The Last Sunday After Pentecost

"Christ the King"

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

-- BCP, page 236

Texts

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 100;

Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

-- BCP, page 246

Deuteronomy 8:7-18; Psalm 65;
2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Luke 17:11-19

Every Sunday at the exchange of the Peace during the 10:30 service, we eagerly anticipate the children's return from Sunday School with their big-eyed smiles and boundless energy, often carrying -- or wearing -- something that tells us what they were learning and doing downstairs. Who can forget the costumed throng that partied for All Hallows Eve? Last Sunday, when we saw them sporting pilgrim hats and Native American headgear, we knew that Thanks-Giving was the lesson plan.

The national narrative about Thanksgiving Day is filled with pictures of Non-conformist English immigrants (the Pilgrims) and local Native Americans who had saved them from starvation, gathered to break bread together in the first Thanksgiving feast.

We Virginians know quite well that the very first official Thanksgiving Day celebration in North America actually took place in what is now Berkeley Plantation in Charles City County on December 4, 1619, when 38 English settlers disembarked from the Margaret -- a full two years and 17 days before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. (Just a little Commonwealth pride!)

Both occasions were a recognition of our complete dependence on God for all the goodness we enjoy. Those English settlers were grateful for safe passage across the Atlantic -- which was never a sure thing -- and for survival in a new land where they had to learn new ways to grow food, much of which was very different from the motherland's, and where, in general, they had to re-invent themselves. This is, of course, what immigrants the world over and from time immemorial do.

"Pray as if everything depends on God; work as if everything depends on you," says the Talmud. Thanksgiving Day is a perfect example of this. At the end of the fall season, before the earth settles into its winter sleep, we gather to celebrate the accomplishments of the sweat of our brow and to give thanks to God for making a bountiful world that is capable of sustaining all living things. We celebrate the prodigal, grace of God.

Notice that in the collect we then ask for the gift of sound stewardship of both the earth and of the organization and structures of human society. Thanksgiving Day reminds us that our stewardship of the earth and of human society needs improvement. God's bounty is given us for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of [God's] Name. God's bounty is not to be hoarded but shared.

We still have work to do. I don't mean to rain on our Thanksgiving Day parade, so to speak, but we need to remember that Native Americans became less than humans in our eyes as we pursued their extinction, that our exploitation of earth threatens the viability of the ecosphere itself, and that we chose to build the wealth of our society largely on the backs of people plundered from their African homelands and sold into slavery. (Berkeley Plantation, by the way, was one of the first slave-rearing estates in the country.) I say this not to induce liberal or conservative guilt; I say it because the reality is that in our own time we have not resolved the consequences of the choices of our ancestors.

I say it because Thanksgiving Day invites us to recommit to the work of restoring human relationships to their proper state, to labor and pray for the day when all the peoples of the earth, as the collect for Sunday says, are freed and brought under [Christ's] most gracious rule.

Under the Mercy,

Fr. Daniel+