Sermon for Thanksgiving (Year C, 2025): More Than Sentiment: Re-Occupying the Meaning of Thanksgiving

Sermon for Thanksgiving (Year C, 2025)

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Psalm 100

Philippians 4:4-9

John 6:25-35

Preached by Aaron Conner

November 27, 2025

at Church of the Advent of Christ the King, San Francisco

More Than Sentiment: Re-Occupying the Meaning of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is here. Some of us are thrilled to see relatives; some of us might dread the arguments; some feel alone. All of us, in one way or another, have things which we are grateful for. After all, it's why we are here celebrating Eucharist on a civic holiday. Americans know how to celebrate Thanksgiving. We gather for family, football, and turkey—but is that really thanksgiving, or just habit? Webster's first definition of thanksgiving is “a public acknowledgment or celebration of divine goodness.” But, for many people, the holiday is just a chance to see family, both chosen and relatives, who we cherish and seldom see, and name a few things we’re grateful for while carving the turkey. Also, for many people, this is the start of the season where they become more aware of their estrangements, isolation, and loneliness. Judging by our cultural sentiments, and the Hallmark Channel, nostalgia runs deep: for the relatives we love to see, the recipes passed from one generation to the next.

Yet the holiday collapses into a Norman Rockwell–esque image lodged in the national imagination almost as firmly as our loyalty to mashed potatoes and gravy. In doing so, we might say we celebrate Thanksgiving, but our celebration is really about something different. Part of the human condition is that we cling to cultural expectations and idealized memories. We as a country idolize the past, drawing strength from the story of the Pilgrims, a people who sought religious freedom and nearly died for it. Though it didn’t make it into public-school curriculum until the last century, the Thanksgiving myth of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a friendly “First Thanksgiving” actually began in the 1800s. It was Sarah Josepha Hale, the Martha Stewart of her time, who campaigned for a national Thanksgiving holiday and published a sentimental version of the story in her magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book.* (She also helped place turkey at the center of the meal). We idolize the present by participating in these comforting rituals every year around food and loved ones and parades and games. On one hand, leaving behind the caricatures of Pilgrims and Native Americans in recent years is a healthy development; on the other hand, in distancing ourselves from that Thanksgiving narrative, the holiday loses its orientation toward real gratitude that comes from reflecting on hardship and what that implies for the present moment. It becomes a day out of the year where actually being thankful for something comes secondary to everything else thanksgiving that we imagine thanksgiving is.

So, is the answer then to return to the old model of Thanksgiving, where the holiday is admired more for its images of Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower? This narrative—along with familiar images of family, parades, and football—have masked deeper questions about the kind of gratitude that the word “Thanksgiving” calls for. If we can’t find the true meaning of gratitude in the ways Thanksgiving has been presented to us, then where shall we find it? If a public acknowledgment of divine goodness—much like the Pilgrim narrative—the definition of thanksgiving we are going for, then history has done us a wonderful favor. When the holiday was still observed unevenly depending on what State you were in, President Abraham Lincoln responded to Sarah Hale's campaign and proclaimed it in 1863 as a national—not for legend or sentiment, but for real blessings in the midst of a Civil War.* Lincoln issued a proclamation on October 3, 1863, establishing the last Thursday of November as a day of gratitude.

Lincoln wrote:

“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies… We are prone to forget the Source of our blessings, and it is fit that we should acknowledge our dependence and humbly confess our national sins… It has seemed to me fit and proper that these blessings should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.”— Abraham Lincoln, 1863

Lincoln’s invitation to observe “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father” rests on this honest assessment of the human condition: when we sentimentalize how good the past was, we are prone to forget the source of our blessings now. Clergy across the nation took up Lincoln’s spiritual charge that year, including Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks, who preached at Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia on our text from Deuteronomy 26.*

In his Thanksgiving sermon Our Mercies of Re-Occupation, Brooks introduces the idea of “re-occupying” God’s promises. Re-occupying God's promises rests on the fact that there was not a day in Egypt or in the days wandering in the wilderness that God's promises to the Israelites was void. The promise was always there despite contrary evidence in any given moment. Deuteronomy describes what Israel is to do upon entering the Promise to them: they are to bring their first fruits, present them at the sanctuary, recite a brief creed rehearsing God’s saving acts, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (Deut. 26:5)—a reminder that every generation stands within the unfolding fulfillment of God’s covenant from then until now. They bow before the Lord, and then join in the ongoing celebration with the community (Deut. 26:1–11). This liturgy of thanksgiving did more than acknowledge their presence in the land—it signaled that they were actively living in God’s promise. Brooks preached that God’s reality was always Israel’s reality.

For Brooks, this ancient act of thanksgiving was not so different from the holiday Lincoln proclaimed. “Those who founded this day believed in an ever-fresh Providence,” he said, a Providence that ensures no year is “empty-handed of its own peculiar blessings.” To “re-occupy” God’s blessings, as Brooks taught, is to depend upon God’s ever-fresh providence by inhabiting the values God calls us to—values like freedom, dignity, and equality. In Brooks’s time, this meant supporting emancipation, securing full civil rights for formerly enslaved people, exercising civic responsibility, and sharing prosperity equitably. In cultivating these values, we walk in the Promised Land—not promoting the idea that America is the Promised Land, but that as Americans we can fully inhabit God’s Kingdom in this country.

Like the Israelites on the way to God’s purpose, who complained that life was better back in Egypt (Exod. 16:2–3; Num. 11:4–6), we too have a tendency to idolize the past. “How much better it was before the pandemic, before (insert any election here), before the housing crash, before 9/11. If only the present were like then, we wouldn’t have to work so hard on these values that God is asking us to inhabit!” But in idolizing the past we keep the present locked in amber, always yearning for something different in the opposite direction of where God is calling us. The Good News for a human condition inclined to idolize the past and sentimentalize the present is that once the Israelites reached their promise to Abraham, the promise didn't stop. They kept living in it. Re-occupying God’s blessings is to depend on God by constantly renewing and refocusing our minds, trusting that what we have to be thankful for now is only partially realized—and that God is not done with us yet. Our lesson from our ancient ancestors in faith is to not use the past as the answer to our present challenges. We have to learn to live in these challenges as if we are already living into God's promises.

The applications for today are easily identifiable, but just as hard to carry out. Like the crowd who wanted more bread from Jesus—bread they could depend on to get them through a very real challenge of hunger—Jesus offers them the same thing, yet not ordinary bread, but the bread that comes from heaven (John 6:32–35). He tells us plainly to work for this bread (John 6:27). Nationally, we work for this bread by carrying on the emancipation of all God’s children, advocating that the laws of this land reflect the God-given dignity of all people, as our baptismal covenant asks of us. We must ensure that all who participate in civic responsibility may do so safely and equitably. Individually, we must ask ourselves: What is the bread we are working for? Is it the bread that tries to fix a world of broken systems, or the bread from heaven that is part of God’s promise—an answer to those systems? Are we working for bread that merely helps us make ends meet, or the bread from heaven that enables us to live joyfully in all circumstances as Paul exhorts us in his letter to the Philippians? Is the bread we are working for the answer to a challenging moment with work, family, finances, and might the bread that comes from heaven be asking us to live into these challenges differently?

Part of being thankful is having gratitude that we have another day added to our lives and can choose to reframe our minds to inhabit those promises. Paraphrasing what Lincoln might proclaim today: despite political challenges, a changing climate, a pandemic, and a shifting economy, we have not collapsed; we remain at peace with our neighboring nations; and more attention is being given to address our health and wealth inequalities. And these are things to which we should give thanks together. In response, Father Brooks would exhort us to reframe our minds today—and every time we return to this table, the ultimate and Great Thanksgiving—to see that what we have has always been promised by God. And so, as Father Brooks, closes:

“Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been, a better time, or a better place to live in.”— Phillips Brooks, 1863

Sources

1. Sarah Josepha Hale’s Thanksgiving advocacy and stories appeared throughout her editorship of Godey’s Lady’s Book (mid-1800s).

2. Hale’s recipes and articles helped popularize turkey as the Thanksgiving centerpiece.

3. Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation of Thanksgiving,” October 3, 1863.

4. Phillips Brooks, Our Mercies of Re-Occupation, Thanksgiving sermon preached at Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, 1863.