by CCW | 8 October 2023 10:00
Austin Farrer once summed up the Gospel according to St. Mark in three sentences: “God gives you everything. Give everything back to God. You can’t.” Except, it must be said, by the grace of Christ in thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the highest form of prayer, a kind of adoration. Thanksgiving is really a kind of thoughtfulness, our thoughtfulness towards God and towards the unity of all things in God. It is the counter to the idea of entitlement and privilege, to our tendency to take everything for granted and to think that we are owed the things we want. Thanksgiving speaks to the highest dignity of our humanity.
The readings for Thanksgiving Day from Deuteronomy and Luke capture the quintessential features of thanksgiving as a kind of thoughtfulness. They are complemented by the readings for Harvest Thanksgiving from Isaiah about God’s Word going forth and returning not empty but with purpose and in joy and from the Bread of Life discourse in John’s Gospel about our sacramental participation in Christ. Thanksgiving in all senses is really about our participation in the motions of God’s Word and Will.
Deuteronomy’s wonderful litany about the good land flowing with the abundance of good things, “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing” is grounded in the idea of “keeping the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him”; in short, honouring God. There is something quite wonderful about our being gathered to God in the gathering of the fruits of the harvest into the Church where even the lowly zucchini, squash, and pumpkins not to mention the little gourds proclaim the goodness of God.
The harvest gathering belongs to the greater gathering of prayer. It is intellectus, the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all good things do come. There is the danger of attending too much to the good things themselves and losing sight of the fact that they are all gifts, the gifts of God in creation of which we too are a part. Bread and wine, after all, are not simply natural creatures. They are the product of our working with God in the good order of his creation. But that belongs to our vocation as “nature’s high priest” (George Herbert). Thanksgiving brings out the deeper meaning of Genesis 1 and 2 about the created order and our place within it. In a way, it highlights the meaning of being made in the image of God and, in a complementary fashion, as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit; connected to God and to the whole order of created beings, from dust to angels.
To act out of our being made in the image of God finds its highest expression in thanksgiving for it means acting as God acts towards what he creates and sustains, namely, with care and respect and love. We honour God in honouring the creation by our care and respect for it and thus for one another as equally made in God’s image. It is in thanksgiving that our humanity finds its fullness and completeness. This is the point of the great thanksgiving Gospel.
There were ten lepers, Luke tells us, who cry out to Jesus for mercy. They are the outcasts of the society, seen as contagious and as a threat to the community from which they are banned. Jesus sees them and bids them go, show yourselves unto the priests, referencing the institutions of prayer and healing within Israel. In Luke’s laconic phrase, “it came to pass, that as they went, they were healed.” All ten were healed through their response to Jesus’s word. But the interest of the story is about something more; the one who turned back, giving him thanks.
And, as Luke tells us, “he was a Samaritan;” the outsider par excellence in terms of the Jews. Once again, as we have seen, Jesus uses the Samaritans to teach us about our essential humanity which is not found in our particular identities and ideologies. At once a critique of Israel, it is fundamentally a critique of our misguided presumption about thinking that any one group or tribe or individual owns God. The true vocation of Israel was not about Israel herself but about the honouring of God by all nations through Israel. Salvation is of the Jews, meaning through them; it is not restricted to them. Here is the strong reminder to them and to us about the truth of our humanity as found in Christ. “There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger,” Jesus says.
Thanksgiving, then, is about giving glory to God from whom all good things do come, including the fruits of the earth in their season and according to their kind. It is only by working with the good order of creation in respecting each thing in its distinctive form that there can be any kind of harvest. This counters our modern presumption to manipulate and misuse the natural world as if it were just dead stuff for us to do as we please, the consequences of which are only too apparent and belong to our current anxieties and fears. Both Genesis and the teachings of many of Canada’s indigenous peoples remind us of another relation to the land and to one another; a relation of care and respect rather than exploitation and property.
But thanksgiving is something more because it centers on God and our life with God. What that means is illustrated in the Gospel. For it is only about “this stranger” that Jesus says, “Thy faith hath made thee whole”, literally saved. Salvation is more than the healing of our bodily and mental infirmities; it is about our being whole. That is entirely about our being in God in Christ. It is thanksgiving, a kind of thoughtfulness that returns us to the truth of who we are. In returning and giving thanks we are made whole because only then are we acting in the truth of our being made in God’s image. The Word of God goes forth and returns to God through us; not in vain, not in emptiness, but in the fullness of truth and glory and for our delight in God’s goodness in the gathering of all things into unity in him.
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving/Trinity 18
October 8th, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/10/08/sermon-for-harvest-thanksgiving-eighteenth-sunday-after-trinity-2/
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