Homily: Thanksgiving Day, 22 November 2007 Propers: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Ps. 100, Philippians 4:4-9, John 6:25-35 Preacher: The Reverend Addison C. Hall If you are a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, and also are committed to being in church every year on Thanksgiving Day, I hope you‟ve noticed that the readings appointed for us this morning are different from the ones you‟ve known ever since the new prayer book was adopted in the late seventies. Our recently revised lectionary has provided alternative readings, especially welcome on occasions like Thanksgiving Day on which before this the same readings were used every single year. They were good readings, and there will be occasions when we will use them again, but we welcome this opportunity, or at least I welcome the opportunity, to meditate on the Thanksgiving holiday from a slightly different perspective. In these readings, from Deuteronomy, Paul‟s letter to the Philippians, and John‟s gospel, there is a progression from the most concrete understanding of the harvest festival to an increasingly more abstract or spiritual understanding. The passage from Deuteronomy, one of the oldest and most important in the Hebrew scriptures, rehearses in a condensed form the story of God‟s saving relationship to the people of Israel. It concludes with the re-entry of the people into the land promised to Abraham, a land described as fertile and fruitful, “a land flowing with milk and honey.” (I digress to say that this famous phrase – “land of milk and honey” – means, among other things, that the land given to the people is one that contains both grazing land – hence milk – and watered oases and riverine valleys – hence honey – in this case date honey, not the honey of bees.) This ancient condensed history was recited by people for generations and centuries as a liturgical offering on the occasion of the first-fruits festival. The offering of the first fruits was a way of remembering that the fruitful land had been given by God, and of remembering the whole saving history that had returned the people to the land of promise after their slavery in Egypt. Not surprisingly, the English pilgrims who fled the religious wars of Europe and Britain in the seventeenth century, thought of the land they were entering to occupy as a new promised land, a New Canaan, a land given them by God as a reward for their faithfulness and as a sign, more important, of God‟s faithfulness to them. Their harvest festival, the memory of which resonates so strongly into the present observance of this national holiday, was a conscious recapitulation of the first-fruits festival of the Hebrew people. Their gathering for what we now call, misleadingly, the first Thanksgiving, was a reiteration in a new place and under dramatic circumstances of the ancient biblical celebration of what the Deuteronomist calls “the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.” In his letter to the Philippians, Paul generalizes from the focused thanksgiving for the harvest, and urges his congregation to give thanks on all occasions, and he does so in a passage that has become well-known and loved throughout Christian history: “Do not
worry about anything,” Paul says, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” If on this Thanksgiving Day we are bringing not just thankfulness but also anxiety about someone‟s health and welfare as we come before God, that is not only normal but also, as Paul would say, appropriate. When we pray for our own or someone else‟s deliverance from difficulty or danger, Paul reminds us to surround that prayer with offerings of thanks; just calling to mind all for which we genuinely can give thanks, especially under duress, helps us to bear our difficulties with greater hope and equanimity than if we artificially separated prayers for deliverance from prayers of thanksgiving. Certainly this mingling of thanksgiving with a sense of the precariousness of life in the wilderness would have characterized that Plymouth first-fruits festival. To the image of the wilderness we turn for the final reflection, from John‟s gospel. The crowd at the lake in Galilee says to Jesus, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, „He gave them bread from heaven to eat.‟” Jesus, aware that after the recent experience of being fed in great numbers by the bread and fish, the people are insatiable, says, “‟Very truly I tell you, the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.‟ They said to him, „Sir, give us this bread always.‟ Jesus said to them, „I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.‟” It would be insulting to our Pilgrim forebears and our Hebrew forebears to suggest that real food is not important, that the feasts to which we will sit down in a few hours are only a crude token of a more urgent spiritual reality, and not a joy in themselves. The harvest is good, and its fruits are good, and the nourishment of real food is essential, as anyone who lacks it – some half a million, many of them children, in this Commonwealth alone – will tell you quickly. But the feast from which we will rise a few hours from now will leave us contented, not principally because of the turkey and the stuffing and the cranberry sauce, but because of the companionship and love that we have shared with those with whom we have feasted. That love and companionship are equally rich at a simple table as at a lavish one, and sometimes all the more sustaining and essential in the former case than the latter. What Jesus means to say, as it applies to this celebration, is that his loving presence is available to all who call upon it, at any time, in any circumstance, in abundance as in scarcity, and it is his loving presence that feeds us most deeply, sustains us in this life in time and into eternity. At this table then, at which we share the simple meal in obedience to his commandment, we give thanks for his presence, and for the hope that his love gives us, and as Paul asked us to do, we are happy to rejoice. Amen.