Thanksgiving Day

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Bless us be God.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires are known, and from you no secrets are hid.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

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 forever.

Amen.

Moses said to all Israel, For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may mine copper.

You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.

Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.

He made water flow for you from flint rock and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good.

Do not say to yourself, My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.

But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors as he is doing today.

The word of the Lord.

To you that hear prayer shall all flesh come.

Our sins are stronger than we are.

Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there.

They will be satisfied by the beauty of your house, by the holinesses or the house.

Awesome things will show you in your righteousness, O God of our salvation.

You make fast the mountains by your power.

You still the roaring of the seas.

Those who dwell at the ends of the earth will tremble at your marvelous signs.

You make the dawn and the dust sing for joy.

You visit the earth and water it abundantly.

You make it very plenteous.

The river of God is full of water.

You prepare the grain.

You drench the furrows and smooth out the ridges.

You crown the year with your goodness.

And your paths overflow with plenty.

May the fields of the wilderness be rich for grazing.

May the meadows cover themselves with flocks, and the valleys cloak themselves with grain.

Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion.

For God loves a cheerful giver, and God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work, as it is written.

He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.

You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us.

For the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints, but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God.

Through the testing of this ministry, you glorify God by your obedience to the confession of the gospel of Christ, and by the generosity of your sharing with them and all others, while they long for you and pray for you because of the surpassing grace of God that He has given you.

Thanks be to God for this indiscernible gift, the word of the Lord.

Glory be to you, Lord Christ.

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.

As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.

Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.

When he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priests.

And as they went, they were made clean.

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.

He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him.

And he was a Samaritan.

And then Jesus asked, Were not ten made clean?

But the other nine, where are they?

Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?

And then he said to him, Get up and go on your way.

Your faith has made you well.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

I hadn't planned to do this.

I thought I had done a great job opening that gospel book.

And then sure enough, it says Thanksgiving Day, year A, Luke, and then it says C Proper 23, year C, turn the pages.

And I thought, what I'm so grateful for is that I could just run and get my bulletin and read it instead of fumbling in that book.

And I hadn't planned to say that, but you know that's the spirit of the day.

And I want to say I think that's the spirit of the year.

And it touches my heart to be here with you tonight, whether you're here or there on screen, to think about those wonderful opportunities we have instead of being anxious, but to be truly grateful for even mishaps, which obviously the year has been full of.

It's a delight to be with you together this year in this community at St.

Thomas.

And I don't want to abuse you because you're here to celebrate the wonderful things God has done and enter into the spirit of Thanksgiving.

And I just want to maybe mention a few thoughts from this reading that are really interesting.

So, you know, there's ten lepers.

We don't think they have Anson's disease, but back then people thought that you've got the skin disease, which honestly could have been eczema, it could have been the Ebola virus, it could have been anything, sometimes really bad, sometimes a birthmark.

They thought you picked that up by being around things that were ritually unclean.

So maybe you touched a dead body or your neighbor touched a dead body and didn't do the right purification.

And so not only were you unwell, it was from a spiritual cause.

The people who declared you unclean and unwell at the same time were not physicians, they were the clergy.

Jesus says, go back to the priests.

Go back to the same people who said, you're not fit to live in this community because you could make somebody else sick.

Go back to those people so they can evaluate you.

So they can say, oh, welcome back.

You're clean now in body and spirit.

And you know what's really interesting is nine of them went to Jerusalem because they were Jewish.

That's to the south.

And one of them, who's a Samaritan, had to go north because Samaritans didn't worship in Jerusalem.

They worshiped in different temples.

They had different priests.

And what's interesting is these people are different.

And we don't know, hey, when you have to live in exile because you're unclean.

Did the ethnic boundaries break down?

I mean, didn't these ten people get along for the first time in their lives because they were united by something they had in common, which was weakness?

We don't know that.

But what we do know is that the one person who Jesus himself might have been most prejudiced against, that is the one who turned around and said thank you.

I want to tell you when I was a little boy, I remember hearing that the other nine people they didn't actually get healed because they didn't say thank you.

I'm gonna tell you that's crazy.

There's no way that the Lord works that way.

So if you're hearing that thinking, oh gosh, those other people kept their leprosy, don't think that, please.

What I think is amazing about this story is what Jesus ends up saying.

The Samaritan goes off and he happens to look, and you know what?

Maybe he looks at the spot on his skin because he's not sure that he trusts Jesus.

Maybe the other nine completely trust him and they never look.

They just go all the way.

But this guy looks down and he sees it and he turns back and he lays down and says, basically, when you prostrate yourself, you say, I owe everything I am to you.

And he says, Thank you.

And Jesus says this amazing thing at the end: get up and go on your way.

Your faith has made you well.

And I think there's this wonderful reminder that the community offers to me every year that this story makes clear.

There's a difference between being healthy and being well.

But we only know this one definitely got well.

I don't know if that difference makes sense to you, but it reminds me that I can be physically healthy, I can be economically secure, and it doesn't mean that I'm well.

And one of these interesting things I think we're reminded is that part of being well is about being connected to one another.

I certainly hear that throughout the readings about what God has done, about how God has led us into these places.

I heard uh Barack Obama say this that, hey, those roads we rely on to get to and from our business, we didn't build those roads individually.

We did that together.

And this story, I think, reminds us that when we can remember that we're not rocks, when we're not islands, but that we are all interconnected through God, that's when we're able really to grasp on to gratitude in all circumstances.

And the epistle says this really interesting thing.

Paul says, if you sow sparingly, you'll reap sparingly, but if you sow bountifully, you'll reap bountifully.

And I think if we uh if we push that on the wrong way, that means again, if we give a lot, we get a lot back tangibly.

And I think there's this great Greek proverb that says, a wise person plants a tree, knowing they will probably never enjoy its shade.

And I wonder if that isn't the difference that gratitude makes in our lives is when we enter in and say, I am in fact going to sow bountifully, because the harvest will be bountiful, whether I get to see it or not.

This trust that we're in this together, whether we're Jewish or Samaritan, whether we go south or north to worship.

This story reminds us while we're on our way to do our important thing, it's never too late to turn back and say thank you.

I've been doing, I've been taking my own advice for once, and each day writing a Facebook post about a saint in my life.

And um, some of them from a long time ago, and I realized there was something not only important in remembering these people from 25, 30 years ago.

But what's really touched my heart is to see some of those people read those posts and message me back, I didn't know you felt that way.

And this guy reminds us, I think, that what we really have before us is not just our health, we have our wellness.

And that what gratitude does really is offers us this opportunity to grow into wellness, to be connected, and only to make these little micro investments.

Sometimes it's people we know who day in and day out show up, and sometimes it's a stranger who just took five minutes to say thank you, or they remembered your coffee order.

And it can turn around your whole day, and in so doing, it can turn around your whole week.

Sometimes even it's that one teacher who turned around your whole major.

They might not have even planned it, but they sowed bountifully in you.

And whether they see the harvest that they sowed or not, you get to bring it to God's table.

And it's just such a wonderful reminder at the end of the year, and I just want you to know my heart is full of gratitude to be here with you this evening, to be a member of this community, where in fact we do work together, where we practice gratitude with one another.

At least you practice it with me.

And and I thank you for it.

And there's no better way, I think, to enter into the spirit of the day.

Remember, tomorrow we're celebrating a story just like the gospel, where a bunch of Native Americans allowed a bunch of pilgrims to live.

And they weren't afraid of their diseases, and they were heretics, and they're the ones who created the feast we're going to enjoy tomorrow.

It's a beautiful story.

I hope it's true.

Either way, it's beautiful.

And we get to celebrate that, and we get to celebrate that at God's table tonight, and that word Eucharist reminder is a Greek word that just means Thanksgiving.

And not only do we have the chance in just a moment through our litany of Thanksgiving to tell God what we're grateful for, but we're gonna pause at the end, and I'm just gonna ask you to take a couple of deep breaths because my friends tell me that's the best way to receive somebody's compliment and love and affection when you don't know what to do, is just to take a deep breath.

Because here we get to hear that God is grateful for you.

So we're gonna give our thanks formally in prayer to God, and then we're gonna pause and take some deep breaths and breathe in God's gratitude for us, and then we're all going to be nourished in gratitude at God's table.

So I invite you to join with me, and we're going to say first our Nicene Creed.

We'll pray our faith through these words.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of Father, eternally begot and the Father.

God for God, light and true God to true God, begot and not made, through Him all things remain.

He will come back to judge.

Let us give thanks to God, our Father, for all the gifts so freely bestowed upon us, for the beauty and wonder of your creation and earth and sky and sea.

We thank you, Lord.

For all that is gracious in the lives of women and men, revealing the image of Christ.

We thank you, Lord.

For our daily food and drink, our homes and families and our friends.

We thank you, Lord, for minds to think and hearts to love and hands to serve.

We thank you, Lord, for health and strength to work and leisure to rest and play.

We thank you, Lord.

For the brave and courageous who are patient and suffering and faithful in adversity.

We thank you, Lord.

For the valiant seekers after truth, liberty, and justice.

For the communion of saints in all times and places.

We thank you for setting us at task, which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.

We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

Grant us the gift of your spirit that we may know Christ and make him known, and through him at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things.

Words about God's love for you, and then take a moment or two to just breathe them in.

There is nothing you can do to make God love you any less.

And there is nothing you can do to make God love you anymore.

God is thankful for you.

God is grateful for the ways you make visible God's otherwise invisible love, creativity, kindness, compassion.

God is so glad you were born.

And now please join me as we humbly thank Almighty God for absolution of our sins and the continued invitation to walk in grace.

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than either we deser or deserve.

Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy for giving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Amen.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

And the only announcement is thank you for sharing the evening together.

And we'll begin the church year on Sunday with Advent 1.

And if you are so inclined, there is some hot punch that we can have sort of outside and sort of have a gratitude toast if you'd like before we leave for the night.

But of course, no obligation.

And I'm grateful to give thanks for each and every one of you at the Lord's table tonight.

So continue to walk in love as Christ first loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.

All things come of thee, O Lord.

This is the table not of the church, but of Jesus Christ.

It is made ready for those who love him and those who want to love him more, so come.

You who have much gratitude and you who have little.

You who have been here often and you who have not been for a long time or ever before, you who have tried to follow and you who have failed, come.

Not because the church invites you, it is Christ.

He is grateful for you and invites you to join him here.

The Lord be with you.

Lift up your hearts.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, because in the obedience of your saints you've given us an example of righteousness and thankfulness, and in their eternal joy and gratitude a glorious pledge of the hope of our calling.

And therefore we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who forever say this hymn to proclaim the glory of your name.

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna and the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna and the highest.

Holy and gracious Father, in your infinite love you made us from yourself.

And when we'd fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you in your compassion sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.

He stretched out his arms upon the cross and offered himself in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.

On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread, and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples and said, Take, eat.

This is my body which is given for you.

Do this for the remembrance of me.

After supper, Jesus took the cup of wine, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them and said, Drink this all of you.

This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins.

Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me.

Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Recalling his death, resurrection, and ascension, we offer to you these gifts.

Sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people, the body and blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in Him.

Sanctify us also that we may faithfully receive this holy sacrament and serve you in unity, constancy, and peace.

And at the last day bring us with all your saints into the joy of your eternal kingdom.

All this we ask through your Son, Jesus Christ, by him and with him and in him.

In the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and forever.

Amen.

And now as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to pray, our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.

Therefore, let us keep the feast.

Hallelujah.

These are the gifts of God for you, the people of God.

People of God, behold who you are, and become what you receive.

And I invite you to receive bread or a blessing by coming to the Isle immediately to your right.

Loving God, we give you thanks for restoring us in your image and nourishing us with spiritual food in the sacrament of Christ's body and blood.

Now send us forth a people forgiven, healed, renewed, that we may proclaim your love to the world and continue in the risen life of Christ our Savior.

Amen.

The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, guide your heart, soul, and strength into the life of grace that gives thanks in all circumstances.

Be with you this day and remain with you always.

Amen.