St. John’s United Church

“HARVEST”
Tell the soil to celebrate and wild animals to stop being afraid.
Grasslands are green again; fruit trees and fig trees are loaded with fruit.
Grapevines are covered with grapes.
People of Zion, celebrate in honour of the LORD your God!
He is generous and has sent the autumn and spring rains in the proper seasons.
(Joel 2:21-23)

One day a very rich man with a good life in a large city took his son on a trip to the country because he wanted to show his son how poor people lived. He wanted to instill an appreciation for their blessings, I suppose. They spent a couple of days on a small farm with a poor farm family where the days were long, the work was hand and there were no luxuries. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was your weekend?” “It was great, Dad.” “Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked. “Oh yeah,” said the son. “So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father. The son answered: “I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon. We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight. We buy our food, but they grow theirs. We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.” The boy’s next statement left his father speechless. His son concluded: “Thanks, Dad, for showing me how poor we really are.”

It IS a funny world. When I was growing up, kids who lived in the country wanted to live in the city, after all there was a MacDonald’s in the city and many countless other stores to shop in and things to do and places to go! But city kids often envy the country kids because they have backyards big enough to play ball or soccer, they don’t have to lock all their stuff up when they aren’t using it and they can have lots of dogs and cats and horses and all that good stuff. Kids who take bought bread to school want homemade and the ones with homemade want the store bought kind.

On the whole, we are really good at pining after that ‘greener grass’ but not as good at truly thankful living. We have a tendency to wish for what we don’t have. We have a tendency to look around and say, “If I just had such and such I’d be happy, or happier.’ However, in most cases, when we get that desired thing we soon feel that we are in need of something else for that thing doesn’t bring us as much joy as we thought it would. It’s what drives our consumer-based economy but it has little to do with living in faithfulness and true thanksgiving.

Tomorrow is our Canadian Thanksgiving; the second Monday in October when we get together with family and eat turkey and all the fixins. (Or perhaps you did that yesterday, or will do it sometime today). This weekend, we also have a food drive for the local food-bank. This allows us to help the less fortunate and to stop feeling guilty about the hungry till Christmas-time rolls around!

Now, we’ve all been told, no doubt, that the first North American Thanksgiving was in Massachusetts and was celebrated by the ‘pilgrims’. If we were on Jeopardy we’d be wrong though!!!! British North America beat them out, by a number of years. Without many of the things we take for granted at Thanksgiving in 2006. In 1578 Martin Frobisher reported observing Thanksgiving in Canada’s eastern Arctic when he returned to Warwick Sound with 15 ships to follow up on a gold discovery made 2 years earlier. Apparently signs of this temporary settlement can still be seen. It was here that this historic Thanksgiving celebration was held. Martin Frobisher’s thanksgiving was shared with the First Nations people of the area and an Anglican priest who was living and working in the community. Of course, they had no turkey. Turkeys are hard to come by in the Arctic, and so, they celebrated with salt beef, biscuits and peas. What a harvest!

Another story of Canadian thanksgiving is the story of Samuel De Champlain and the Order of Good Cheer. In 1606, Samuel de Champlain had established his famous habitation on the fruitful shores of the Bay of Fundy, in the beautiful Annapolis Basin of what would much later become known as Nova Scotia, or New Scotland. It was then very much the centre of New France. The previous year, Champlain had been one of a group of 79 men, who had tried to “over-winter” on an island in the Sainte Croix River. Isle Sainte Croix was situated just across the big bay with the highest tides in the world from Porte Royale, and very close to the modern border between the Canadian province of New Brunswick and the U.S. State of Maine. He and his men chose an island because they believed it would be easier to defend in case of attack. They hadn’t anticipated the dangerous ice that made their little island virtually impossible to leave in search of essential things like food or water. Winter came early that year. Snow was waist-deep by the sixth of October. It stayed - with drifts that often went way overhead - until the end of April. First, the settlers ran out of firewood, because they’d deforested their island in order to build primitive shelters. Then, they ran out of drinking water, when the single weak spring on Isle Sainte Croix froze solid. Finally, they ran out of food, and were unable to safely dodge the giant ice floes, tossed about by legendary three-story tides, in order to forage for the game and fresh water that waited for them just a frustratingly short distance away on the mainland. They were close enough to shoot any moose that might have wandered down to the shoreline, but unable to navigate the treacherous waters. Thirty-five men died, and only 11 remained healthy when spring finally arrived. Of those 11, only three decided to stay in North America for another winter. The rest went back to France.

One of the three was the famous cartographer and explorer Samuel de Champlain. The deadly plague that decimated his men that first winter was scurvy. Champlain was a map-maker who couldn’t have understood that scurvy was caused by vitamin deficiencies. Nobody did back then. But it was Champlain’s genius to suggest that good food and friendly camaraderie would go a long way towards curing the medical problems of his small and struggling colony. So, he instituted the Order of Good Cheer. Under the rules of the Order, special meals became the personal responsibility of individual colonists. They inevitably endeavoured to upstage one-another by providing the finest fish, and fowl and game for their communal table. And it worked. Entertaining tended to raise everyone’s spirits. Good food brought better health. The emphasis was off the individual and on to what would delight the others. The focus moved away from “poor me” to “how can we live with good cheer together.”

The story is told of two men were walking through a field one day when they spotted an enraged bull. Instantly they darted toward the nearest fence. The storming bull followed in hot pursuit, and it was soon apparent they wouldn’t make it. Terrified, the one shouted to the other, “Put up a prayer, John. We’re in for it!” John answered, “I can’t. I’ve never made a public prayer in my life.” “But your daddy was a preacher - surely he taught you some sort of prayer! So pray John, pray! The bull is catching up to us.” “All right,” panted John, “I’ll say the only prayer I know, the one my father used to repeat at the table: ‘O Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful.’”
In the United States, Thanksgiving is a time to remember the Pilgrims and celebrate the harvest. When the pilgrims arrived, one of the first things they discovered in their exploration of Cape Cod was a deserted cornfield near the beach. Nearby they saw several strange mounds. Upon digging into one, they were amazed to find unfamiliar yellow, red and blue Indian corn, which they took and later repaid. When spring came, the surviving men and boys planted the Indian corn with the help of Squanto. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims had a good harvest of Indian corn. However, the garden seeds they had brought with them did not reproduce well in the New England climate. With the foods they had grown and preserved, the Pilgrims decided to celebrate what they called Harvest Thanksgiving. They invited their Indian friends to join them, and much to their surprise about 90 Indians came and stayed for three days. A few days after the Harvest Thanksgiving, the ship Fortune arrived bringing 35 colonists from England. Most of the new arrivals did not have much more than the clothing on their backs. The sailors aboard Fortune also needed food for the voyage back to England, which was an unexpected drain on their food supplies. As the food supplies dwindled, every colonist knew daily hunger. They lived on half rations for six months. During the summer, many of the men and boys were too weak and thin to do the heavy labor of raising crops. It was not a good growing season. The harvest in 1622 was slim, and the Indians stole some of the crops that matured. The Starving Time came upon the colony in the spring of 1623. Tradition tells us that each person received only five kernels of parched corn a day. When the corn supply was exhausted, they had neither bread nor corn for two or three months, and their entire diet consisted of fish and water. Their pursuit of religious freedom, their desire to remember who they were as children of God, sustained them through a harsh, bitterly cold, winter where starvation bayed like a wolf outside every door. I can well imagine their prayers that spring as the frozen ground began to thaw:

“Accept our thanks, O Lord, for these and all thy blessings.”

We are here today to give thanks. And hopefully, not only to give thanks, but to feel thankful. Some of us don’t feel thankful. We feel worried. We feel like the bulls are catching up with us. We feel anxious, concerned, lonely, distressed, or just plain bored.

When I look through my own list of close friends and family I can see that it can be a challenge to be thankful. The premature birth of twins has left a couple hovering over two one pound children praying for their survival. It can be hard to be thankful.
A couple faces loosing the opportunity to adopt three little brothers. A family grieves the death of a parent and sibling. Parents are coping with the liver cancer of a teenage son. Another friend finds that the outcome of the biopsy is not good. It can be hard to be thankful and that life is indeed a raging bull. And yet…, Jesus tells us not to worry.

”Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” Jesus says. To seek first the kingdom of God is to place God’s concerns ahead of our own. It must become the only concern, in the light of which all other concerns are judged. God’s kingdom is the realm in which all people are equal before God. From Old Testament times, God’s people have been called to create the world where each person – friend of stranger – can enter into a place of Shalom, the kingdom of mercy and justice in God’s company. When the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness become a consuming passion in a disciple’s life, all these things will be given in addition.
In many ways the observance of Thanksgiving has become another excuse to eat far too much and forces us to list off the “nice things we have”, just because that’s what we are supposed to do. However the biblical view of thanksgiving is not so much about “feeling grateful” for things or for particular blessings such as food and love of family, but rather it’s a way of looking at life where God is at the center of all that we are and can be. It’s about the most essential relationship in our lives. It’s a relationship that changes how we look at everything in life.

Even though the people to whom Joel was preaching are promised a return to a better time, the more we delve into the biblical story the more we discover that thankfulness in the biblical perspective is a way of relating to and with God, and not an attitude toward material things. True thanksgiving is a relationship with the Divine that shows to ourselves and to others that we depend on this God for all that we are and can be. Thanks living shows that God is not an ‘add on’ in our lives but an essential part of who we are and can be. It’s the relationship that is reflected in the age-old verse of promise and call, “I shall be your God and you shall be my people”. It’s a relationship that is not dependent upon fair weather and good fortune but one which endures through thick and thin because that’s who God is and who we have become through our relationship with this God of the ages. So let us focus on the God of the ages - the God of our ancestors, the God of today and tomorrow - the God who calls us to live in faithfulness and love, giving thanks and praise to God not only for the harvest that we share, but for life itself.

Acknowledgements: Beth W. Johnston; Olwyn Coughlin; Claire, Clyburn

A meditation preached by the Rev. Myra Garvin at St. John’s United Church, Brockville
Sunday, October 8, 2006 – Thanksgiving B