KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 8 October
One turned back … giving him thanks
The week of Thanksgiving is always a special time at the School. My thanks to the Junior School for decorating the Chapel with the fruits of creation gathered into the Chapel. The emphasis this week has been on the theme of thanksgiving as the logical extension of the idea of creation. Once you grasp that creation is a gift, the gift of life, it changes your attitude and approach to the world around you and to one another. The idea of creation as a gift moves in us in thanksgiving, a giving back to God what God has given to us. It is profoundly spiritual in the intellectual gathering back to God what has come from God. It is grace moving in us and in ways that belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God.
The Junior Chapel service on Monday focused on the lovely and rich passage from the Book of Deuteronomy about the good land and its fruits given to us by God and yet grounds those material aspects of creation in the word of God. “Man cannot live by bread alone but from everything which proceeds from the mouth of God.” We enjoy the bounty of creation only through our working with the order of creation, honouring the word of God in creation through our labours. Gathering apples and zucchini into the Chapel remind us of our connection to the created order. They teach us that creation reveals God in his truth, and beauty and goodness to us. We learn even from zucchini! It is about thanksgiving not thanks getting. Such is our response and acknowledgement of creation as God’s gift.
In Canada, Thanksgiving is at once a national holiday and a celebration of the Harvest, a much more ancient concept that reminds us that we cannot take for granted the fruits of creation. By extension, as we have seen in our considerations of the pageants of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 along with Job and Wisdom, our reflection on the wisdom of God in creation teaches us our connection to everything else in the created order and to our relation to God as made in his image, the image of his ordering care for the world. This gives no warrant for our abuse and misuse of the natural world or of one another.
The Grade 10 Chapel service on Tuesday featured the classical Thanksgiving story of the healing of the ten lepers, one of whom turned back, glorifying God and giving him thanks. As Luke tells us he was a Samaritan, an outsider, a member of a sect despised within Judaism which Jesus sometimes uses to critique and correct Israel. Here Jesus calls the one who turned back a “stranger.” The point is that we learn from the stranger about the true nature of our humanity. It is in turning back and giving thanks that we are not merely healed but made whole. Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. Thanksgiving for creation in all of its splendour and riches is complemented by our thanksgiving for the healing and the redemption of our humanity in Christ. Thanksgiving is our turning to God who has turned to us.