Sermon for Harvest Thanksgiving
“I am the bread of life”
Powerful and yet familiar words. They speak profoundly to the special meaning and purpose of Thanksgiving. Ultimately, thanksgiving is a spiritual activity. To push it even further, I would argue that there is no true thanksgiving which is not a thanksgiving to God.
We are rather good about the idea of thanksgiving for something or other. We get that because we like to be on the receiving end. The idea of thanksgiving makes some kind of sense if we have been given something, especially if it is something which appeals to our appetites and desires. Where we fall down on the thanksgiving front is on the radical idea of thanksgiving to God for all and everything that exists. For that requires reflection and awareness, an aspect of self-consciousness. The deeper and more explicitly spiritual aspects of the act of thanksgiving reveal to us what runs completely counter to our culture of entitlement. You may like to have turkey, squash, potatoes, pumpkins, even zucchini, and so forth – certainly I do – but no, none of us deserves any of it. Even if we have raised and slaughtered the turkey, grown and harvested the various fruits and vegetables of creation, all of those things and our labour included depends radically and completely upon God and upon the good order of his creation.
We create nothing of ourselves. We are only secondary creators, acting in accord with the good order of God’s world and out of the idea of having been made in the image of God. God is the Creator. Thanksgiving reminds us of our human limitations and recalls us to God’s “bountiful goodness” as this Sunday’s Collect so wonderfully puts it. There can only be life and there can only be a bountiful harvest of edibles and delectables as well as a harvest of rational and spiritual pleasures and principles because of God’s great “bountiful goodness”.
That is the central spiritual insight of thanksgiving. It is less about thanksgiving for and more about thanksgiving to. Why? Because there can be no harvest whether of material or spiritual goods without God.
