A Thanksgiving Turkey Story
The following story comes from Frank Honeycutt, a Lutheran pastor from Abingdon, Virginia, and appeared in The Christian Ministry magazine. Honeycutt begins by saying that his friends call him a “weenie vegetarian” because a decade ago he made a decision not to eat meat, but will indulge in an occasional hot dog. But then he and his family traveled to South Carolina to share a lavish Thanksgiving dinner with relatives.
“As I had done for the ten holidays before this one, I wordlessly bypassed the bird and dove into the sweet potatoes. I ate my fill, gobbled like a turkey a few times to poke fun at everyone else, and we headed home. It was a rainy and foggy return trip to Virginia, especially over the mountains. As we rounded a curve suddenly a wild turkey appeared out of the fog and seemed to smile at me just as I ran over it. Is there any greater irony for a pious vegetarian than to hit and kill the very bird he’s avoided at the dinner table for a decade?”
Honeycutt goes on to make his point. “All of us have rigged up pious improvement plans where every day and in every way we are getting better and better. And we sometimes stand in judgement on the unenlightened who don’t share our views. We think moral perfection might arrive if we did this, avoided that, or had the right information. Why, the Kingdom might come if we could just get enough like-thinking people moving in the right direction! We could pull this whole world up by its own moral bootstraps.”
“But basic Christian theology tells us that we cannot save the world through proper moral behavior. The world is not messed up due to ignorance or lack of understanding. Christianity says the world is out of whack due to sin. It’s a condition we are born with. Frederick Buechner says, ‘More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, sin is what Jesus said he came to save the world from’. Sin is not something to avoid, like meat on Thanksgiving. Nor is it a list of faults we have piously given up.”
“We are prone to self-righteousness. So it’s easy to look down our noses at those who make ethical goofs. Paul wrote that ‘There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ We all fall short. We disappoint people. We make wrong decisions. In Christian lingo, we sin. This is not something we acquire after a time of innocence. It’s built-in. We can’t grow out of it.”
Honeycutt goes on to make the point that it took something drastic to deal with our sin. It took the death of Jesus on the cross. Then he concludes: “Somewhere up near Sam’s Gap, the carcass of a dead turkey has long since rotted and returned to the soil—that turkey that smiled up at my headlights as I returned home from Thanksgiving. I learned a lot from that turkey: that no one’s hands are clean. No, not one.”
Happy Thanksgiving,
Pastor Wayne
“As I had done for the ten holidays before this one, I wordlessly bypassed the bird and dove into the sweet potatoes. I ate my fill, gobbled like a turkey a few times to poke fun at everyone else, and we headed home. It was a rainy and foggy return trip to Virginia, especially over the mountains. As we rounded a curve suddenly a wild turkey appeared out of the fog and seemed to smile at me just as I ran over it. Is there any greater irony for a pious vegetarian than to hit and kill the very bird he’s avoided at the dinner table for a decade?”
Honeycutt goes on to make his point. “All of us have rigged up pious improvement plans where every day and in every way we are getting better and better. And we sometimes stand in judgement on the unenlightened who don’t share our views. We think moral perfection might arrive if we did this, avoided that, or had the right information. Why, the Kingdom might come if we could just get enough like-thinking people moving in the right direction! We could pull this whole world up by its own moral bootstraps.”
“But basic Christian theology tells us that we cannot save the world through proper moral behavior. The world is not messed up due to ignorance or lack of understanding. Christianity says the world is out of whack due to sin. It’s a condition we are born with. Frederick Buechner says, ‘More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, sin is what Jesus said he came to save the world from’. Sin is not something to avoid, like meat on Thanksgiving. Nor is it a list of faults we have piously given up.”
“We are prone to self-righteousness. So it’s easy to look down our noses at those who make ethical goofs. Paul wrote that ‘There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ We all fall short. We disappoint people. We make wrong decisions. In Christian lingo, we sin. This is not something we acquire after a time of innocence. It’s built-in. We can’t grow out of it.”
Honeycutt goes on to make the point that it took something drastic to deal with our sin. It took the death of Jesus on the cross. Then he concludes: “Somewhere up near Sam’s Gap, the carcass of a dead turkey has long since rotted and returned to the soil—that turkey that smiled up at my headlights as I returned home from Thanksgiving. I learned a lot from that turkey: that no one’s hands are clean. No, not one.”
Happy Thanksgiving,
Pastor Wayne