Hooray for Pumpkin Pie! Lessons in Gratitude
Hooray for Pumpkin Pie! Lessons in Gratitude
Psalm 65:1, 8-12
November 23, 2025
Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, CA
There will be silence before You, and praise in Zion, O God,
And to You our promises will be kept.
Those who live at earth's farthest bounds are awed by your signs;
you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.
You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges,
softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.
The Psalms in the Hebrew scriptures are a collection of poems and songs spoken and sung by the Hebrew people over many centuries. Not parables, not narratives, not family trees, not theological explanations about the holy. Poems and prayers - hymns of praise, laments, royal psalms, wisdom psalms and thanksgiving & harvest psalms. Here is another poem, an invitation to notice the sacred, to praise, to give thanks. Here are a few sections of the longer poem “Messenger” by Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers
there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness. . . .
Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still
and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing,
since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude….
from “Messenger” by Mary Oliver
I am grateful for poets and poetry. Sometimes those are the words we need.
So much of my life and ministry have to do with words. I’m not very good at coming up with clever sermon titles. So when I find one, I jump on it. “Hooray for the Pumpkin Pie!” I discovered in a footnote from another preacher’s sermon. He found it in a whimsical editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Eric Felten in 2009 about how Thanksgiving is more and more crowded out of the calendar by Halloween and Christmas. Felten invokes the nineteenth-century song and poem, “Over the River and through the Woods.”
Over the river and through the woods
To Grandmother’s house we go.
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
Through white and drifted snow
Over the river and through the woods,
O how the wind does blow.
It stings the toes and bites the nose
As over the ground we go.
And on and on it goes to the end:
Over the river, and through the wood—
now Grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurray for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurray for the pumpkin pie!
I decided that’s a pretty good title for a sermon on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.
In his sermon on Psalm 65, Rev. John Buchanan from Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago suggests there are two important and serious theological ideas in that line:
That food—bread, milk, corn, butternut squash, pumpkin pie—the produce of the earth, the providential fertility of nature, is worth singing about and celebrating, that the food we eat is a gift from God and bears within it the grace of God. “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist wrote, and I think he didn’t mean only a tiny piece of communion bread and a thimbleful of grape juice, but a robust, delicious meal.
And that it is a good idea for human beings to respond to this miracle—nature’s generous provision, the everyday miracle that the world can be counted on to sustain us, to produce an abundance of food, good things to eat. “Praise,” Walter Brueggemann says, in a scholarly discussion of the psalms, is both “a duty and a delight.”
So “hooray for the pumpkin pie!”
Mr. Felten’s editorial begins by observing the obvious: that in the early to middle of autumn, Christmas is already in the air. Starbucks retired the white cups and replaced them with irresistible “cranberry-colored, snowflake-flecked seasonal substitutes, weeks ago. Wal-Mart ads for weeks have featured Andy Williams crooning ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year.’ Halloween—a much more muscular and marketable holiday than Thanksgiving, Felten says—is the only thing preventing “Christmas Creep” from extending all the way back to Labor Day.
“Christmas Creep” is all around us. We could fight back, of course: hunker down here for Advent and don’t start celebrating Christmas until it comes—or at least is close. We put up a little struggle. But it’s a little like trying to beat the Dodgers in the World Series. Oh, too soon?
You may have noticed Christmas creep in stores. Safeway quickly changes from Halloween candy display to Christmas on Nov. 1. Home Depot puts out Christmas decorations early fall – lighted angels, reindeer, blow up Santa or the Grinch. Christmas cookies are on the shelves.
Here we are on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Where is our heart? What do we notice?
Eric Felten wonders if the real problem might be that we are losing our capacity for gratitude. Throughout most of human history, the success of the harvest in the fall was all that stood between the community and a long, cold winter of hunger and perhaps starvation. All spring and summer you watched it happen and began to worry: nobody worries like farmers—too little rain, too much rain, too cloudy, too hot, too dry, windstorms and hail, weeds and pests, insects and fungus. I know some of you grew up on farms. You watched. You watched it every day and worried and fretted and prayed to God. And when harvest time came and the barns and silos were full, you knew you were safe for another year, and it was a time for rejoicing and celebrating and giving thanks.
Most of that is all gone, of course—that immediate connection between the grain growing in the field and our continued survival, for us at least. We, most of us, never see it. Many of you go to farmers markets and seek ways to buy local and seasonal.
As a culture we may be losing our capacity for gratitude and that perhaps it has to do with our literal and figurative distance from the natural world. And yet, here, where we live, I hear many of you express your gratitude for the beauty around us and opportunities to be outside 12 months of the year.
Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and former Director of the National Institutes of Health, is a devout Christian as well as a distinguished scientist. In an interview, Collins said that intellectually curious believers will want to go deeper into the theology of their religion, but “that deeper searching has to involve more than searching through the Bible. We must also search through that other book God has given us—the book of nature.”
For Collins and for a growing number of scientists, nature is a textbook in which to find fascinating and provocative information and discoveries and unexpected, unpredictable mysteries, with clear theological implications.
We have learned this more deeply from our study of Celtic Christian Spirituality – John Phillip Newell and others. We reclaim it from the mystics. It deepens our reading of the Psalms – yes, praise to this Divine Mystery, gratitude for water, for abundance, and for doing our part to care for our beautiful planet.
In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor says that, like many of us, she learned in church to view the world with suspicion. The world, she learned, was a fallen, sinful place, full of temptation and corruption. She learned that to be a good Christian was to reject the world, withdraw from the world, resist the world’s seductive allure.
But then she began to read the Bible and think about the Bible and discovered that in the Bible the world is also God’s home, God’s beloved creation, God’s very good creation. Reading passages like Psalm 65. In the Bible, she says, people encounter God not so much in church, “but under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, on mountains and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, and burning bushes. When people want to know more about God, the Son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.”
“Whoever wrote this stuff,” she says, “believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture” (pp. 12–13).
Yes. We can embrace this truth and acknowledge the world, the earth, nature, as God’s good creation—and gratitude for what is, for the miracle of life itself, for the amazing productivity of the earth, is at the very heart of our religion.
“Praise is due to you, O God,” the psalmist wrote.
You visit the earth and water it. . . .
You crown the year with bounty.
Abundance . . .
Pastures overflow,
meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
valleys deck themselves with grain.
There is so much abundance, that the hills and meadows and valleys
shout and sing for joy (Psalm 65).
The psalms urge us to look, to taste and see the beauty and goodness and grace all around us. Artists and poets remind us to pay attention. Mary Oliver.
But the thing about this gratitude to which we are called, this thanksgiving which the hills and fields and valleys sing, is that it comes even when there is no abundance or peace or well-being. It comes out of the depths of faith, even in adversity.
We are in the midst of challenging times in our country and world. In our church we are carrying grief around the death of people, dear friends, we love. We worry about neighbors who feel afraid because of threats of arrest and deportation. We see that the rule of law and due process is being questioned by many in leadership and not equally applied to all people.
We gather here because we can be honest with each other in this community. There are times that preachers, including me, have had a hard time finding a way to say thanks in the midst of loss and grief and fear.
And yet we do, you do. We come to church before Thanksgiving to say thanks for something deeper and more profound and more real than an abundance of food or even health and security: the grace of God, the love of God, the experience of this Divine Mystery and this vision of the Beloved Community.
Let us be people of gratitude in the small ordinary and sometimes unexpected joys. Like pumpkin pie. Everyone is invited to have a little pumpkin pie after worship today.
A treat. A little joyful surprise. Let’s say it together – Hooray for pumpkin pie! Amen
Resources
Rev. John M. Buchanan, “Hooray for the Pumpkin Pie!” Nov. 22, 2009 Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2009/112209.html
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World. (HarperOne. 2009)
Link to full poem “Messenger” by Mary Oliver https://wordsfortheyear.com/2020/04/04/messenger-by-mary-oliver/