in the sanctuary exactly what they were thankful for on that particular year.

            It was a nice tradition, it really was.  People would cite the usual things for the most part – a spouse, the church, the roof over their heads.  One little boy, a real wild card, announced he would be thankful once the service the over. 

            Now I don’t know about you, but I always find myself especially MORE thankful when things turn out the way I envisioned them.  Like, I imagine having a great wife and kids and BOOM, there they are.  But, on other occasions, when I don’t get what I wanted or thought I deserved, it’s hard for me to process Paul’s admonishing us all to be thankful, for everything.  1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 reads, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”  Which, to my thinking, includes being both cheerful and thankful when either my beloved Braves lose a big game.  Still haven’t quite mastered that ability…yet but the Braves sure give me enough opportunities to practice.

            But then I remember a story. 

            You know the kind.  The type that when you hear it, you know that its impact struck so deep that you’re likely never to forget it, or the lesson it taught.  The Prodigal Son is a story like that, isn’t it?  There are others, to be sure.  Some Biblical, some not.

            Christian pastor Frederick Buechner tells a story of being in the Army on bivouac.  It was the wintertime somewhere near Anniston, Alabama and he was eating his meager supper out of a mess kit in the cold, drizzling rain.  All around him was mud, the sun was disappearing in the west and the cold was creeping in.

             It had been a long day and Buechner was still hungry after finishing his dinner.  He noticed that another soldier nearby had left something that he wasn’t going to eat.  It was a turnip.  He asked the man if he could have it.  The man said yes and tossed it towards him.  Buechner missed the catch and the turnip landed squarely in the mud.  He wanted it so badly that he reached down to the ground and began eating the turnip, mud and all. 

             Time deepened and slowed down. With a lurch of the heart, he suddenly understood that not only was the turnip good, so was the mud and the rain and the cold.  Even the Army that he’d dreaded for months was good as well. 

            Buechner writes – “Sitting there in the Alabama winter with a mouthful of cold turnip and mud, I could see that if you ever truly took to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to give thanks to God for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak to the birds of the air about it.”

            But there’s the rub.   We may in fact find a way to be thankful for all of our blessings.  Both those things which’ve wallowed in mud (Literally and figuratively) AS WELL AS those that have not and turned out exactly the way we wished them to.

            But, whether Republican or Democrat, are we thankful for the outcome of the many elections in this country?  

            Are we thankful for quarantine?

            Are we grateful for COVID?