Harvest Festival 9th October 2011 8am

Harvest Festival is an annual reminder as the eucharist is a weekly reminder of the profound truth of thanksgiving.

Our lives are not our own – and that’s an unfashionable truth in a self reliant age.

The Christian faith calls for inner eyes to be opened up to gratitude.

We come from God. We belong to God. We go to God.

This means, as creatures made and loved by God, that we believe in thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a key mark of the Christian church which has as its first service the Eucharist or great thanksgiving over bread and wine for Jesus sake.

Christians have every reason to live with thanksgiving. In Jesus Christ they find belonging, purpose for life, empowerment, forgiveness, spiritual direction and so many blessings.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey made many a profound remark and one was that ‘thanksgiving is a soil in which pride doesn’t easily grow’.

Thanksgiving is a soil in which pride doesn’t easily grow – now there’s a deep thought!

To believe in thanksgiving is to believe that the centre of your life is outside of yourself.

This truth lies behind those words on divine providence that we just heard from Our Lord in the Gospel from St Luke Chapter 12: Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?

St. Paul expresses this truth of our belonging at the deepest level within the providence of God when he writes to the Colossians our life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3v3b).

To live thankful for such a grace is to live in infectious joy so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God quoting the apostle Paul again only from 2 Corinthians 4v15b.

Doesn’t thanksgiving undermine a right self-reliance? Surely God helps those who help themselves?

Yes and no. Yes we are subjects not puppets. God never undermines our free will. No because the whole wonder of Christian life is God’s readiness to be helper of the helpless. He’s eager to release his possibilities into so many of our situations. If you rely on self alone you’ll always be disappointed. Depression is self-reliance that has failed. Death is the utter loss of self life.

Christian faith, thankful living, reverses both of these scenarios.

It is a matter of immersing ourselves in the self-offering of Christ as we do week by week in the holy eucharist.

Blessed art Thou, Lord God of all creation, through thy goodness we have this bread and wine to offer...

These gifts are offered as an expression of gratitude, the sign of our lives being given up to God. The bread and wine’s transformation to Christ’s body and blood and our receiving of these is the instrument of our own ongoing transformation into thankful living.

We come from God. We belong to God. We go to God.

All things come of thee O Lord and of thine own do we give thee!