Giving Thanks

Today is Thanksgiving – a note to my American friends we celebrate Thanksgiving earlier than you.  This morning my thoughts are focused on two things – giving thanks, and home. 

When I think of giving thanks, the passage from 1 Thessalonians 5:18 comes to mind, "In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you."  It is important to note that it says, ‘in every thing’ and not ‘for every thing’.  I don’t think the writer of this passage intends us to give thanks to God for everything that happens to us.  It would be inappropriate to give thanks for the premature death of a loved one, or for a vehicle accident in which you or a passenger was seriously injured, and the many things that many or all of us have experienced in life that are tragic, or heart wrenching, or horrible, to contemplate.  That also applies to the not so serious events in life when fate seems to be conspiring against you.  However, it is possible to give thanks to God when life gives us a wrong turn for God is with us particularly in those difficult times. 

With that in mind, I consider what I am thankful for this Thanksgiving?  Fortunately, I do not have much that is difficult for me to not be thankful for.  Lorna and I have returned from our summer at the cottage in PEI.  We have had 14 years of enjoying and appreciating our time each year at the cottage and with many friends and good neighbours.  That has come to an end with the decision that it was time to close that portion of our lives and sell the cottage.  So, thankfully we were able to sell the cottage in a slow real estate market – the sale was finalized on our last day – something to be truly thankful for.  We were able to pack up all we wanted to bring back to Ontario (more than might be imagined for a cottage), sell what we didn’t, and give to the local second-hand shop.  I was also thankful for the safe journey home which was uneventful if a bit stressful.  Actually, the whole process was quite stressful, and we both are thankful that we didn’t wait until next year to undertake all this as we are definitely not getting any younger – but I hope we are getting better.  So here we are back in our home in Parkhill and settling in for it to be our year-round home.

That brings us to the second thing on my mind this morning – home.  What comes to mind for this is the quote from TS Eliot, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."  Our cottage was home for us and our house in Parkhill Ontario was and is also home.  However, neither of those homes was, I believe, what Eliot had in mind when he wrote those memorable lines.  I give thanks that Lorna and I had our home at the cottage with friends and neighbours and the opportunity to worship at an Anglican church.  There are things in both homes that have components of what Eliot was expressing.  There was a place where we were safe and secure and could enjoy the aspects of life that fulfilled us – Lona had her garden and I had my bunkie.  We had St. Alban’s church where we could worship God in a meaningful way and where I could preside and provide music with people we love.  That is true of our home in Parkhill – in ways that are different but the same.  We have the Anglican Church of St. John the Evangelist at home in Parkhill.  Both those homes are reflections and indications of what our true home will be when we shall arrive once more at the place we each started and see it truly for the first time.

So, there is much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.  I hope that you have much to give thanks for as well – in everything give thanks but definitely not for everything.   

 

What is Biblical Truth

Yesterday I was strolling around the internet and came upon an interview with Richard Dawkins.  For those of you who don’t know Dawkins, he is a big name in the religion debunking business and what I could call the cult of atheism in popular social media today.  The title of the interview, which says a lot about Dawkins, is Outgrowing God: Richard Dawkins in Conversation and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Sf2eNVWVs.

Now from my observation of Dawkins, his approach is to set up straw dogs of fundamentalist religious beliefs so that he can make a splash of knocking them down.  In this case, Dawkins was describing a discussion two people were having about the creation story in Genesis and disagreeing about whether Adam and Eve were tempted by an apple or a fig.  Dawkins dismissed this out of hand and stated his concern was that the Garden of Eden story never happened implying that the details of the story didn’t matter.

As it happened, this was a great example of what I was preaching about yesterday at St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Souris PEI.  Dawkins uses the facts of the biblical account as a straw dog to try and destroy people’s belief in God.  The Gospel Reading for the day was the account in Mark of Jesus feeding 4000 men with a few loaves of bread and a few small fish.  I believe that when dealing with miracle accounts in the bible, it is not constructive to engage in issues of facts i.e., did the events in the biblical account happen the way they are recorded.  Rather, I think that we can find common ground in why these accounts - these stories are part of our scriptural heritage.  In other words, what is the message in these stories that are important and necessary for our understanding of who Jesus is and how God works in the lives of the people in the bible and in our lives today.

St. Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians this way of understanding those things which God gives us including an approach to scripture, “Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually.”  If we approach the accounts of miracles spiritually – as a gift of God’s Spirit we can begin to understand what these miracle stories mean for us.

With that let us see what the spiritual message is for us in this account of the feeding of the multitude.  The account tells us that Jesus began with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.  There is not a lot to work with in in terms of food for such a large number of people.  However, with this beginning, they are fed – we can assume they were filled to the point of their appetites were probably more than satisfied.   In fact, there was more than what they had to start with.  From seven loaves and a few fish they ended up with seven baskets of leftovers – I wonder who got to take some of that home?  We can look at the number seven and if we investigate this, we find that seven is a number which signifies perfection or completion.  There is the seven days of creation and the seven seals in the book of Revelation for example.  We could say from this that the followers of Jesus were completely fed with spiritual food.  Those followers and by implication, we are offered by Jesus, food for our souls which will completely satisfy us.

This is reminiscent of the account in the Gospel of John in which Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well:

Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

Jesus gives to that Samaritan woman and to the four thousand people gathered to hear him the bread of life and the water of life.  If we eat that bread and drink that water we will be fed spiritually.  Our spirit will never again be thirsty in a dry and barren land and will never be spiritually hungry.  Therefore, let us follow Jesus for he offers us the bread of life to eat and he offers us the water of eternal life to drink.

May you be blessed to receive the bread of life to eat and he offers us the water of eternal life to drink on your journey.