by CCW | 11 October 2020 08:00
Link to the audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 18/ Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday[1]
Harvest Thanksgiving is 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 others. The idea of Creation as a gift moves in us in thanksgiving, giving back to God what God has given to us. It is profoundly spiritual in the intellectual gathering back to God that which 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. To see Creation as a gift means seeing one another as a gift, a point which Paul makes in the Epistle reading for Trinity 18. “I thank my God always on your behalf for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ.”
Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity because it is at once the human response to the marvellous givenness of things and equally God’s grace moving in us. In short, it belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity in its wholeness and completeness as found in the return to God. Thanksgiving is the return to God of what has come to us in Creation and Redemption.
It is a theological way of thinking that counters the overly simplistic and destructive narratives which have so possessed and inhabited our contemporary world; “systems and ideologies” which are, as the writer and theologian, Marilynne Robinson suggests, both “simple and simplifying” in their attempts to explain reality (Theology for This Moment (2016) in What are We Doing Here – Essays (2018). These ideologies are captured in such tropes as ‘the invisible hand’ of certain forms of capitalism, ‘the survival of the fittest’ in the Darwinian competition for life, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ in Marxist political thought, and the ‘id, ego and superego’ of Freudian psychology, to name some of the most familiar. What they have in common is that they are all materialistic and determinist, effectively denying agency and responsibility. They are also, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt and gone, things of the past which linger on in the present like so many ghosts. Paradoxically, in seeking to displace theology and religion, they are parodies of what they sought to displace; substitute religions, we might say, a point which George Steiner made in his 1974 Massey Lectures. The old world, as Feuerbach says, made spirit parent of matter; the new world makes matter parent of spirit. But such materialist claims are for the most part no longer credible. They are empty and no longer command allegiance, no longer dominate our minds.
Our postmodern world, whatever one means by that phrase, is largely defined by “the incredulity of meta-narratives” (The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard) a disbelief of any overarching narrative that might embrace the whole of reality in part because of the mutually exclusive nature of these competing ideologies. Such is a feature of the uncertainty of our times.
What is needed is the recovery of theology, not in the narrowness of its sectarian divides but in the truth of its reflective and collective vision, its intellection as it were, which is itself a kind of gathering of the scattered fragments of our fractured world in its being and knowing. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Genesis tells us. “In the beginning was the Word,” John tells us, the Word which is God. The Word is Christ without whom nothing was made that was made. Such resonant words impart a way of thinking, a grounding of Creation and our humanity in God. They proclaim the idea of the essential goodness of the created order and of our humanity in a principle, the “givenness” of reality “that in its fullness reflects divine intent,” or purpose (Robinson, Theology). It is what we read in Isaiah: “So shall my word be … it shall not return to me empty … it shall accomplish that which I purpose,” literally complete or finish what I – God – have willed. Nothing could be more counter-culture and yet so refreshing and freeing.
The wonderful readings appointed for Harvest Thanksgiving emphasize this point and complement the classic Thanksgiving Gospel story which we heard a month ago and which is also appointed for Thanksgiving Day (BCP, p. 308[2]). Thanksgiving Day is about giving thanks, not just for the harvest but for our political and social freedoms, however attenuated in our current world and day they may be. The classic Gospel story is about the healing of ten lepers of which “one turned back, giving him thanks.” About him, and him a “stranger,” as Jesus says, it is said that he is “made whole.” Not just healed but made whole. In turning back and giving thanks we are made whole.
The idea of Creation as a gift that reveals the essential goodness of the Creator is grounded by Isaiah in the activity of God himself in the going forth and return of the divine Word in Creation and in us in joy. The classic Thanksgiving Gospel story is about the going forth and return of the Word in Redemption but locates the activity of that Word in us in ways that are sacramental. The word is eucharist.
This brings us to the Harvest Thanksgiving Gospel which unites both the going forth and return of God’s Word in Creation and in Redemption in the sacramental life of the Church. The Word is bread, “for the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world.” This complements Deuteronomy that “man cannot live from bread alone but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord” (Dt. 8.3). The bread of our daily sustenance comes from the Word of God in Creation but in this Gospel, the Word becomes the bread of our spiritual sustenance, the bread of heavenly and spiritual life. Jesus, the Word of God, says that he is “the bread of life.” It is not so much the contrast as the complement of Word and Bread which is so striking.
Grace is not an add on to some sort of independent nature. To say that grace does not destroy but perfects nature does not negate the fundamental idea of Creation, of the natural order as divinely given, itself a grace. We cannot ignore the realities of sin and wickedness. We are to give thanks even in times of uncertainty and hardship. How and why? Because all thanksgiving is about our life in God, our return to him from whom and in whom and through whom all good things do come, the good even through hardship and sorrow, grief and loss, fear and uncertainty. Thanksgiving is our return to God in loving praise regardless. “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord” (Ps. 92.1).
In our Parish traditions, the fruits of Creation are gathered symbolically into the Church. It is not about feeding God. Not quite a barn for the storage of harvest, our churches become the places where we are reminded of our connection to the whole of the created order. Even the lowly zucchini teaches us about the grandeur of God. There is something wonderfully positive about thanksgiving but it does not hide the realities of a world of hardship, a world of sin and despair. That is the signal importance of the bread of life discourse in John’s Gospel. In Christ we have the Word made flesh who in the sacrament of bread and wine feeds and nourishes us with everlasting life. “I am the bread of life.”
The sacramental life of the Church brings together and unites the grace of Creation and the grace of Redemption. It is grounded in the going forth and return of the Word of God and that movement in and through us in thanksgiving. In a way it is exactly the love of God and neighbour signalled in the Gospel for Trinity 18. The truth of our lives is not measured materially but spiritually for such is the grounding of our life in God and his Word.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving/Trinity 18, 2020
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