Today we’re keeping our annual Harvest Thanksgiving service, or Harvest Festival as it used to be called. I know that these services tend to be either loved or loathed and people have their own good reasons for which side of that particular fence they sit on. But I don’t want to talk about that today or about what people’s reasons might be for what they think about Harvest services. Whatever we, personally, think about Harvest services, one very good thing about them is that they do draw our minds towards giving thanks to God. Specifically for the food we eat, but hopefully in more general terms too. So what I want to do this morning is say something about thanksgiving in general terms. About why we should give thanks to God and also how we should give thanks to God.
None of us should struggle when it comes to finding reasons why we should give thanks to God. We only need to pay attention to the words of our Sunday services to find plenty of reasons to do that. As we go through the liturgy we thank God for his glory, we thank him for his word as revealed to us in scripture, in the Eucharistic Prayer, the Thanksgiving Prayer which is what that prayer is, we thank God for many things and most especially for sending his Son into the world to save us from sin and bring us to eternal life, and we thank God for receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. In the Creed we’re reminded that God is both our creator and the creator of all things and so, in turn, that should remind us that we have God to thank for our lives and all we need to sustain life. But as many and as important as all these things are, they don’t adequately cover our need to give thanks to God.
We believe that God is the creator and sustainer of life. And so we believe that God is with us and at work in our lives at every moment of our lives. So when it comes to giving thanks to God, we have to think about our lives and what’s happening in our lives that we need to give thanks for. And that includes both the good things that bring us happiness and the bad that we might learn some valuable lesson from, perhaps something that helps us grow in faith, or strengthens us for some future challenge or makes us more understanding of others. Giving thanks for bad things is very difficult to do when we’re going through them, but if we think about these things, we often can see that some good has come from those bad experiences and that, in the end, they are things we can actually be thankful for.
To do this though means that we have to think about our lives and what happens to us in our lives through the eyes of faith. That means spending some time, perhaps towards the end of each day, thinking about the day, reflecting on the events of the day and contemplating how God might have been active in our lives through those events and what he might have been trying to say to us through them. Doing this kind of exercise really can help us in more ways than one when it comes to giving thanks to God.
One way this kind of reflection and contemplation on the day can help us is through what it adds to our prayer. I think sometimes our prayers can amount to not much more than a wish list, that is, we tell God what we want and ask him to give it to us. By that I don’t mean “Please Lord, let me win the lottery” or anything like that (although I have actually been given prayer requests for that very thing!). What I mean is we tend to pray for things like Church unity, peace in the world, health for ourselves, our family and friends, the recovery of the sick and the repose of the souls of the departed. Now there’s nothing wrong with praying for any of those things and they are things we should be praying for. But there should be much more to prayer than that.
One way of thinking about prayer, which some of you may have heard of, is by thinking about ACTS of Prayer where ACTS is an acronym for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. And the idea is that, when we pray, we start with Adoration, in other words, prayer begins as worship, in praise of God. Then we move to Confession. That in itself tells us that before we pray, we have to think about the events of the day and about all we’ve done during the day and be honest enough to admit and confess our sins, all the things we’ve done during the day that we shouldn’t have done and the things we’ve not done during the day that we should have done. Then we move to Thanksgiving and again to give thanks to God for the events of the day requires us to give some though to the events of the day. And only after we’ve worshipped God, confessed our sins to God and given thanks to God do we move on to Supplication, of humbly asking God to grant us what we need or want. So that wish list that so much of prayer tends to be made up of is actually the very last thing we should thinking about when we pray. So thinking about the day, reflecting on the events of the day and contemplating what God has been doing for us and through us and trying to teach us during the day helps our prayer and it helps us to understand what we need to thank God for.
One of the great issues with thankfulness though is the genuineness of the feeling, how heartfelt is our thankfulness. There’s a big difference between saying “Thank-you” and being genuinely thankful and I’m sure we all know that. How often, for example, have we given a gift to someone, and they’ve said “Thank-you”, but we’ve been able to tell, perhaps through their tone of voice or their body language, that it’s just been said out of politeness, they’ve not really meant it. And so, when we give thanks to God, we need to feel genuinely thankful. In our liturgies we use words to express what God has done for us and our thanks to God for those things, but the reality of what God has done for us and does do for us for us is beyond words. He gives us life and sustains our lives and has offered us eternal life how can we adequately put those things into words? How can we adequately express our thanks for those things in mere words? If we are truly thankful to God for all he has done for us and still does for us we can’t. So if we are really, truly thankful to God we can’t leave our thanksgiving at mere words.
Another thing we all know is that true thankfulness is best shown in action rather than words. We can say “Thank-you” to those who’ve been good to us, and so we should, but if we are really thankful for what they’ve done, we inevitably want to show that by doing something good for them in return. But how can we do that for God? God is complete in himself; he needs nothing so what can we give him in return for his goodness towards us to show how thankful we are?
One thing we can do is just what we’re doing here this morning. We can show our thankfulness to God by making the effort to come to church and worship him. But we can also show our thanks to God by doing what he asks us to do, and he especially asks us to listen to his Son Jesus Christ and live our lives according to what we hear from Jesus. And what we hear from Jesus is that we should love God with all our heart and soul and mind and love our neighbour as much as we love ourselves. So Just like our thankfulness towards God, our love of God has to be more than just words, it has to be something we really feel, from the heart. And our love of others has to be more than just words too. We don’t simply talk about wanting good things for ourselves do we? We really do want them, and we do things to make sure we have those good things. And so if we really do love our neighbours as we love ourselves, we won’t simply wish them well, we’ll actually do something about it, we’ll treat them well and make sure they have good things too.
And in doing that we’ll show our true thankfulness to God by giving something back to God for all he’s given and gives to us. Because, in speaking about the good we do to others, didn’t Jesus say,
‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.’
So today we celebrate our Harvest Thanksgiving service, and we give thanks to God for the food we eat. We show our love of our neighbours too by giving some the food we have to those who have less than us. But what we do today is only a small part of the thanks we should give to God and of the love we’re called to show towards our neighbours. So, whatever we think about Harvest services, whether we love them our loathe them, let’s all use this Harvest Thanksgiving as a reminder of just how much we have to thank God for; of the genuineness of the thankfulness towards God we should feel, and of our need to show that depth of thankfulness through action in our lives.
Amen.
Propers for Harvest Thanksgiving, 6th October 2024
Entrance Antiphon
The earth has yielded its fruit, for the Lord our God has blessed us.
The Collect
Eternal God,
you crown the year with your goodness,
and you give us the fruits of the earth in their season:
grant that we may use them to your glory,
for the relief of those in need and for our own well-being;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Joel 2:21-24, 26-27
Psalm 67
1 Timothy 6:6-11, 17-19
Luke 12:15-21
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Joel 2:21-27
Psalm 126
1 Timothy 6:6-10
Matthew 6:25-33
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 