Thanksgiving Day (Novmeber 25, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We have so much to be thankful for. As I enumerated in the sermon on Sunday, this has been quite a year for us at St. Paul’s! Beyond that which we share in common, I’m sure each of us can come with a long list of things we’re thankful for. Each of those particular people, things, and events we are thankful for are windows or icons whereby we can see God working in our lives clearer. Through the particular goods we are gifted by God, we come to know the universal Good.

This is what our reading from James gets at. “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." Everything good comes from God, who is Goodness itself. Because God is the ultimate goodness, he can’t change. If he changed to be less good, he wouldn’t be the ultimate good. He also can’t be more than the ultimate good because then he wouldn’t be ultimate. The point is that God is unchanging. Our notion of goodness comes from God who is goodness.

So as we are thankful for those things which are good in our lives, we direct that thanks to God precisely because he is the fount of all goodness. Knowing that God is the source of “all things bright and beautiful,” as the hymn puts it, is comforting for us because it means that God is our ultimate provider.

Because God is the fount of goodness, we can heed Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:25, “do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on.” To prove the point, Jesus points to the birds of the air and lilies of the field. The birds don’t do any work. They don’t make provisions for themselves. They don’t clock in at 8 and clock out at 5. They probably don’t have 401ks. Yet “your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?"

Similarly, the lilies of the field don’t do work yet God clothes them in such splendor. “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?" Because we see how God cares for those things that are lesser than man, how much more will God provide for us? “Therefore, do not be anxious saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

Today is a beautiful day for us to consider the blessings God gives us in our lives. Each of the individual blessings we have should remind us of the ultimate blessing: that Christ became human and died on the cross to restore us to Communion with God. So today, let us give thanks for this benefit and all the other instances of God’s goodness working in our lives. May these serve as an impetus for us to “seek his kingdom and his righteousness,” allowing his will to order our priorities.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen