Readings
Neh 12:27–43 Celebration after the walls of Jerusalem are rebuilt.
Ps 136 Give thanks to the Lord for he is good. The need to remember the blessings God has brought to our lives, both personally and communally.
2 Cor 4:7–18 Our endurance is based on the all-surpassing power from God, not from ourselves. The overflow of thanksgiving brings glory to God.
Luke 18:9–14 Are we, like the Pharisee, thankful only for our superiority; thankful that we have avoided the pain which others suffer?
Introduction
I hope that many of you know the children’s hymn “All things bright and beautiful”. How many can sing it with me?
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all.
Each little flower that opens
Each little bird that sings
He made their glowing colours
He made their tiny wings.
It is clear that there are many things for which we should give thanks to God. During this week and later in this service many have given thanks for God’s gifts. Personal blessings such as health, employment, family, friends, freedom and food. Communal blessings within our church such as the lovely mix of people here and the quality and commitment of our leaders. Blessings on our nation which miraculously averted the civil war which so many had expected, the richness of our national resources and the many examples of forgiveness which we have seen.
The reading from Nehemiah shows how appropriate it is for our thankfulness to overflow in celebration, complete with processions and singing and trumpets. They rejoiced and offered sacrifices because God had enabled them to rebuild the city walls. This last week of thanksgiving has encouraged many of us to think about how much we have to be thankful for.
But perhaps you will also know the more cynical version of “All things bright and beautiful” whose chorus goes …
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
We have to admit that there is much in the world which we neither understand nor enjoy. There are many horrors in nature — fatal accidents, ferocious and poisonous animals, earthquakes, fires and floods. And many forms of evil between people — violence, abuse, mistrust, murder, greed, backstabbing and betrayal.
Sure, there are many things bright and beautiful for which we are thankful, but also many things dull and ugly. How can we respond to Paul’s injunction to “Be joyful always [and to] give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thes 5:16–18)? Can our thankfulness be authentic if we have to turn a blind eye to the dull and ugly and horrific? On the other hand, can we, should we, be thankful for the horrors of the world?
So what is it — what is it really — for which we give thanks to God?
Some Bad Options
Being Spared from Evil?
Paul seems to place particular emphasis on thanksgiving. Of the 150 references to thanks throughout the Bible, just under a third were penned by Paul.
Does he mean that we should be thankful for those times when God spares us from the horrors? No, for this would be to accept that the horrors were the normal and proper order of things and that goodness constitutes just a few rare islands in a vast sea of evil. The truth is more like the reverse — that goodness is the intended norm of creation in which the horrors are disruptive intrusions. It is not that goodness is the lack of evil, but that evil is the lack of goodness. We give thanks to God for the underlying goodness of creation upon which evil preys.
We need to be careful about thanking God only when something good happens to us, especially when the benefit to us comes at someone else’s expense. Should we give thanks to God that South Africa beat Australia in the tri-nations rugby a couple of weeks ago? Richard might say “Yes”, but I would have trouble doing that, particularly since I was born in Australia! Can we be thankful that most of us are among the richest tenth of the world’s population when such a position was built (and is still being built) on the disempowerment of the other nine-tenths? There is a danger that we can become as self-righteous as the Pharisee in today’s Gospel reading who so proudly thanked God that he was not like the sinners of the world.
Ignoring the Evil?
Is it that we thank God for the good things while trying to ignore the bad? This may be why “All things bright and beautiful” is classified as a “children’s hymn” — an admission that it can only be sung wholeheartedly by those too young to know of the many things for which we could never be thankful. Perhaps our thankfulness is based on naiveté.
But then why would James write “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2) and how could Paul (who had experienced so much suffering himself) write “Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything” (Eph. 5:19–20).
It might be easy to be thankful with our eyes closed, but it makes no sense. It makes no sense to put on a happy face as though there were no sorrow in the world. Our thankfulness would be hollow if we never confronted the issues for which we do not feel thankful. But if our eyes are open, open to the world’s sorrows, can we still be thankful?
The Balance of Good and Evil?
Is our thankfulness based on the overall balance of good and evil; a faith that in the end the good will outweigh the bad? Well, our faith does hold that “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor 4:17), but that can seem a slim basis for our thankfulness in the present where we see goodness on a defensive retreat and where we cry out “How long, oh God, how long can it continue?”
Does our thankfulness disappear when the balance of the good and the bad weighs against us?
The Real Essence of our Thankfulness
One thing to note about our thanksgiving to God is that, although we list numerous things for which we give thanks, it is not primarily things which make us thankful. Rather, we are thankful for our being, for the life which we experience — in all its fullness — and thankful to the God who is the foundation of our being and the sustainer of our life.
The Package Deal
Many of you will be aware of the great British apologist C. S. Lewis and perhaps of the crisis of faith he weathered in the later part of his life. He had married Joy Davidman very late in life and was devastated when she contracted and eventually died from cancer. His intense grief called into question much of what he had previously accepted about God’s love.
You may have seen some of this struggle of C. S. Lewis portrayed in the movie “Shadowlands”. In the movie, Joy seems more able to cope with her impending death than Lewis. While he cries out about the unfairness of it and his inability to accept it, she reminds him of the happiness they had shared earlier and says “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” That’s the deal — you can’t accept the one without the other. We take the sum of our experience and give thanks for the whole. It’s a package deal — the suffering is inextricably linked to the joy.
Later in this communion service we proclaim the mystery of our faith in the words “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again” — that is what we are thankful for, perhaps above all else.
Just as a footnote, there seem to me to be four mysteries of faith in these words — “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again” — not three. There was a song in the Top 40 just a few years ago called “What if God were one of us?” The lyrics include these thoughts — ”Yeah, yeah, God is great. Yeah, yeah, God is good” (and the “yeah” here is sung indecisively as if to imply “Well it might be true but so what? The thought is too abstract and doesn’t touch me”). “But what if God were one of us? Just a blob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?” The song raises important questions about our response to such a possibility and I think it is very significant that it became so popular.
My point is that soon as we commence the three-fold declaration with the word “Christ”, we are affirming our belief in this greatest miracle of all — that God did become one of us! For “Christ” is not, as I used to think, Jesus’ surname, but a Greek title which means the same as the Hebrew term “Messiah”. Jesus was the fulfillment of the age-long human yearning for God to come and deliver his people. God has come — that’s the first mystery. But not only did God become human, in doing so he also became mortal. And then … God did die; God did rise; God will personally come again.
Now what part of this fourfold declaration are we thankful for? Can we be thankful for the trauma of Jesus’ death? (Can we be thankful for anyone’s death? Can we be thankful for the pain and suffering of so many who seem not to deserve it, especially those close to us? Can we be thankful for our own suffering when it is clear (to us at least!) that we certainly don’t deserve it?)
But it’s a package deal. Christ’s life had no point without his death. His rising would be impossible without his dying. His joy impossible without his suffering. It is the whole package for which we are thankful.
This brings us closer to an understanding of true thankfulness, for it highlights the nature of our God who turns death into life, darkness into light, destruction into victory, mourning into gladness, captivity into freedom, sickness into health.
Our Dependence on God
Being thankful to God is, in its deepest essence, an admission of our complete dependence on his grace. Underlying our thankfulness is an acceptance of what Jesus says in John 15:5 — “Apart from me you can do nothing.”
If we believe, contrary to this, that we deserve all the things we have received, then we will certainly not be thankful. Entitlement is opposed to gratitude. To the extent that we think we are entitled to life and health and rewards, we will certainly not appreciate that these are gifts, given by God as expressions of his grace.
In a book by the fantasy and SF writer Stephen Donaldson, a common proverb which becomes almost a cliché is “Accepting a gift returns honour to the giver”. This is exactly right, and especially with regard to God. Expressing our thanks when we accept God’s gifts gives back to him the honour which only he deserves, for none but he could have blessed us so richly.
Our admission of dependence brings glory to God, as the reading from 2 Cor reflects — Jesus’ death, resurrection and his future return are all for our benefit, so that thanksgiving will overflow to the glory of God (2 Cor. 4:14–15).
Closure
I want to close with a prayer of General Thanksgiving which you can follow in the blue Prayer Book on page 94.
ALMIGHTY God, Father of all mercies,
we your unworthy servants give you most humble and hearty thanks
for all your goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all people;
We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life;
but above all for your inestimable love
in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ,
for the means of grace,
and for the hope of glory.
And we beseech you, give us that due sense of all your mercies,
that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful,
and that we show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives;
by giving up ourselves to your service,
and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom with you and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory,
world without end. Amen.
“Give thanks to the Lord for he is good; His love endures for ever” (Ps 136:1)