Thanks! Really!
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Thanks! Really!
Thanksgiving
Sunday, October 13th, 2019
Aberdeen
Mennonite Church
If
you’re like me, you probably have a set of associations relating to
Thanksgiving Day. Turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie come to mind
easily. Autumn leaves, the picture of bins brimming with wheat, crisp
cold of October mornings, and displays of grain sheaves, garden
produce and fruit in an amazing still-life at the front of church.
And the hymns, “We plow the fields and scatter, the good seed on
the land, but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand.” And
maybe some of us think first of “Come, ye thankful people come,
raise the song of harvest home. All is safely gathered in, ere the
winter storms begin.”
The
association of harvest and Thanksgiving is probably as old as the
time when wandering, nomadic cultures began to cultivate crops,
domesticate animals for food.
For
most Christians, grace at meals constitutes a mini-Thanksgiving
repeated thrice daily. It’s a reminder that our very survival
depends on the security of our food supply, something that can’t
always be guaranteed on an earth subject to drought, flood, hail,
fire or hurricane.
I’m
sure the people most thankful after a successful harvest are those
living in the most marginal food-producing areas, where food must be
scavenged and malnutrition hovers overhead always like a dark,
threatening cloud.
It’s
probably we in the West and North of the world who most need to
remind ourselves that the sustaining, caring hand of God has for so
long been associated with food or no food. What does it mean in an
age where the food supply for some has been so certain that people
are likely to pray for an effective ,weight-reducing diet at the same
time as others are praying for a piece of bread, a morsel of mango,
anything to postpone the agony of starvation, if just for another
day.
In the
1929-1933 period of Stalin’s collectivization, food grains were
confiscated from collective farms to feed Moscow and to boost the
Russian economy generally. It was a ruthless regime that pitilessly
left whole villages to starve. News came to Canada via the few
pleading letters for help that managed to evade censorship, and North
American Mennonites responded with food enough to save at least some
of their brothers and sisters.
The
stories include heart-wrenching accounts of making soup with poplar
leaves, of families being evicted because they were found to have
withheld a small bag of flour from the government.
“Segne
Vater diese Speise; uns zur Kraft, und dir zum Preise.” The table
graces of my childhood have never left me: “Lord bless this food so
that it will nourish us well, while honouring your name.” Or “Komm,
Herr Jesu, sei du unser Gast, Und segne was du uns aus Gnaden
bescheret hast, Amen.”(Come Lord Jesus be our guest, and bless what
your grace has provided for us.) We sing “Praise God from whom all
blessings flow . . .” before sitting down to potluck in church and
though the words may slide too easily off our tongues sometimes
because our minds are already in the potato salad bowl, we sing it
because we know how enormous a blessing soil and rain and sunshine, a
chicken in the oven and peas from the garden actually are.
Is it
even possible to be adequately thankful to God for such amazing
blessings?
Before
I began writing this sermon, I thought about the origins of setting
aside a day in which all citizens can celebrate the harvest and
acknowledge what a successful growing year means for all of us. I
thought about the bulging grain-bins of my youth, the jars upon jars
of meat and peas and pickles ranged on groaning shelves in the
cellar. I wondered how people who’ve grown up in our cities, living
possibly on the tenth floor of Saskatoon Tower, would relate to the
theme of harvest gratitude.
I
thought about the endless choice, the seemingly unlimited quantity of
food at Costco, Safeway, Sobeys, Bigway. And I wondered, who first
had the foresight to know that secure as we may feel at any given
time and place, our well-being still depends on the harvests in the
plantations, the farms, the vineyards, the gardens and greenhouses
and on the labour and sweat of neighbours, and ultimately on the
rain, the soil and the sunshine that is so, so easily taken for
granted until it fails.
I
started with the Old Testament and found that in the NIV, at least,
the word “thanksgiving” appears at least a dozen times in
different places.
Come,
let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
The
Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all
her ruins; he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like
the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the sound of singing.
Two
things stand out for me in the Old Testament accounts of the Children
of Israel as a thankful people.
The
first is that communal thanksgiving seems most often to be linked to
celebration, and celebration includes singing accompanied by
trumpets, cymbals, harps and Lyres. (Celebrating with my body as in
dancing, prancing, shouting and praising God spontaneously is not my
best thing, in fact it’s not my anything.)
But
singing, ah, singing I can do. I’m a baritone so I can sometimes
switch bass to tenor and back again and when we Mennonites conference
and hundreds of us are gathered together like early Christians at
Pentecost, we can celebrate the goodness of God; the sopranos become
our harps, the altos our lyres, the tenors our trumpets and the
basses our drums.
The
spirit of joy and thankfulness can fill vast arenas with harmonious
sound.
Gratitude,
thankfulness needs to find expression. Whether it be the simple,
verbal “thank you,” the spontaneous embrace, even the Hallmark
card, something is needed to seal and communicate gratitude.
Thanks bottled up inside can leave gaps in relationships; a meal for
which God, farmers, gardeners, labourers are not thanked openly and
genuinely is a meal undeserved. A meal shared under the knowledge of
how great a blessing it really is can become a benediction of
thanksgiving.
Leviticus
7:12 & 13
If
they offer [gifts] as an expression of thankfulness, then along with
this thank offering they are to offer thick loaves made without yeast
and with olive oil mixed in, thin loaves made without yeast and
brushed with oil, and thick loaves of the finest flour well-kneaded
and with oil mixed in.
Along
with their fellowship offering of thanksgiving they are to present an
offering with thick loaves of bread made with yeast.
An accompaniment to the thanksgiving celebration in ancient
times was the offering. In Levitical law, each celebrant was required
to bring a “fellowship offering,” of three kinds of “thick
bread,” plus an offering of yeast bread.
Sacrificial
offerings disappear with the incarnation of Jesus, of course, but we
have maintained the principal of the offering, calling the vessel in
which we deposit our gift an “offering plate.”
Our
prayers over the offering generally ask God to bless the gifts we
bring so that his kingdom should grow and prosper, that the hungry
should be fed, the naked clothed, the sick and imprisoned be visited
and healed.
We
don’t burn our offerings or believe that the smoke from such a fire
would rise up as incense to God. Neither do we consider our offerings to be the source of our salvation.
But
surely, our gratitude for the blessings we enjoy should result in
overflowing generosity, and that, I think, would qualify symbolically
as sweet incense to God.
A
quote:
“The
first official Canadian Thanksgiving occurred on April 15, 1872, when
the nation was celebrating the Prince of Wales recovery from a
serious illness.
By
the end of the 19th century, Thanksgiving Day was normally celebrated
on November 6. However, when World War 1 ended, the Armistice Day
holiday
was usually held during the same week. in 1957 the Canadian
Parliament proclaimed Thanksgiving to be observed on its present date
on the second Monday of October to prevent the two holidays from
clashing with one another.” (Wikipedia).
There’s
something amusing about a statutory, national “thanksgiving day,”
as if there’s now declared to be one day of gratitude and 364 days
of . . . well, of business as usual. When you hold the door at the
post office for someone carrying packages, she doesn’t say “thank
you” because its Thanksgiving
Day,
but because you just now made her life easier with a helpful,
courteous gesture. “You’re welcome.”
We
think of the Pilgrims and their connection to a designated
Thanksgiving celebration. “The event that Americans commonly call
the “First Thanksgiving” was celebrated by the Pilgrims after
their first harvest in the New World in October, 1621. This feast
lasted three days, and was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53
Pilgrims. The New England colonists were accustomed to regularly
celebrating “thanksgivings,” days of prayer thanking God for
blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought.”
(Wikipedia)
There
are similarities between the ancient Hebrew celebrations of
Thanksgiving and the American Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday
in November and Canada’s Thanksgiving Day on the second Monday of
October. There are stark differences as well.
One
is that the holiday has become a family event more than a community
celebration. Gratitude to God for a year’s blessing, for a
bountiful harvest, for a disaster averted or a victory won no longer
figures heavily in Thanksgiving Day observances. Much has changed in
every aspect of how nations and communities behave since King David
wrote the thanksgiving verse that opens Psalm 95.
Although
I can hardly see the entire population of Saskatoon, for instance,
gathering in one place to sing praise and thanks to God for his
goodness, I’m pretty sure that as a church, we could do more to
model thankfulness in our world. And why would we do that?
Here’s
one good reason:
Another
quote:
“In
positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently
associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more
positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health,
deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”
It
may be a chicken-and-egg thing, but thankful people are happier
people, happy people tend to express gratitude more for their good
fortune, and all of this connects to mental and physical health, to
resolution of conflicts, to well-being, and if anyone ever expressed
God’s desire that people be happy and healthy, it was Jesus whose
ministry included healing as well as teaching.
For Christians and Jews, the need to practice thankfulness to God
for food, for shelter, for a portion of health and well-being goes
without saying. Also, because personal health, healthy relationships,
a way out of conflicts all depend in part on the gratitude factor,
there’s good reason to preserve what we have and to build on it.
Let
me suggest a few scenarios imagining how, for instance, Aberdeen
Mennonite, Eigenheim Mennonite, Cornerstone Church, Plains
Conservative Mennonite or all of us Anabaptists and all the other
communities that share a history of God’s goodness and grace could
actively build on our practices of thankfulness.
Imagine
it’s 2030. Mennonite Church Saskatchewan has dwindled down to 18
churches, all with static or declining membership. Discouragement and
pessimism are running high and there’s talk about selling the
Mennonite Youth Farm and Shekinah in order to survive.
But
in a bold step, the MC Sask Council rents SaskTel Centre in Saskatoon
for a weekend and invites all the people in the province sharing an
Anabaptist heritage to gather there, purely for the purpose of
celebration, of communal thanksgiving.
Hutterites,
Old Colony, Bergthaler, General Conference, Mennonite Brethren, and
others are called to a time of feasting, of singing, of story and
conversation. Speakers and videos remind everyone there of the
faithfulness of leaders of the Radical Reformation of which they all
share a legacy.
The
history of MCC reminds everyone that service is a shared Anabaptist
value; dialogues on being salt and light to a world in conflict
abound.
And,
oh, the singing. Nun Danket alle Gott; Now thank we all our
God.
The
story has two possible endings: 1) Only half of the MC SK people and
a scattering of MBs and Bergthalers register, the arena and the
busses are canceled and penalties levied, and half of the Mennonite
Youth Farm property is sold to stave off bankruptcy,
or
2) Church conferences have become tired enough of unnecessary
divisions to embrace this unique initiative. Ten thousand nearly fill
the arena and can’t get enough of the atmosphere of gratitude and
good fellowship and the singing and the laughter around the tables.
It’s like they’d stepped for a short time into Psalm 95: “Let
us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and
song.”
Could
it be the beginning of realizing the degree to which we’re the same
instead of defining ourselves by how we’re different?
Another
imagined scenario: It’s 2019, today maybe. We’ve been to church
and listened to a sermon by George Epp (great grandson of our first pastor) on gratitude,
on thankfully living life. We go home to a dinner with family and
some friends. A nicely browned turkey, mashed potatoes, baby peas,
stuffing, a green salad lead us to hurry the prayer so we can get at
the feast.
Someone says, “Anna, would you lead us in Grace?”
It’s
not always easy to come up with an impromptu meal grace, even when
we’re all together and we’re all happy for the company and the
bounty on the table.
To
thank God as the provider of the sun and the rain that led up to this
day isn’t hard. Our traditional graces do this nicely. “Come Lord
Jesus be our guest, and let this food to us be blest, Amen”
But
poor Anna, she knows how much time and effort were invested in making
the turkey and the potatoes and the peas and the salad possible and
to thank God without thanking the people seems to leave something
out.
There’s
an image of how God’s blessing is delivered on earth that I find
enlightening. It goes something like this: “God’s hands are at
the ends of my arms, His voice is in my mouth, His kindness and
compassion are delivered through my love for my neighbour, my family,
my community.”
If
this is true, then our gratitude to God is made real in our
gratitude for one another.
Anna
knows she can’t lead the family in a prayer so long that the mashed
potatoes grow cold. But if she could, she might well pray, “Thank
you Mary for getting up early to begin preparing this feast, Thanks,
Jake, for raising the turkey, thanks migrant Mexican workers for
picking the lettuce . . .. Thanks, God, for Mary and Jake and the
Mexican migrant workers. Amen
To
be grateful to God without being grateful to each other leaves out a
part that’s so important in our relationships, that can add so much
to our very happiness.
And
one last thing. I have a certain preoccupation with roots, with the
foundations on which my good fortune, my good faith, my good family,
my good community rest.
Do
we ever visit the Tiefengrund Cemetery, put our hands on the memorial
to Peter Regier and thank God for the work this sacrificing servant
did to bind us together into a Saskatchewan Valley community of
faith? Have we forgotten our Rosenort legacy?
Do
we give thanks for our forefathers and fore-mothers who took such
risk to tear themselves from their homes, cross the ocean and
re-establish communities here in the land of plenty?
Or
are we “just for today” people, who have no interest in our past,
in the martyrs who gave their lives to keep the flame of the gospel
as expressed in Jesus Christ alive, the many who died securing the
separation of church and state so that the kingdom of God could
prosper? Do we give thanks for our ancestors, our saints?
To
summarize:
- Thankfulness and its expressions are traditions older than Moses.
- The expression of gratitude means less if it’s not accompanied by celebration and offering—at least if Old Testament witness is to be our guide.
- The benefits of thankfulness and the evidence of it in our speech, in our singing, in how we live our daily lives is like a therapy of love, an undeniable health and happiness benefit.
- The light that thankful, celebratory, generous Christian communities shine on our world is immeasurable.
- And in our thanks, the saints who went before us should never be forgotten.
Let’s
pray: Lord, Creator, God. We are overwhelmed when we think of the
goodness poured down on us by your loving hands. Accept our
celebration, our offerings, our mindfulness as an expression on this
Thanksgiving Sunday. It’s our acknowledgment that all good things
come from you, delivered through the hands and voices of your
faithful servants. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Amen
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