Pastor Steve's Weekly Letter for Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you enjoy the holiday tomorrow, even though the pandemic has resulted in smaller gatherings for many folks. Some of our family members who planned to be here decided to stay home due to their own health concerns or their work as health care providers. Still, we are looking forward to celebrating God’s faithfulness and goodness. Of course, Thanksgiving Day is an American holiday—not a Christian holiday or even a global one. As you know, Thanksgiving Day has its roots in the feast celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in October 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. However, we need to be careful to separate actual history from legend. Robert Tracy McKenzie, a professor at Wheaton College, has done this in his book titled The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells us about Loving God and Learning from History. I shared some of his insights in my letter a few years ago. Today, I thought it would be worth re-visiting them and adding a couple more. So, here is the truth about the “first Thanksgiving.”

·         The Pilgrims did have a “great store of wild turkeys” to eat for their thanksgiving festival which they shared with their neighbors, the Wampanoag Indians.

·         The Pilgrims did not wear black clothes or buckled hats. This was a 19^th century invention.

·         Half of the 102 Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth Plantation died during the winter before the first thanksgiving festival.

·         The Pilgrims did not come to America to find religious freedom but to find a place where they could make a living and maintain their English identity. They had already found religious freedom in Holland. The threat they faced in the Netherlands was spiritual corruption.

·         The Pilgrims were not Puritans (who sought to reform the state-sponsored Anglican church from within) but Separatists who completely pulled out of the Anglican church.

·         The Mayflower Compact, which many consider to be the first written constitution in American history, was signed by all the adult males aboard the Mayflower and expresses their commitment to God and their desire to glorify Him.

·         The proclamation of the first thanksgiving in 1623 by Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford was not written by Bradford! As moving as it is, the proclamation was fabricated by someone in the late twentieth century.

·         Squanto, the Native American whom William Bradford described as “a special instrument sent of God” for the good of the Pilgrims, had a rather ominous name. The Pilgrims had no way of knowing that he was named for the spirit of darkness—the equivalent of Satan!

·         Sadly, not long after the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims launched a preemptive assault on the local Massachusetts Indians which resulted in violence and bitterness. This is not revisionist history. Tragically, the Pilgrims took the lives of some of the Indians and even displayed a severed head on a pike outside of their fort.

·         A few years later, drunkenness and sexual sin became so common among the remaining Pilgrims (some had left the colony in search of larger, more productive farms) that Bradford said it caused him “to fear and tremble at the consideration of our corrupt natures.”

You don’t need to share the final three details with your young children or grandchildren when you sit down to eat Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. But it’s a reminder that the believers in the past whom we consider heroes are flawed heroes. We need to be honest about this and learn from their terrible mistakes as well as their acts of devotion to God. As McKenzie writes, “when we make room for our heroes’ frailties in our narratives of the past, we at the same time make greater room for God’s glory.”

This Sunday, November 29, we will conclude our series on Gospel Fluency. I plan to preach Colossians 4:7-18, and the title of the sermon is “Gospel Fruit.” Finally, on the family front, my grandson Madden (4) recently received a mixed progress report from his pre-school teachers. The good news is that he makes sure his classmates listen to instructions and then get their work done. The bad news is that Madden doesn’t pay attention to the instructions himself, and he is so busy helping others get their work done that he doesn’t do his. It turns out that he also operates this way with his cousins. He makes sure they are eating their food during meals and that they help clean up. However, he doesn’t do either himself. There’s a lesson here, I think. It’s easier to help others and hold them accountable than to do so for yourself. Alright, thanks for reading. Grace and peace to you all.

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