Reading: Philippians 4:4-7, 11-12
The reading is from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi, and includes the famous line we all like: “in everything … give thanks … and the peace of God will be with you.”
It sounds like a first-century version of the “Have a Happy Thanksgiving!” that we say to one another this time of year.
But … there’s something we need to remember. This is not a normal happy Thanksgiving for Paul and the friends he is writing to.
Paul is in a Roman prison. He’s been there for some time. And no one knows if he will get out alive, or be executed there. His friends have not seen him for some time. This is the first they’ve heard from him, and it may be the last.
So that’s where Paul is, when he writes this to his friends:
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!
Let your gentleness be known to all. The Lord is near at hand. Do not worry about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your prayers to God. And the peace of God, beyond all human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds secure in Christ Jesus.
...
I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned to be content in any and all circumstances and situations, whether I am well-fed or I am hungry, whether I have plenty or I am in want. I can live in and through all things that come, through him who is my strength.
To God be the glory.
This is Paul’s witness to his friends in Philippi. In it, they hear God’s Word for themselves. May we hear also God’s word for us. Thanks be to God.
Reflection
Happy Thanksgiving!
What a happy
holiday. Even with pandemic
restrictions, we look forward to Thanksgiving.
To celebrate the bounty of creation.
Revel in the fall colours and rejoice in the fulness of the
harvest.
Come, you thankful people, come;
raise the song of harvest-home!
All is safely gathered in,
‘ere the winter storms begin.
God, our Maker, doth provide
for our wants to be supplied:
come to God’s own temple, come,
raise the song of harvest-home.
The happy worship. The grateful feast. And the generous sharing in so many ways with others, to ensure that Earth’s fulness is enjoyed by all.
It doesn’t come easy, though. The fulness is not automatic, nor uninterrupted. The harvest is not guaranteed, and not always full. It’s also not always equally or justly shared.
Being a child of the city, I can only imagine the stress and anxiety suffered every year by farmers and other agricultural workers as they labour and hope and pray their way towards the harvest. They never know until it’s in, just what it will be. And sometimes, in so many places around the world, some years there is no harvest at all, but drought and famine instead. Or flood and loss. Natural disaster or human greed, and death.
The feast of thanksgiving – and the Thanksgiving stories we tell are as much about giving thanks for survival, endurance and the miracle of making it through difficult times and circumstances, as they are about the simple bounty of the Earth.
In America, for instance, the first Pilgrim settlers who arrived in 1620 almost died of starvation and illness through one of their first winters, until the indigenous people around them helped get them through – bringing them food, as well as teaching them how to survive in the land that was new to them, so that in 1621 they finally had a good harvest and a feast to celebrate it with.
The first Canadian Thanksgiving story -- or at least, the first European settler Thanksgiving story in Canada, is even older. In 1576, Martin Frobisher’s expedition was looking for a northwest passage to India, faced terrible storms on the ocean, and many times he and his men feared they would not survive. When they landed at last on Baffin Island (in what is now named Frobisher Bay), Frobisher immediately ordered the priest on board to organize and lead the crew in a worship service of thanksgiving to God for helping them survive the voyage and reach land safely.
A generation later, in 1605 Samuel de Champlain established the first French settlements in North America at Port-Royale in Nova Scotia, and the settlement was almost wiped out the first winter by starvation and illness. So, to raise the settlers’ spirits and help them endure, in the second winter of 1606-07 Champlain established “The Order of Good Cheer” – a company of people charged with planning and leading nightly meals and parties of entertainment, games, singing and food to cheer everyone up. And it worked. Celebrating and sharing the gifts and blessings they had, helped the settlement get through the hard time.
And the stories about celebrating the possibilities of fullness and bounty in any situation are not just long-ago and historical, reaching out to us and instructing us from our past. They’re also current and all around us, as we in our own time create and live into our own stories of the goodness and the bounty available still in any situation and circumstance.
Naomi Shihab Nye, an Arab-American poet, tells this story about something that happened in her experience just a few years ago in – of all places, the Albuquerque Airport.
And I wonder – is it a Thanksgiving story? A story of the bounty of life and the goodness of life on Earth that helps us survive – even thrive, that is present and able to be celebrated in any situation and circumstance?
“Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal,” she writes, “after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: ‘If anyoe in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.’
“Well – one pauses these days [just a few years after 9-11]. Gate A-4 was my gate. I went there.
“An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like mt grandma wore, was crumpled on the floor, wailing. ‘Help,’ the flight agent said. ‘Talk to her. What is her problem. We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.’
“I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. ‘Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?’ The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, ‘No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.’
“We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
“She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies – little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts – from her bag – and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo – we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
“And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend – by now we were holding hands – had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with furry green leaves. Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
“And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate – once the crying and confusion stopped – seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
“This can still happen anywhere,” she concludes. “Not everything is lost.”
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