Author: CCW

“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven
and giveth life unto the world”

“The Lord God,” it is said, “walk[ed] in the garden in the cool of the day”. Jesus, we are told, walked through a corn field on the Sabbath. So here we are in the cool of a corn field giving thanks to God. We shall be most thankful, I am sure, when our new heating system is fully installed and operational!

Thanksgiving is all about giving; indeed, it is life-giving. As such it is the strong counter to the entitlement culture of our world and day – to the idea that we are endlessly owed whatever we think we should have and want. That is all about getting. Thanksgiving is all about giving. It is a profoundly spiritual and intellectual activity which belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.

Thanksgiving revolves around the power of prepositions, those little words which position words and ideas with other words and ideas, placing things in relation, as it were. The two prepositions essential to thanksgiving are ‘for’ and ‘to’. There are things for which to be thankful. Many, many things actually. But it takes a certain thoughtfulness, again a counter to the thoughtlessness of so much of our lives, to be thankful. Yet thanksgiving is also about giving thanks to others. It is especially about thanksgiving to God for all and everything. That perspective extends to our being thankful to others for whatever intermediate goods we have received from them. Yet, each and every good that we enjoy ultimately comes from God in and through the mediation of creation and human experience. Thanksgiving is our acknowledgement of that truth and understanding.

Thanksgiving cannot be forced. We can ask that people say ‘please and thank you’ and even require it as part and parcel of the courtesies of our lives together as a community but real thanksgiving can only come from the heart and the mind. Properly speaking it is a thoughtful and intentional act which extends from us towards God and others.

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“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”

“There was war in heaven,” we heard on The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels just past. It is a daunting prospect to hear about war in heaven. Surely the endless parade of wars on earth is more than enough to disturb us, let alone the thought of war in heaven. For however we conceive of heaven, war would not seem to be part of the picture. And yet, the idea of war in heaven connects wonderfully to the readings of this day. We are being taught about love in the face of all of the enmities and divisions, all of the wars of our world and day, and, above all, love in the face of the wars in our own hearts.

The Collect for today echoes the demands of the baptismal service wherein we “renounce the devil and all his works,” “the vain pomp and glory of the world,” and “the sinful desires of the flesh,” reminding us of the necessity of God’s grace for us in the living out of our lives in order “to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil.” These are the very things that have been renounced as the precondition for professing Christ and being baptised in the name of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Baptism is about the triumph of God’s love over and above the limits of all our human loves. That, in a way, is the point, a point which is easily overlooked and forgotten. We forget that our loves are incomplete. We forget about the easy animosities in our own hearts and souls, the wars within each of us. We forget about sin and evil.

Baptism is a strong reminder to all of us of our Christian identity and vocation. It is about the triumph of God’s love and goodness over all that stands against the truth of God, absolutely all, past, present and future in the whole of human history and experience. The ultimate expression of that principle of opposition to God is the devil, Satan, Lucifer, that ancient serpent, who embodies the contradiction of all and every sin. Think about it for just a moment. Lucifer means light-bearer. That is the meaning of his very creation and the very vocation of his being. But what happens when he denies his creatureliness and his calling? He becomes the prince of darkness and the prince of lies, a study in absolute contradiction. He exists in his own denial of his very being and the purpose of his being. Such is darkness rather than light. And such is the darkness in us and in our world, a world that abounds in no end of evil and sorrow and suffering.

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