That’s sinful.
Sorry.
Norman Rockwell was the artist who
painted a lot of classic pieces that showed American culture in the mid
1900s. Life was good. Families were
together. People were happy. He did a Thanksgiving piece called “Freedom
from want” where the big family with big smiles is gathered around a big
turkey. It’s what Thanksgiving is
supposed to look like.
It’s a beautiful painting. Nobody is eating alone, hurting and wishing
for things to be like how they were. Nobody’s just pretending to be thankful
while they feel empty. Nobody spilled on
the carpet, and so nobody is yelling. Nobody is drunk and saying things that they
shouldn’t. Everyone’s happy and actually
speaking to each other. Nobody’s crying
in the back room.
I want to punch Norman Rockwell in
the mouth because it’s a beautiful painting, but sometimes Thanksgiving doesn’t
look like that. If your Thanksgiving
doesn’t look like it should, it’s painful seeing the perfect family with
perfect smiles who have no problems. We
want that.
We want it so bad we’re willing to
chase down self help books that don’t really help. We’re willing to pretend
everything’s fine when it isn’t. We’re
willing to pretend, at least for a day, that our families aren’t broken
somehow. We act out our traditions and
hope nobody messes up their part so we can recreate that Norman Rockwell
Thanksgiving. Some years it seems to
work. Some years it doesn’t, no matter
how hard you try.
Sometimes you sit down to a meal of
thanksgiving with a family that doesn’t look like everyone else’s family. With friends who are spending the whole meal
arguing. While someone is secretly planning to betray you with a kiss.
Jesus did. It was His last supper. We
call it the Eucharist. It means thanksgiving. The last supper was a meal of Thanksgiving. It wasn’t because it was the perfect meal
with the perfect family. Far from
it. It was because in it, our Lord gives
Himself to sinners. He speaks words so
powerful they cut right through all of the sin and pain at that table. “Take. Eat. This is My body, given for
you. Take. Drink. This is my blood of
the New Testament, shed for you, for the forgiveness of your sins.”
When we celebrate the Lord’s
Supper, the Eucharist, we really do eat and drink Christ’s body and blood. We really do receive the forgiveness of sins. Your sins are forgiven. That changes things. It means that what’s broken around you is
healed. Not in a “let’s just pretend”
way. Real, in a way that lets us
actually take all of the pain and frustration and lay it at the foot of the
cross where our Lord died for us, bearing the weight of all of our sin for us,
and call it finished. Real, in a real way that lets us cast off the guilt for
what we’ve done wrong to the ones closest to us. Real, in a way that lets us look at the
people across the table with eyes that don’t see sin, but a sinner who Christ
actually died for. Real, in a way that
undoes the power of death itself, and gives us hope that those who have been
cut off from us in faith are not gone, but we will see them again in the
fullness of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb in His Kingdom which has no
end.
Christians celebrate the Eucharist
on Thanksgiving because it’s a meal that forgives so powerfully that it undoes
sin and joins us to heaven itself.
Christians don’t have perfect families.
They have Jesus, who forgives.
When they sit down together, they sit down as brothers and sisters in
Christ, forgiven, and whole, joined by a God who loved them enough to feed them
with His own body and blood.
