“We Should Be Thankful Every Day”—The Best Jesus Juke

Sorry to ruin your holiday

Caleb Coy
Backyard Church
2 min readNov 20, 2023

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Image by Pro Church Media

Greetings, congregants. The title of my sermon for today is “We Should Be Thankful Every Day” and it is aimed directly at all of you for practicing the Thanksgiving Holiday.

You should be ashamed of yourselves. Look at you. Shirt with a gravy stain on it. Popping out of your pants from all that stuffed turkey.

Four score and something something years ago, Abraham Lincoln started a holiday called Thanksgiving, based on pilgrims and Indians. Now I’m a fan of him being a Republican, but of course he would create a secular holiday inspired by pagans and yankee pumpkin pie.

But the Good Lord would want us to be thankful every day. So I give you this Jesus juke: I am holier than thou for being just as thankful every day of the year that you are on Thanksgiving.

Do I know how thankful you are the rest of the year? Of course not. I’m presuming. But I preach this sermon nonetheless, because I’m so uncreative I basically plan my own liturgy around what thing in culture I should be detested by.

And I chose an innocuous civic holiday brimming with vague religious themes.

That’s right. If you celebrate the Day of Thanksgiving, it clearly means that you just aren’t thankful the rest of the year. And by hearing this you should assume that I wake up every day and utter a prayer of thanksgiving, showing my gratittude to God every moment of every day. Even if I don’t. My sermon says I do.

Saying Grace at the table over the turkey, cranberries, mashed taters, and buttered sausage? Shame on you for doing focusing extra hard on that today, because it therefore implies that you don’t do it at all the rest of the year.

Yes, I chose to do a sermon on this. Of my own free will.

Look forward to the coming year, because I’m next going to preach on why Jesus was born every day, we should make new resolutions every day, we should love people every day, we should be Irish every day, we should have moms and dads every day, we should be free every day—you get the point.

So, please be thankful for my sermon, and remember to feel guilt for every special thing you do with your family.

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Caleb Coy
Backyard Church

Caleb Coy is a humorist and freelance writer from Virginia. Work in McSweeney's, Slackjaw, Weekly Humorist, elsewhere. Follow @CalebCoyGuard