by CCW | 7 October 2018 15:00
Michaelmas is a feast of intellection, we might say, a festival of the gathering of the thoughts of God; such are the angels as the intellectual principles of the universe in its diversity and unity. Similarly, Harvest Thanksgiving celebrates a gathering, the gathering of the visible fruits of creation in an intellectual way to God, the invisible source and principle of all that we see and feel and taste and smell. It is a particularly significant festival for our agricultural communities where there is some sort of real connection to the land and a proper concern for the good of the land.
Gathering the fruits and vegetables from the fields into the Church is an entirely spiritual activity. We aren’t feeding God, offering sacrifices, as if were, to some idol of our imaginations. We are honouring God as the source and truth of all that belongs to our lives physically and spiritually. This point cannot be emphasised enough. It is the counter to our materialism, on the one hand, and our complacency, on the other hand; a counter, too, to the deadly dualisms of our world and day. You cannot take the harvest for granted. While there is a physical aspect to our thanksgivings for food, for healing, and even for our social and political lives, thanksgiving itself is a profoundly spiritual and intellectual activity.
That is why the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel is actually the Gospel appointed for The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity[1], which we heard five weeks ago. Look in your prayer books on page 240. Then look on page 308 and you find it again as appointed for Thanksgiving Day[2]. That refers to the idea of a nationally appointed day of Thanksgiving, a thanksgiving for the rational principles that properly belong to our collective life without which our social and economic lives cannot flourish; itself a point worth pondering in our current confusions.
The Collect[3] on page 307 wonderfully captures that larger sensibility. We “humbly thank” our merciful God and Father, “for all thy gifts so freely bestowed upon us.” Those gifts are clearly specified and are comprehensive in the sense that they pertain to every aspect of our lives. We thank God “for life and health and safety; for power to work and leisure to rest; for all that is beautiful in creation and in the lives of men.” Think and ponder on those words for a moment and see how they counter and challenge all forms of entitlement and complacency and every sense of whining and complaining. Notice how they open our eyes and our minds to whole different approach to life. Such ideas are only possible on the basis of the pageant of creation that Genesis 1 unfolds, that the Benedicite Omnia Opera sings, and that Isaiah proclaims in this morning’s lesson; all affirm the essential goodness of creation because of the goodness of God. But those ideas of thanksgiving, our thanksgiving for all manner of good things, are altogether secondary to our thanksgiving “for our spiritual mercies in Christ Jesus our Lord,” which ties together the themes of creation and redemption.
The spiritual mercies of Christ Jesus are seen in the thanksgiving Gospel from Luke about the ten lepers who are healed but of whom only one “turned back, glorif[ying] God and f[alling] down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks.” Healing is one of the spiritual mercies of God about which some of you know only too well. But that Gospel signals a deeper form of the understanding of spiritual mercy. It is about turning to God freely and totally, a turning to God not just for what God does but because God is. “Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself,” as the poet/preacher John Donne remarks in a kind of mantra or prayer.
Thanksgiving for and thanksgiving to. These are powerful prepositions that are complemented wonderfully, it seems to me, by another preposition, the little word ‘with’, that places us, quite literally, with God in Jesus Christ. That opens us out to the sacramental feature of thanksgiving captured in the Gospel for Harvest Thanksgiving.
Harvest Thanksgiving is actually a bit of a movable feast; in other words, it can vary according to the actual time of harvest in our communities. Our tradition at Christ Church, mindful of the agricultural sensibilities of Windsor and its environs, is to celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving on the Sunday of the Canadian Thanksgiving Day weekend. Yet the Collect, Lesson and Gospel[4] are actually provided for the Eucharist within a larger consideration of A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest (BCP, pp. 617-621). The prayers and other readings there are well worth pondering. They bring out more fully the spiritual nature of thanksgiving as an act towards God. Consider for a moment the teaching in those prayers beginning with the first on page 617.
We are reminded, first, of the Noadic covenantal theme, meaning God’s covenant with our humanity through Noah after the flood, that “while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest shall not fail,” a literal quote from Genesis 8 (22), such that we are given “the fruits of the earth in their season.” Immediately after that we are recalled to the Mosaic covenantal theme that “man does not live by bread alone” from Deuteronomy which is then tagged to the Harvest Gospel theme from John about Christ as “the true bread which cometh down from heaven;” a nice and concise way of gathering together the biblical imagery of thanksgiving by way of Noah, Moses, and Christ.
The second prayer (BCP, p. 618), along with the last prayer (p. 619) which is prefaced with the explanatory phrase, “This prayer may be used when the harvest has been defective,” reminds us that the harvest cannot be taken for granted. It turns that sombre thought into a spiritual good about our relation to God whose “blessings are for our trial as well as for our comfort” and whom we humbly praise “for still bestowing upon us far more than we deserve.” We are exhorted to be thankful no matter what such that “with thankful hearts”we may “give unto thee – God- of thine own, ministering gladly to the maintenance of the thy Church, and the relief of the poor and the afflicted, the widow and the orphan,” and all to God’s glory. Thanksgiving turns us outward and upward, towards one another and to God. It counters the idea of sin as homo incurvatus in se, man as turned in upon himself and away from God and one another.
The third prayer (BCP, p. 618) speaks about another kind of harvest, the harvest of God’s word sown in our hearts “that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit” and so be gathered “by the holy angels into the heavenly garner,” emphasizing once again the fundamental spiritual nature of thanksgiving. The fourth prayer (p. 618) grounds our thanksgiving spiritually in terms of the special gifts of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon the Church at Pentecost and thus the labours of the ministry in looking towards the joys of the spiritual harvest, anticipating in a way the Communion of Saints. The sixth and seventh prayer (p. 619) echo the theme of thanksgiving for the “abundant supply of all our necessities” and the gathering “in their season the kindly fruits of the earth, and the harvest of the seas” but also the thanksgiving for “those better gifts which nourish and enrich the soul,” recalling us to “the gifts of the Holy Spirit.” All in all, it is a pretty rich and comprehensive reflection on the essentially spiritual nature of thanksgiving. These are prayers really for our everyday use.
All this is concentrated for us in the lesson from Isaiah and the Gospel from St. John. Creation and redemption are about the going forth of God’s Word and Son. In prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament we are gathered to God in Christ. Here is “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving speaks to the highest dignity and freedom of our humanity, to our being with God and with one another, thankful for the bounties of the harvest but even more for our spiritual mercies in Christ Jesus. Our thanksgiving is primarily to God through our “turn[ing] back, glorif[ying] God with a loud voice and falling down on [our] face at [Jesus’] feet giving him thanks.” For in him we find not just our healing but our wholeness and the truth of our lives.
Bread and wine are the fruits of our labours in working with the good order of God’s creation. But God does something more. Christ identifies himself with the heavenly bread of God’s Word which Word he is. He has come to give us life and to give us life more abundantly. All our thanksgivings converge in the Great Thanksgiving through our sacramental participation in the life of God. Such is the divine purpose of the Word which goes forth in creation and in redemption: “it shall not return unto me void (empty), but it shall accomplish that which I please.” Thus thanksgiving is our joy and our peace.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving/Trinity XIX
October 7th, 2018
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