Festival of Booths
13 Once you have collected the food and drink you need, perform the Festival of Booths for seven days. 14 Celebrate your festival: you, your sons, your daughters, your male and female servants, the Levites, the immigrants, the orphans, and the widows who live in your cities. 15 Seven days you must perform the festival for the Lord your God in the location the Lord selects because the Lord your God will bless you in all you do and in all your work. You will be overjoyed.
Reflection
Collect the food and drink you’ll need for a seven-day celebration and then REJOICE! That sounds like quite the party to thank the Lord. And don’t forget to invite all your family, friends, as well as strangers such as immigrants, widows and orphans. If you are like me, you probably have countless memories of Thanksgiving celebrations. When our children were young, we always celebrated at Grandma and PopPop’s house because Grandma Ora made the best
stuffing! My most vivid memory was the year when our eldest son and his cousin, who were about five at the time, decided to use a set of “finger puppets” to dramatically tell the story of the first Thanksgiving “when the Pilgrims crashed into Plymouth Rock.” That was the story they learned in school, and I suspect most of us heard a similar version of the first Thanksgiving when we were young.
Our reading from Deuteronomy is actually found in six books of the Hebrew Bible and each records instruction for celebrating the Festival of Booths (aka Sukkot or Feast of Tabernacles) from which our Celebration of Thanksgiving evolved. The tradition and the law of the Hebrews was to celebrate and give thanks to God not just once a year but three times. Many people believe that the Pilgrims modeled their first Thanksgiving after this Jewish tradition. Most of the Pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving were Puritans who strongly identified with the historical traditions and customs of the Israelites in the Bible. In their quest for religious freedom, the Puritans viewed their journey to America as analogous to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. One report said that most of the Puritans had Hebrew names and there was even a proposal to make Hebrew the language of the colonies! As “new Israelites” in a new “promised land” the Pilgrims surely found inspiration in the Bible, in the book of Deuteronomy, or Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Ezra or Nehemiah, in which God commands the ancient Israelites to observe the Feast of Booths, to CELEBRATE “because the Lord your God will bless you in all you do and in all your work. You will be OVERJOYED!”
by Kathleen Stolz
For Pondering and Prayer
I think God deserves our thanks for the blessings in our lives, don’t you? What does it take for YOU to be OVERJOYED!? Joy is one of the Bible’s Fruit of the Spirit; it is a gift from God. It is different from happiness because it is an inward feeling that endures hardship and is rooted in God. When I ponder “joy” I think it is connected to God’s Creative Energy. God creates joy within each of us from people, nature, creativity, music, food, activities or even memorable simple moments.
Sometimes people ask those gathered around their Thanksgiving table to say what they are thankful for. I suggest that we consider reframing that question to something like “What has God done in the world this year that causes you to celebrate? How has God caused you to be overjoyed, or to rejoice?”
Prayer: O Gracious One, we give you thanks for life itself; for waking up each morning to see the brightening sky as the sun rises; for the warmth of summer and the cold of winter; for the falling leaves of autumn and the budding flowers of springtime; for people who smile “hello” as they pass by and for children who laugh and babies who smile; for food on the table and
for friends and family who join us to eat it; for pets and wildlife; for a roof over our heads and for those who have none; for joy in our hearts and for all your blessings in our lives. We give you thanks. Amen.
