GeeDubya's Sermon Site: Matthew 6: 25-33 - October 13, 2024

Thanksgiving is a holiday for celebrating the bounty of the field and all our blessings, presenting the first and best to God. Although we often hear the US and Canadian Thanksgiving holidays traced back to a harvest feast shared by the English colonists of Plymouth Massachusetts and the Wampanoag people some 400 years ago, I’d suggest that the roots of Thanksgiving Sunday back go back more than 2,000 years, to the Jewish Harvest Festivals. Much like the Oliver – Osoyoos area, where there are many harvests rom July to October as various fruits and vegetables are ready for harvest, there were three annual harvest times in Galilee and Judaea – barley in the spring, wheat in the summer, and fruits, grapes and olives in the fall. Each of these harvests was marked by its own religious ceremony and celebration.

In our earliest days in Ministry, serving three small towns in eastern Saskatchewan, everything in the community, whether you lived in town or on the farm, relied on the harvest. School started around Labour Day, but farm kids were often needed to help with harvest until late September, and I understand that in years gone by, this was the case here in the south Okanagan as well. In our Saskatchewan congregations you couldn’t start Sunday School until the crop was off because you would have neither students nor teachers until then, and if it seeding had been late, or if farms had been hailed out, or if the frost came early, or if it was a bad year for crop diseases or pests, Thanksgiving Sunday was a bit moted. We still had carrots and winter squash and onions and zucchini and tomatoes on display, but things felt a bit shaky because a lean harvest meant a worrisome winter.

It is a delight for Shannon and me to live in an area with so many fruit and vegetable stands. The tomatoes have been amazing and sweet, and we’ve had local apples that are like an entirely new fruit, so crisp and flavourful. But we also know that this has been an awful year for the vineyards and orchards and those whose livelihood rests on them, due to the prolonged deep freeze in January, and the closure of BC Tree Fruits made it that much harder. And as we look at erratic weather patterns made so much worse by human-induced climate change we can expect many more such years. As we gather for Thanksgiving Sunday we would love to offer unqualified thanks for a bountiful harvest, but this year, that to me would seem off-target, even dishonest.

So I ask: what does Thanksgiving look like when the harvest isn’t particularly bountiful? Or, more broadly how do we give thanks in any lean times – times of grief or loss, times of high anxiety, low hope or endless uncertainty, or times when your spiritual life has gone flat?

Thankfully, the Bible – which we described as the “field guide” in our Intentional Interim backpack– is well aware of life’s challenges. Our friend in Canmore, the retired Anglican Priest Rev. Dr. Richard LeSeur, points out that the vast majority of the Bible was written when the Israelites and early Christians were overrun by some nation or other: the Romans, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians. The various books of the Bible, then, shows deep awareness of life in hard times, and while these difficulties were duly lamented the people refused to be defeated by them. They found ways to give thanks to God, for God’s past faithfulness and future promise, even when all outward indicators were grim.

Our reading this morning from the gospel of Matthew (6: 26-29) has some thoughtful, lyrical words on how to reframe one’s life, asking “which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?... Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…. [and] consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these”.

Look at the birds of the air – consider the lilies of the field. Using two analogies from nature, Jesus shines a light on the human propensity to make things worse by fretting about them. Those of us who have lived with decades of depression or anxiety know that worry is not an easy adversary to defeat but there’s an important point for us to hear. Middle East Pilgrimage leader Rev Dr Andrew Mayes states that the word “consider” used here by Jesus means to pay close and prolonged attention to something, so you may learn from it. Consider the way the lilies are resourceful by design, taking the nutrients from the water and soil and sunshine, transforming that into sustaining energy that blooms. And behold how a bird shapes its day, combining its innate and learned abilities to build a nest, flirt, find food, nurture its young, migrate. And as we pause to contemplate what we see in the daily and seasonal routines of the birds and the lilies, we are likely to experience awe and wonder in their innate abilities to survive and thrive even in scarcity. We will also notice that neither birds nor flowers are ruled by a wristwatch or a calendar, and neither of them intentionally increase their anxiety by doom-scrolling through the alarming headlines on their smartphones. Both plants and birds can and do experience stress, caused by weather, or predators, or invasive species, or scarcity of nutrition, or harmful human activity, but do not add to the stress by their own imaginings. And the flowers, in particular, aren’t motivated by envy or jealousy or a fear of missing out; as Jesus said, even Solomon in all his glory wasn’t dressed in threads that could outstrip the natural beauty of nature.

Jesus’ words about the birds and flowers not wasting energy on things beyond their control remind me of the words of the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”. When the harvest is meager, we lean into this truth. When life is hard, we are honest about that, with ourselves and with God, and seek positive, creative ways forward. Many growers in the Okanagan had no stone fruit to sell this year, many vintners will not have a 2024 vintage wine and knowing this, many growers pivoted, quickly, to crops they could grow and sell in order to survive into 2025. And while it’s a very different thing from the crop failure, let’s face it: in Church life the harvest hasn’t been all that great for quote a while; we’ve all seen the steady decline in Church involvement in Canada since the mid 1960s. A major part of our Interim time together will be to determine who God calls you to be here, now, even while acknowledging that Canadian Church life is not easy. Thanksgiving in more meagre times still expresses gratitude, but does so as we realistically discern where we can make a difference, and where our efforts will be fruitless.

I mentioned earlier that our ancestors in the faith lived through some very grim times of being overrun by foreign oppressors, and still managed to find faith and gratitude. So did our most recent ancestors. Both of my parents were born in the early 1920s, grew up in the depression and were teenagers at the start of World War II, and it shaped them – and by extension, shaped my brother and me, as we learned how to scrimp and save, how to mend and fix and never be wasteful, and how to be grateful for what you have, even if it’s not everything you expected.

This fall, Shannon and I watched a British TV series from a dozen years ago entitled “Wartime Farm” where three adults, a historian and two archaeologists, lived together on a farm with the same surroundings, constraints and circumstances people would have faced in the war years. One of the episodes spoke of how the Brits, during World War II, addressed Christmas dinner at a time when a Christmas goose or turkey was almost impossible to source. The British Ministry of Food published instructions on how to make a mock Turkey, a pile of sausage and bread stuffing shaped like the body of the bird, with two parsnips peeled and carved into the shape of turkey legs. To be honest, it looked kind of sad and ridiculous, but the people on the TV show who had been simulating farm life during the war years spoke in glowing terms about (a) how good it tasted and (b) how much it meant to do something “normal”, to celebrate Christmas even when the life of the nation was turned upside-down by war. Here in Canada, folks grew Victory Gardens, and found other creative ways to keep on keeping on. In a way, those brave and creative efforts help to demonstrate our capacity to gives thanks in lean times: you bravely forge ahead, doing the best you can under the circumstances, and realize that a cultivated attitude of gratitude, especially if shared in community, will get you through a lot of things.

For even in the midst of hard times, friends in Christ, when the harvest is a flop, when we are missing loved ones who will not be sitting down at table with us this Thanksgiving, when we are dealing with challenging life circumstances, thanksgiving is not only possible, but helpful. We learn to see the good, we learn to count our blessings – not in a trite, dutiful way, but in a way that honours the very gift of life – and we seek ways that we can be of Christian service to others, even in hard circumstances. And so we give thanks for past and present, we give thanks for future hope, we give thanks for the people with whom we share our lives, we give thanks, as we did last Sunday, for simple pleasures like a favourite song or a favourite place or a favourite flavour. We lift a prayer for those who are in situations that need as much support as they can get. Yes, it’s a lot easier for me to be upbeat and happy and grateful when things are good and bountiful and I’m feeling encouraged, but I have also found that I can authentically find and express gratitude without ignoring or minimizing the challenges.

“Look at the birds of the air”, said Jesus, “they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…. [and] consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these”. May your lives, and the life we share as Church, truly flourish, this day and always. Amen.

References cited or consulted:

Ekins, Carolyn https://the1940sexperiment.com/2023/09/24/mock-turkey-wartime-christmas-recipe-no-215/

Government of BC, “Tree Fruit Blossom and Harvest Schedule” https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/farming-natural-resources-and-industry/agriculture-and-seafood/animal-and-crops/crop-production/tree_fruit_blossom_and_harvest_schedule.pdf

Kohn, Daniel. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/pilgrimage-festivals/

LeSueur, Richard. https://www.fifthgospel.ca/

Mayflower 400. https://www.mayflower400uk.org/education/who-were-the-pilgrims/2019/july/the-story-of-thanksgiving-and-the-national-day-of-mourning/

Mayes, Andrew. https://www.spiritualityadviser.com/

Wartime Farm: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2470814/