October 9, 2022 - Thanksgiving - Simple Abundance
Simple Abundance - Carolyn Smith
Hi everyone. The last place I expected to be today was at home and online! So you’re hearing this recording, and it is my great thanksgiving today for this brave and eager Board of yours for pulling together this Service of Thanksgiving, figuring out how to celebrate this Service of Thanksgiving in a grand way with me and Deborah both unavailable in person.
While it was fun to revisit my pandemic ways of recording a sermon out here in the sunshine, I assure you, I am not cooking a turkey this sunday or spending time with anyone - I’ll do that when Jay & I are recovered next week or so. But I expect there are some of you at home today, elbow deep in a turkey right now, watching online. Who knew live-streaming would be handy for busy holidays?
If you get out of the city, you’ll see the tractors in the fields and the big rolls of hay, and farmers’ markets in full swing. Apples and squash and pumpkin for Halloween and for the best pie!!! So Happy Thanksgiving!
This holiday is easier than Christmas in some ways - It’s as if we’re freed up to just to share and enjoy life together. it’s a pure and simple even visceral response of the harvest time. And it’s universal. All faiths and all cultures celebrate when storehouses are full and communities are fed. Such a simple and obvious upwelling of gratitude!
From way back, we heard these instructions in Deuteronomy for the Jewish Festival of Weeks - an Israelite harvest time in June. Judy as she read the scripture, told us the faithful were to bring their first fruits, and present them to God in the temple, remembering their times of oppression and rescue, remembering those oppressed and the outsiders and giving thanks .... Timeless human experience isn’t it?
A couple of weeks ago, Deborah told the legend of the ancestors of these people - about Moses and the Israelites fleeing Old Pharaoh way down in Egypt land, and the Red Sea waters parting giving them a path to escape, before crashing in on the armies that followed. We’ve heard about Noah
giving thanks beneath a rainbow. Deep Gratitude is a continuing theme of our faith story, for escape, freedom, abundance and sustaining hope for the future, and the priests of Deuteronomy put it into Thanksgiving liturgy and ritual - funny how something written in dusty times 2500 years ago can feel relatable now.... And here is that ritual - baskets and donations, your dining tables with treats this weekend ... offered to one another and our community with praise to God! An Ancient, simple, almost instinctual human response of gratitude.
That comes most easily when we know all too well what might be..
We see Florida and Puerto Rico and the east Coast, simple gifts of drinking water and power returning raise hands in thanksgiving..
In Palestine and Ukraine, silence of guns and loved ones found alive brings tears of thanksgiving.
At Fare Share Food bank, full shelves of food to bag up and share out brings laughter of thanksgiving.
Even the most abundant traditional table of turkey and trimmings - Maybe it means a little more if we remember how humble is a noisy turkey in a smelly barnyard, or simple earthy potatoes, and a lowly fat pumpkin in a decadent pie - we forget these were simple, homely foods, simple things made into abundance through care, through celebration, through an attitude of gratitude.
Another story popular at Thanksgiving is the parable of the widow and her 2 small coins, where everyone came to the temple with their bigger offerings, she pulled 2 tiny coins, possibly all she had and offered them up. Last week at the Hamilton Market - .... Jay & I read that lady’s story! He grew up with regular trips to on Saturdays to the market and there was a lady there - the Hallelujah lady as he remembers her - she had bananas and plantains and yams from the islands, and she sang all morning at her humble stall at the market for 43 years. Somehow in that meagre existence, somehow along the way, she saved up money and in 1997 created the Tillie Johnson Scholarship Fund... and she gave out education money
for black youth. Talk about 2 tiny coins offered in gratefulness!... McMaster University gave her an honorary Doctorate in education for her service to the community. Dr. Ethilda Tillie Johnson of Tilda’s Tropical Delights was honoured last week with a plaque with singing and stories. Nothing extravagant about Tillie’s abundance, only about her thanksgiving! Because when our gratitude comes from relief, from hard work and memories, from celebrating goodness, it wells up inside us in prayer, in song, in service and in praise! And thankfully it spills out in good food, laughter around a table, sharing abundance and hope for the future.
We as a faith community are feeling that this year. We have more freedom to be with family, most of us aren’t worrying about porch deliveries of cold turkeys. This space is alive with friendly chatter and we’re planning a bazaar filled with our abundant gifts, there are full baskets here for Food Share,,, We are bravely gathering at funerals, and talking at tables, hopeful for a future of vibrant ministry. That’s what our hands and gifts are doing! You know, it’s been a long time since the few times I’ve milked a cow. The literal experience of harvest for most of us is distant, its our privilege in some ways to be removed from farm work. Our fruits are different - whether it’s a corporate pay check we earned with our disciple heart, or a family raised, or clothes repaired, the fruits of our labor through trades with a hammer or an oven, or we’re educators and healthcare workers, So how we connect our own harvest with gratitude might take more reflection. And Our sense of abundance can be skewed by keeping up with the Jones and rising prices and difficult relationships.
I know we aren’t always good at it - we lose that perspective as it gets skewed - and what happens: we get nervous or frustrated, we keep things to ourselves and fearful... I’ve felt worry in myself reading the news and that makes me cringe! Because we’ve also seen the breakdown of community when people build barriers out of fear.
The instructions of Deuteronomy for people coming forward were tied closely with their connection in community, with a sense of the social fabric
abundant or frayed, and I don’t expect they ever looked ahead assuming bounty year after year. They remembered viserally exile and hunger and scarcity. In deepest thanksgiving, it is always for that which awes us - and that which sustains us, that which is enough... what is enough for you? What’s enough... When we watch the East coast mop up after intensifying hurricanes? Or recall Orange Shirt day, honouring Residential School survivors who excavate graves on school grounds. When we push past old hurts and offer humility in family troubles? What’s enough for the planet that is our mother, who gives gifts of sunsets and creatures and vistas that bring tears to our eyes, and which could thrive and give enough for all if we heal it?
Thanksgiving that rises from our personal, visceral sense of what is enough - for ourselves, for our community and world - that kind of thanksgiving is our story - of Christ found in self and neighbour, of ancient peoples seeking their way together out of oppression into the hope of God’s beloved community...
Simple then, is Enough, meagre abundance spreads farther, the tables are longer instead of higher fences. The gifts we have to share, whatever they are, held in open hands are enriched with love and awareness and commitment, and they are magnified into something more precious than extravagance and riches - These gifts offered are real, loving, humble and hopeful abundance.
So let this attitude of gratitude well up in you, with memory of where we’ve come from, and a vision of what we are harvesting together... abundance that fills us, and flows out to the world. We well up with praise, Thanks be to God!