Thanksgiving Day

"Thanks Be To God"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!

This fervent exclamation, ending today’s second reading, is a brief expansion of one of our most basic liturgical prayers: “Thanks be to God.” We pray that simple acclamation after hearing God’s word read from scripture, as well as at the very end of the service when we are sent forth to love and serve the Lord. “Thanks be to God.” Our repetition of this mantra, if you will, reminds us that gratitude is the basic stance of the Christian. Just as we are constantly receiving gifts flowing from the hand of God, so too are we frequently to express our thanksgiving so that gratitude becomes second nature to us and it easily flows off our tongue: “Thanks be to God.”

This slight expansion by Paul in his second letter to the early Christians living in Corinth adds further depth to our habitual prayer: “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift.” This addition, “For his inexpressible gift” first of all makes clearer that everything we receive from God comes as a free gift, with no conditions attached – and not as a result of any merit of ours! God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt.5:45), as Jesus taught. Whether we are “naughty or nice,” we receive God’s lavishly given gifts anyway because God loves all of us children, who are made in the image of God. God’s gifts are not deserved; they are simply to be humbly received.

And these gifts are so multiple and so beyond our ability to comprehend them that we acknowledge them as inexpressible gifts. We cannot do them justice because we not only have trouble realizing them as gifts, taking so much for granted and as just the way things are and what we deserve, like the macho cartoon character who, when asked how life is treating him, replies, “It’s not. I pay my way.” But even when we are left in awe by, say, the overwhelming impact of another person on our life, our parent, our spouse, our child, our mentor, our friend, we can never fully express the depth of that mystery. Like Paul we are left to exclaim, “Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!”

Thanksgiving Day itself comes to us as a significant gift this year. With such a recessive economy, unseen by most of us in our lifetimes, we can easily focus on what we do not have and what we have lost or may lose. None of us are better off financially than we were last Thanksgiving, and many among us are in a significantly worse position. Anxiety and depression can settle in and crowd out any sense of gratitude and awe.

But the grace of our situation – when we can take nothing for granted – is that it refocuses our priorities and our trust. It is not what we accumulate in this life that gives it value. It is not our worldly possessions from which we derive a sense of security. It is not what we have in which we put our trust; it is in the God who created us and from whom all blessings flow and in whom is our ultimate fulfillment. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O God,” articulated Augustine.

But until our hearts ultimately rest in God, we find flashes of that God in all the daily gifts that reveal to us something of the mystery of the dynamic, loving, unreservedly sharing Divinity. We glimpse God in the vastness and the intricacy and the stunning beauty of creation; in the abundant supply of all that meets our daily needs for food, for water, for air, for challenge, for affirmation, for rest and rejuvenation; in the gift of one another, in our mental and emotional capacities, in our faith, in our continuing but ultimately finite gift of physical health.

For all of these we are, like the lepers in our Gospel story, to turn back, “praising God with a loud voice,” and to fall on our faces “at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks.” We are not to assume that our health, our friends and family, our place in this world are due to us and ultimately caused by our merits and hard work. Our first reading this morning reminds us, “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” Even our talents and resources and opportunities are themselves God’s gift to us.

Our path as created human beings to truth and to closer contact with the Creator for whom we were made is gratitude, growing in giving thanks for all that we are and all that we have received. Gratitude is at the heart of our spiritual journey, and it brings us together this morning on this unique national holiday to give expression to our common gratitude in the Eucharist, in Eucharistia, the Greek word for thanksgiving. In doing so, we touch on the heart of our faith and of our intimate relationship with God.

J.B. Mozley, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford well over a century ago, in preaching on gratitude, declared, "The grateful spirit alone believes, because it alone acknowledges the source of its life and being. The grateful spirit alone finds out God; to it alone God reveals himself. It alone discovers its gracious Maker in its own faculties, its own perceptions, its own capacities of happiness: and with the grateful one out of ten, it falls down before Him, giving Him thanks."

Deuteronomy 8:7-18; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Luke 17:11-19