by CCW | 9 October 2016 15:00
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.
Thanksgiving can’t be forced or coerced. It can be recommended but ultimately it comes from within us. The classic thanksgiving story is one which Luke alone tells and which we heard several weeks ago. It is the story of ten lepers huddled on the outskirts of a city, outcasts and rejects, who cry out to Jesus for mercy. He bids them “go and show yourselves to the priests”. They turn and go only to discover that they are healed of their infirmity.
The burden of the story is about the one who seeing that he was healed “turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Luke poignantly and pointedly adds, “and he was a Samaritan”, referring to religious tensions and divisions within Israel. The Samaritans were particularly despised. So the one who turned back is the outsider of the outsiders! Yet his action shows us something about what it means to be truly human. His action catches Jesus’ attention. “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” And to him, alone of the ten, Jesus says that “thy faith hath made thee whole.” It is a powerful story about returning to God in praise and thanksgiving.
Our humanity finds its truth and completeness, its wholeness in returning and giving thanks. It is the freest thing that we can do. It is about the power of thoughtfulness. In a way, what moves in this one who turned back is a motion of God’s grace at work in him. The other classical Harvest Thanksgiving reading is our lesson this morning from Isaiah which recalls us to the creative power of God’s word. The passage speaks about the rain and snow “water[ing] the earth, mak[ing] it bring forth and bud”, giving “seed to the sower and bread to the eater”, but it grounds those natural events in the activity of God. Creation, after all, contrary to many Darwinian assumptions about the philosophical and religious traditions, is not something static but dynamic. “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth,” Isaiah has God say, “It shall not return unto me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” The passage ends with a wonderful image of the whole creation rejoicing in God.
“So shall my word be”. Thanksgiving is about the going forth of the Word of God in us returning to God our praise and thanks for all that we have received. But that Word of God in us is also the meaning of the great Harvest Thanksgiving Gospel where Jesus identifies himself as “the bread of life”, the one in whom our spiritual life is nurtured and fed. Word and bread go together. “So shall my word be,” God says. “I am the bread of life”, says Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. He gives himself to us in and through his act of thanksgiving to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. Such is the Holy Eucharist. It means thanksgiving. Our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” is only possible through the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the agony of the cross. It is only possible in us because of Christ in us. We are in him in these fundamental motions of returning and giving thanks, the motions of his life in us, through him who is “the bread of life”.
In returning and giving thanks we are more than healed; we are made whole. Thanksgiving reminds us of our life in Christ and for Christ. It is about the motions of his Word alive in us.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/10/09/sermon-for-harvest-thanksgiving-8/
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