Thankful to Whom?

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Matthew 6:25-34

So, it’s Thanksgiving Sunday here in Canada.  Happy Thanksgiving!  That out of the way and getting to the point, I think that in today’s Canada which would be best labelled secular and multicultural, having a national day for the purpose of giving thanks begs a couple of obvious questions: to whom are we thankful and for what.  A quick look at history might be helpful.

Being an insular American, it pushes my patriotic ego a bit to admit that Thanksgiving didn’t begin in 1621 at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts when Puritan Pilgrims and some very helpful First Nations neighbours thankfully celebrated a harvest that would keep them alive through the coming winter.  Actually, the feasts of thanksgiving were commonplace among the First Nations peoples here on Turtle Island long before Europeans showed up. Those feasts usually happened after Winter and gratitude was expressed to the Creator for their surviving the winter and for crops to plant and game to hunt. 

The first recorded European Thanksgiving actually happened in Nunavut in 1578 celebrated by English explorer Martin Frobisher and his crew for their safe arrival.  They feasted on a meal of salted beef, biscuits, and mushy peas and gave thanks by celebrating Holy Communion.  That’s 43 years prior to Plymouth Plantation.  

The next recorded Thanksgiving celebration happened in what was New France on November 4, 1606 hosted by Samuel de Champlain.  It was a French and Mi’kmaq feast at which cranberries introduced by the Mi’kmaq played an important role.  This is why we have cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.  People didn’t know about Vitamin C and how it helped ward off scurvy which killed many European colonists, whole villages.  Yet, the Mi’kmaq knew that cranberries had something to do with preventing scurvy so Champlain listened and started having thanksgiving feasts every few weeks to get people to eat them.  The Order of Good Cheer grew out of organizing such things.

An official day for Thanksgiving wasn’t declared until 1879 when Parliament declared November 6 as the official date.  Prior to that, sporadic Thanksgiving celebrations happened around harvest time.  Also, Loyalists to the British Empire started coming up from the States after the Revolutionary War and began to change the menu considerably to be more American, inclusive of turkey, squash, and pumpkin pie.

After the World Wars, a need to move the date of Thanksgiving Day arose to prohibit Thanksgiving celebrations from occurring on the same weekend as Remembrance Day.  So, on January 31, 1957 Parliament declared that the second Monday of October would be our national day of Thanksgiving.  The body of the declaration answered our two questions very well saying that this day is to be “a day of general thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed.” 

Well, not to be a bummer, I suspect that if parliament made a Thanksgiving declaration for today’s Canada the stated purpose for the day would likely sound more like “a day of general thanksgiving for such things as the bountiful harvest, friendship, family, community, health, safety, etc.”  You will notice that any reference to a god is missing and the list of things to be thankful for has grown. Why no reference to God?  Well, we need to recognize the religious diversity of Canada today.  Why a larger list? There’s a current trend in our culture arising from “Wellness” circles noting that we’ve a lot more than the harvest to be thankful for and thankfulness plays a vital role in mental health.  So, be thankful for everything.

I wholeheartedly support the notion for an expanded list of things to be thankful for. Taking time daily to stop and note the things for which we are thankful truly does change our outlook on life benefitting overall health.  Finding things in other people to be thankful for changes relationships.  Getting spouses in a hurting marriage to stop pointing out the negatives and rather finding things to be thankful for can go a long way in healing the brokenness.  Thankfulness is good for physical, mental, emotional, and relational health.  Dwell on the good and you will see your way through the bad.  In the practice of thankfulness, there will even come a time when you can find reason to be thankful for the bad.  And of course, take some time to be thankful for the food we eat, the harvest, the land, and those who work it.

Thankfulness is essential to human well-being, but it concerns me that in so much that is written today on thankfulness God is left out.  There’s no “whom” to direct our thankfulness too.  I get it that we are a religiously diverse culture and we don’t want to offend one another’s beliefs and religious sentiments.  But I can’t help but feel that there is a bias against a Christian understanding of God that serves about the same purpose as shooting oneself in the foot.  

I do truly understand that there are legitimate reasons for this bias and topping the list is the conduct of the Church throughout Western history; primarily its lust for power, its greed, its colonializer mentality, its racism, its sexual abuse of vulnerables.  The list is long here.  It also doesn’t help when governments and nations align themselves with a deity they identify as “almighty God” and call it the Christian God.  History has taught us the power of the State undergirded by an “almighty God” is always evil.  Regardless, I will take my lumps in today’s world by saying if one wants to know what God is really like, you have to look at Jesus because Jesus is the self-revelation of God.  Jesus is the one in whom “I am” said “this is who I am”.

Looking at Jesus we find that God listens.  God becomes one of us to fully know what it is to be one of us in all our tarnished glory.  God heals.  God casts out evil spirits.  God forgives even tax collectors and adulterers.  God confronts religious and political hypocrisy.  God feeds, often miraculously.  God loves indiscriminately.  There are no favourites when it comes to God’s love.  God seeks the lost.  God is concerned about what wealth, particularly the love thereof, can do to a person.  God cries.  God grieves.  God laughs.  God parties.  God reconciles.  God raises the dead.  God touches those considered untouchable.  God does not want big business in his houses of worship.  Because God’s power is a vulnerable, wasteful love that we cannot understand, God allows himself to be betrayed, wrongly accused, spat on, beat with a stick, flogged with a leather strap that has nails in it that rips the skin from the body, then crucified all the while being mocked.  God dies.  Yet, by some great mystery that only God can explain; by his wounds we are healed, by his death sin, evil, and death are defeated, by his resurrection all things are and will be made new.  

Jesus tried to help us understand this by saying, “Very truly I tell you, unless a seed of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it becomes many seeds.”  Friends look at the bread on this table.  It comes from a seed that has passed through death and become many.  It nourishes us.  So, the seed of the grape.  From one seed comes many and our thirst is quenched.  This is Jesus.  This is the mystery of life embodied by the God who in love provides the abundance of enough to us even when we are known to starve ourselves while growing fat on seeking life elsewhere.  The first Christian Thanksgiving in Canada was celebrated by sharing this meal.  Let us give our thanks likewise.  Come to this table, the table of the Lord Jesus Christ, and live.  Here is the God who truly provides.  Amen.

A Tale of Two Meals

 Mark 6:14-46

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You folks may be familiar with the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s shelter ministry down in Toronto known as Evangel Hall.  They’ve a really amazing ministry there providing medical and dental care, temporary housing even for special needs people, clothing, help with job searching, bathing facilities, a chaplain, and that’s just getting started.  Evangel Hall also serves meals every day of the week, but for Sunday dinner they like to provide churches with the opportunity to come and serve.  This is a wonderful thing.

My last church was close enough to Toronto to go down a couple of times a year to serve the Sunday dinner.  It was a big effort for my church for we averaged only in the upper twenties on a Sunday.  We had to bring enough food for close to a hundred people and ourselves.  We had to get there in plenty of time to prepare the meal in their kitchen with enough volunteers to cook, serve, and clean up afterwards.  We were small and mighty and we did it joyfully and efficiently.  Once we had done it a couple of times everybody knew what they each had to do and we did it and it never became a labour of love but was always a joy.  I even brought along a couple of musician friends to provide a little hillbilly indigestion to accompany the meal.  When everybody was served, we served ourselves and sat and ate with the people and made friends.  After dinner, we took whoever wanted to go down to the chapel and had a little informal church service that was a really beautiful moment in time.

I don’t want to say these meals were a miracle of loaves and fishes.  It was just a group of relatively well-off white-people pulling together $400-500 and donating a Sunday afternoon and evening to provide a meal to some folks who otherwise wouldn’t have had a meal on Sunday.  The real miracle, the real gift was the sharing of lives; the building of relationships in what I would call a wilderness place, getting to hear the stories of people who for so many reasons just aren’t able to do life the way “society” expects them to do it.  I’m sure Jesus would say, “To such as these belongs the Kingdom of God.”

Now, if I may, let me share another meal experience I’ve had as a minister that for me was not so uplifting.  It was a thing called a Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.  There was an element in the ministerial association in the community where my last church was who thought it would be good to let the mayor and other local government officials know that the local churches were praying for them.  Good idea, but…you know, I would have whole-heartedly supported the event if it had just been a thing where the Ministerial invited the Mayor and the Councillors for breakfast in the fellowship hall of one of our churches and we shared a meal and then prayed for them, but that’s not how those Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast things work.  Let me bring you up to speed.  

It was a well-catered event for which everybody had to pay, I think it was about $35 a person.  You got a little break on the deal if you could get enough people from your church to fill a whole table, about eight.  Of course, there was some status associated with being able to do that.  It’s been a while, but I think the venue wound up being either a big meeting area in the town offices or one of the local banquet halls.  The local business community was also invited as if this were a Chamber of Commerce event.  They were also given a reduced price if they could bring enough employees to fill a table.  Posters went up all over town.  There was a motivational type of speaker and a brief prayer at the end. 

Being a frugal Presbyterian with some Mennonite in my background, I had a hard time seeing the purpose in the event.  The people who attended, the mayor included, were already involved in local churches so it wasn’t outreach.  It wasn’t even a fundraiser for a special need in the community.  The caterers got the money.  There wasn’t much socializing afterwards.  Everybody had to get to work.  I questioned why we were having this breakfast.  Knowing the theological tradition from which the idea of the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast arose down in the States, at best it seems they hope that they can build a type of relationship between the Ministerial and town council that was enjoyed by Billy Graham and American Presidents.  But…, and I don’t want to sound cynical but I guess I am…, I am suspicious that these breakfasts are just a way of letting local politicians know there is a Christian voting block they need to consider next time they run for office.  Anyway, a good time was had by all, but the next year when the Ministerial decided to organize another one of those things, I just stopped participating in the Ministerial.  It just didn’t feel right.

These two meals show two different ways the church can be in the world.  We can serve others unconditionally or we can court power.  In his Gospel, Mark presents us with these two options.  First, we have Jesus miraculously serving a meal of abundance to the crowds of people who followed him everywhere because he was bringing hope and healing to them.  He also told of the feast that King Herod threw for his cronies where his young stepdaughter danced so seductively well that he promised to give her anything she wanted.  Her mother put her up to asking for John the Baptist’s head on a platter.  She found his prophetic voice concerning her having two husbands a bit too challenging.  Thus, the church can be a “meal”, so to speak, that brings in the Kingdom of God or it can be a “meal” that courts power and kills its prophetic voice.

The Ministry at Evangel Hall is a “meal” like Jesus’ Feast of Loaves and Fishes.  Presbyterians all over Canada give what amounts to a loaf or a fish to Presbyterians Sharing and it’s funnelled through to Evangel Hall to where it becomes a feast of abundance of sustenance for people in some really challenging situations and their lives are changed.  The people who come to Evangel Hall if they keep coming back and take full advantage of what’s offered there, they will get a taste of salvation now in the Kingdom of God that manifests wherever Jesus is.

This is World Communion Sunday.  Churches all over the world are sharing this meal that speaks loudly of who we are as the church of Jesus Christ and what our mission is in the world.  This bread is his body given for us.  This juice is his blood shed for the forgiveness or our sin.  This meal demonstrates the way of unconditional love, wasteful, sacrificial unconditional love.  This meal says he is with us and by the presence of the Holy Spirit he is indeed here with us.  It’s a little meal that doesn’t solve the world’s problems or sate our hunger in the present.  It points to the future when Jesus will return and put out the “feast” – put the world to rights. It’s a little bit of nourishment to our bodies that shows us how we, the Body of Christ, are to be in the world.  We are not to court power.  That will take away our prophetic voice.  We are to share this “meal” little by little, through little acts of wasteful, sacrificial unconditional love give whenever, wherever, however we can as Jesus leads us through the voice of the Holy Spirit so that Jesus may be seen and felt as his kingdom becomes visible through these small, tangible, life changing ways until he comes.  Amen.