by CCW | 11 October 2015 14:45
“The Lord God,” it is said, “walk[ed] in the garden in the cool of the day”. Jesus, we are told, walked through a corn field on the Sabbath. So here we are in the cool of a corn field giving thanks to God. We shall be most thankful, I am sure, when our new heating system is fully installed and operational!
Thanksgiving is all about giving; indeed, it is life-giving. As such it is the strong counter to the entitlement culture of our world and day – to the idea that we are endlessly owed whatever we think we should have and want. That is all about getting. Thanksgiving is all about giving. It is a profoundly spiritual and intellectual activity which belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.
Thanksgiving revolves around the power of prepositions, those little words which position words and ideas with other words and ideas, placing things in relation, as it were. The two prepositions essential to thanksgiving are ‘for’ and ‘to’. There are things for which to be thankful. Many, many things actually. But it takes a certain thoughtfulness, again a counter to the thoughtlessness of so much of our lives, to be thankful. Yet thanksgiving is also about giving thanks to others. It is especially about thanksgiving to God for all and everything. That perspective extends to our being thankful to others for whatever intermediate goods we have received from them. Yet, each and every good that we enjoy ultimately comes from God in and through the mediation of creation and human experience. Thanksgiving is our acknowledgement of that truth and understanding.
Thanksgiving cannot be forced. We can ask that people say ‘please and thank you’ and even require it as part and parcel of the courtesies of our lives together as a community but real thanksgiving can only come from the heart and the mind. Properly speaking it is a thoughtful and intentional act which extends from us towards God and others.
Throughout history there have many celebrations of thanksgiving: thanksgiving for victory in battle, thanksgiving for deliverance from the threats of plague, war and treason, thanksgiving for some defining event in the history of nations and cultures, and so forth. In Canada, this Monday is our national thanksgiving day. It is a day to give thanks for our rational and political freedoms – which are themselves intellectual and spiritual principles, which is itself something which we need to recall. But there is an older tradition of thanksgiving – the idea of giving thanks for the harvest. This is a more or less explicit recognition of the interrelation between our humanity and the created order.
Derived from northern European practices and customs, our Churches are festooned with leaves from the trees in their Fall array as well as with the bounty of the fields and orchards; in short, the things of nature and the things of our human labour are gathered into this spiritual place, the Church. These things are brought into the Church not just as mere decoration but to teach and illustrate the profoundly spiritual point about the essential goodness of the created world and about the meaningfulness of human labour in working with creation. To acknowledge God as the ultimate author of creation is to be reminded that we are made “in the image of God” and that we have a special relation to the created order, having been given “to till and to keep it” and to exercise a responsible dominion over the world, a dominion that properly belongs to the Lord God. This, too, is something which our Church and culture badly needs to reclaim and recover.
The great gospel reading for Harvest Thanksgiving is “the bread of life discourse” from John’s Gospel. Bread and wine are powerful symbols of civilised life. They speak directly to the nature of our human labour working in concert with the created order. Wheat and grapes belong to our cultivation of the land. Wheat from a thousand hills is gathered in and is transformed into bread, the image of what sustains our lives; bread becomes proverbial and protean. Grapes from a thousand vineyards are gathered in and through a kind of alchemy are transformed into wine, which in biblical terms makes glad the hearts of men.
The Christian Faith adds another and even deeper dimension to these things. Bread and wine, at once symbolic of our engagement with creation and its transformation, become more than just the stuff of our lives and our pleasures; they become the sacraments of our communion with God. Jesus takes the simple elements of the bread of the Passover and the Passover cup of blessing and transforms them into the means of our participation in his very life and death. They become the means of our being returned to God in “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”; our participation in his great thanksgiving to the Father which signals the real meaning of Christ’s life. He is the Word and Son of the Father who is ever and always living towards the Father into whose hands he places the whole of the redeemed order. Everything is gathered to God in prayer and thanksgiving. “Father forgive them…”; “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Our thanksgivings are eucharistical and sacrificial; they place us with the Trinity.
Thanksgiving is the thoughtful recognition about what we have been given which turns us back to God in a free act of acknowledgement about God’s goodness and truth. In giving thanks, we are being made whole, more complete, more human. In the Christian understanding, thanksgiving is the central act of worship. The Holy Eucharist is the great thanksgiving of the Son to the Father which is why bread and grapes are placed on the altar as symbolic reminders of the means of our communion with God and with one another. Thanksgiving is about our participation in the life of God. Giving is greater than getting.
It is the point which Jesus constantly makes. We are constantly being taught about the truth of our being as spiritual creatures. It is found in the giving of ourselves and not in the getting of things. It is the counter to all our miseries – our getting older, our getting sicker, our getting slower but more importantly our becoming more and more complainers because of what we think we are owed. In the face of such complaints, thanksgiving is our freedom and the highest activity of our humanity. Count your blessings, not your miseries. This changes our outlook entirely; a change from death to life and all because thanksgiving is life-giving.
This is the great point of Jesus’ discourse to us in the 6th Chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus identifies himself with the bread and wine of the ancient Jewish Passover to inaugurate a newer and deeper understanding. Through the things of the created order transformed by human labour, we are privileged by grace to participate in the life of God himself. The bread of God is he who has come down from heaven; he comes to give life unto the world. Ultimately, the world itself participates in the eternal life of God but only through “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving is life-giving; if we are not thankful, then we are dead. Yet it belongs to the essential goodness of God to use the simple things of the world to recall us to our freedom and dignity, to thanksgiving; even, I suppose, on a Sunday in Windsor, when pumpkins are on parade, and some are sailing squash or paddling pumpkins in the Pisiquid puddle but we are sitting in the cool of a corn field in Church giving thanks to God! Thanks be to God!
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving
(Trinity XIX), 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/10/11/sermon-for-harvest-thanksgiving-7/
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