Sermon for Harvest Thanksgiving
“So shall my word be”
Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity. It is about a certain kind of attitude and approach to life. It is about being thoughtful, the exact counter to the many forms of thoughtlessness in our culture and world. Thanksgiving, too, is counter-culture especially in relation to the entitlement culture which surrounds us. Thanksgiving is not about taking things for granted or worse, thinking that we are owed whatever we think we should have and want. Thanksgiving is not thanksgetting!
The idea of thanksgiving is a powerful concept that connects to the theme of creation. Thanksgiving speaks to the respect and dignity of our humanity and to our human vocation. It complements the idea in Genesis about God placing our humanity in the proverbial Garden of Eden “to till it and to keep it”. Thanksgiving extends that idea to taking delight in the good order of creation and in the good will of the Creator. Thanksgiving is a kind of grammar lesson, too, because it involves the idea of being thankful for the good things of creation which we are privileged to enjoy and to the idea of being thankful to God. You’ve got to love the power of prepositions!
Thankfulness is a kind of thoughtfulness, a redire a principia, a return to a principle but that return is something fundamentally positive. It involves our recognition that the world as intelligible and orderly is not just there for us but is something which is to be honoured and respected both in itself and because it is God’s world. It says something about us as human beings that we can be thankful. It is a profoundly spiritual idea. As the poet, George Herbert, notes, it belongs to our humanity to be “the secretaries of thy praise”, the secretaries of the praise of God, giving voice to the voiceless creation, giving praise for the simple truth that a zucchini is a zucchini, or in the context of Windsor, that a pumpkin is a pumpkin even when it is being used as a boat! All of which comes from God. Our praises and thanksgivings all go to God.
The Thanksgiving weekend in Canada combines several forms of thanksgiving. Traditionally and globally, there are the celebrations of the harvest, harvest thanksgiving. In the countries which derive many of their cultural traditions from northern Europe, harvest thanksgiving is a bit of a movable feast, depending on when the harvest is gathered. The idea of harvest has very much to do with our engagement with creation raised to a higher order by gathering the fruits of the harvest into the churches as a symbol of our recognition of the Creator and his creation. To that notion of thanksgiving has been added the idea of giving thanks for political freedoms, the idea of national thanksgiving. All of these things speak to our spiritual freedom.
