Today this nation celebrates
Thanksgiving. This is not a day on the church Calendar, but it is still a
special day—a day in which people come together to eat, to give thanks for all
the gifts they have been given. Our neighbours to the south also celebrate
Thanksgiving Day, but theirs will not occur until November. I confess my bias
in saying this, but I much prefer Canadian Thanksgiving. This is not simply a
mater of national loyalty, but because Canadian Thanksgiving is
more specifically connected in an older festival—harvest festival which
British and European churches celebrates a specific and very important event in
the yearly life cycle—and that is the harvest. You will notice that today we have decorated the church with
pumpkins and squash. The celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving as an official
holiday on the second Monday in October is not that old—just over fifty years.
On January 31st 957, the Canadian Parliament proclaimed “ A Day of
General Thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which
Canada has been blessed—to be Observed on the 2nd Monday in
October.”
On
Thursday evening I returned home from Saskatoon. And in that province, amongst
farming families, Thanksgiving is a very big deal. The crops have made it
through and have been harvested. Within farming culture the celebration of
Thanksgiving has a special significance, it is rooted in something very
concrete. The fattened Turkey and variety of vegetables come out of what has been
grown and harvested.
As
people living largely in an urban context, in cities, and suburbs, who do not
farm for a living, we might miss the full significance of this event—even
though our lives depend on a bountiful harvest. It is easy for us to lose sight
of the basis, the reason, for this special meal of thanks.
Every
Sunday Christians gather in worship to give thanks to God. And just like
Thanksgiving, the reason for the thanks can fade into the background or even be
forgotten.
Thinking
about Thanksgiving, Contemplate this question for a second, “ Why should we
give thanks to God?” The answer which might spring to some minds is, “ Well,
God wants us to” or “we’re supposed to” or “the Bible tells us we should” I
don’t want to look our of place in church when everyone else says, ‘ Thanks be
to God.”
Yes,
this is true, God wants us to be thankful. But if a sense of duty is all which motivates us—that’s kind of sad
really.. When we look at giving thanks in our human relationships we can see
why. If I were to answer the question, “ Why should we say thank you to someone who has done
something good for us, or given us a nice present?” with answers such as
“because I feel I need to”, or “it would be impolite not to.” or “I really
should” you would undoubtedly think there is something missing in me and my experience of receiving a gift.
And
what would be missing is sincerity, and true appreciation for the gift, and
true joy in receiving the gift.. In our relationships with each other most
people believe that expressions of appreciation should be sincere—real
responses born out of true appreciation.
Yet
how often does God receive that?
On
this day, millions of people will gather for Thanksgiving meals. How many people who regularly attend
church, will not attend because of the holiday? How many people will give
thanks to God before they eat? How many will give thanks to the source from
which life, and breath, and all good things flow? How many people truly live
with an attitude of gratitude this day and beyond? How many people will sit
down today focused on all the things they don’t have instead of the gifts which
overflow before them?
Most
people would agree that greed is not good. Yet what is greed? Greed is an
attitude, an attitude born out of a disparity mentality. “I do not have enough.
I need more”. One Turkey drumstick isn’t enough. I need another—need another
despite the fact that I have high cholesterol, and my belly is grotesquely
distended. Yet I will take that drumstick, even though Uncle Charlie hasn’t had
one, would love just to have a half of one, a quarter of one, even just a small piece of one. “Too, bad, I need
it, and I take it.” And if I don’t
get it, I’ll pout, and feel hard-done by, and resentful, and impoverished, and
blind to the great gift I have been given in receiving even one drumstick.
That’s the mentality of greed in operation. And Greed makes thanksgiving
impossible, so does selfishness, and self centredness.
It
is a sad irony that it is often the people who have been blessed with an abundance who lack appreciation. And
when we’re honest with ourselves, we know that we all fall into this category
at one point or another—especially those of us who play golf. A few weeks ago I
had an exceptionally bad hole. I wound up in the sand trap. it took me about
three shots to get out, only to land in the sand trap across the green. Another
five shots or so got me back into the first sand trap. In those moments my attitude was not
one of appreciation.—appreciation for the fact that I was privileged to have several good holes, appreciation
for even being able to play in the
first place.
Perhaps the
greatest display of thankfulness for any meal I ever saw did not occur in a dining
room in front of a turkey, but in a palliative care ward in Saskatoon. Here a
young man lay nearing the final stages of terminal cancer. It had been a long
time since he enjoyed a Turkey dinner, but he asked for one thing, one thing ,
one food item more than anything else in that moment, and that was orange
flavoured ice cream. And his mother gave him that. Not a lot—his stomach
wouldn’t be able to handle it, Just a couple of spoonfuls. This turned out to
be too much as he wasn’t able to keep it down. But that moment, the moment that
ice cream hit his taste-buds, were lived in total and utter appreciation.
In today’s gospel lesson we hear of another person who was grateful for
the gift he had been given—the Samaritan leaper. Jesus had healed him, and, in gratitude, he lay himself
before Jesus on the ground. The other nine didn’t do that. But this man did.
This non-Jewish outsider praised Jesus, and truly appreciated the gift of
healing Jesus had given him.
Jesus
has given us a great gift also—the gift of divine forgiveness, the gift of
eternal life, the gift of Grace, the gift of his Word of Life. Yet, how
thankful are we really?
Today,
as we live in what many call a post-Christian culture, it is often said that
God is love, and God loves people unconditionally, almost as if folks like to
tell God what God’s job is.” God your job is to love me no matter what I do.” “God
your job is to make me rich”. “God your job is to help the Canucks win the
Stanley Cup.”
Yes, God is love, scripture tells us that
God is love. But scripture also tells us that God loves righteousness; God
loves his perfectly holy law. and scripture also tells us that humanity lives
in sin, has departed from God’s Holy Will, and the wage of that departure is death,
eternal death, damnation.
Through
Jesus Christ God has saved humanity from that fate. Can there be any greater gift than that? Through the blood
of God’s own begotten son, the
world has been gifted with forgiveness. Martin Luther put it succinctly. Where there is forgiveness of sin, there is
new life and salvation. The
good news of the gospel is that God has done all through Jesus Christ. There is
nothing we need to do to earn salvation. It is unconditional, but not
unconditional in some warm and fuzzy humanistic psychology way.
The
Grace of God was born out of a great cost, and, as the great German theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, what is costly
to God should never be cheapened by us. Rather, an attitude of gratitude is the
fitting response to all God has given to us. Sincere worship, disciplined
devotion ,and a life lived out in faith and good works is the fitting response. We have been
given all we need. In Baptism and Holy Communion, Jesus Christ is truly present
and tells us that.
I
invite you to specially attend to the words spoken before the Holy Communion.
This is called the great thanksgiving. If you see this as simple ritual action,
your not seeing its significance.
It begins with the worship leader saying “The Lord Be with You.”
This
in itself is huge. While it is proclaimed by the pastor—it is not the word of
the pastor. It is God’s word of promise working in and through the worship
leader, just as “And also with you” is the word working in and through the
congregation. Pastor and
congregation proclaim to each other God’s promise—the promise that the Lord is
with you. It’s so easy to just hear that, take it for granted, to not see it
for what it is, and take it for what it is, which is God’s promise.
But
the preface reminds us that it is indeed
our right, our duty, and our joy that we should at all times and in all
places give thanks and praise to God for sending his son into this world for us—for our salvation. That’s the great thanksgiving—the great
thanksgiving for the greatest promise ever made, thanksgiving for what is about
to happen here in this place when Christ comes to us spiritually and physically
in the bread and the wine. When we eat and drink that promise, there is no
doubt that it is meant for us.
God
has not chosen to do what he could do—which is leave humanity in its miserable
state of alienation—just as he could have left the Israelites in the land of
poisonous snakes and scorpions.
God didn’t have to
save us. And those hard passages of scripture, the ones that are hard to
hear—those remind us of God’s wrath, what he could have done. Jesus tells us to fear the one who has
the power to destroy body and soul in hell. When he tells us that he is not teaching us to live in fear
but to realize the power of God.—and to smash any human presumption about what
God should or should not do. God chose instead to save us, out of his great
love for us and the world he chose
to send his son into the world to save the world, to restore a broken creation,
and to bring about a new creation. But the fact is that this word of promise
needs to be heard again and again because the sinner is resistant—the sinner in
us wants to shut it out, because the sinner wants to be in charge and give
thanks to no-one, especially not God. This is why attending church regularly is
so important, it is to hear God’s
great promise to you. But its not
just about us. God has saved us and has entrusted us with the task of
proclaiming this good news as gift for others, so that they too would be fed
and nourished—spiritually and physically.
Today
is one day on the national calandar—but for Christians Thanksgiving is a
lifestyle. So today, as everyday, we are called to give thanks to the trinue
God who has done all for us, and given us the tremendous gift of peace. Now may
that peace, the peace which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and
minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
