THANKSGIVING ECUMENICAL SERVICE

Sunday, November 21, 2021, 4pm

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Manasquan, N. J.

Deuteronomy 8:7-18

II Corinthians 9:6-15

Luke 17:11-19

As we approach our national Thanksgiving holiday, it might be helpful to reflect on the act of giving thanks itself, and the role it plays in our individual and community lives.

Giving thanks, it seems to me, is the outward expression of the inward disposition that we commonly call thankfulness or gratitude. And gratitude is one of the classical Christian virtues. Its opposite, ingratitude, is one of the classical vices. To say, for example, that someone has a grateful heart or a thankful spirit is to pay them a high moral compliment. Conversely, to say that someone is habitually ungrateful is to call attention to a perceived flaw or defect in their moral character.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, one of the great theologians of the thirteenth century, classified gratitude as a subcategory of the cardinal virtue of justice, by which we render to each their due. Traditionally, there are four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. As one of the cardinal virtues, justice comprises dozens and dozens of subvirtues—such as truthtelling, prompt payment of debts, restitution for injuries, and so forth. So, the question is: under what circumstances is gratitude something we owe somebody in order to render them their due and so fulfill the obligations of justice?

Well, according to Aquinas, gratitude is what we owe our benefactors for favors received. Let’s unpack that a bit. In medieval language, a benefactor is someone who gives us something over and above anything they owe us. So, a favor received from such a benefactor is a freely-given gift or good deed that we really had no right to expect. When we receive such a gift, then, our appropriate response is one of inward gratitude expressed in outward praise and thanksgiving.

A prosaic example will illustrate the point. When I’m driving along the street in my car and I come to an intersection where I have the right of way, and another car comes to the stop sign and lets me pass before proceeding themselves, I don’t normally feel any sense of gratitude towards the other driver. Nor should I. (I may feel relief if it looked as though they weren’t going to stop and then they slammed on the brakes at the last minute, but not gratitude.) They’ve simply obeyed the law and yielded me the right of way that was mine. No thanks are called for. (I might thank God that he made them stop, but that’s another matter.)

But if I’m the one coming to the stop sign at a busy intersection where I’m likely to be waiting a long time for a break in the traffic—which seems to happen a lot in this part of the world, especially in the summer—and a driver who does have the right of way takes pity on me, slows down, and waves me on ahead of them, then I do feel gratitude, and give them a thank-you wave and perhaps a smile. And so I should, because they did a generous deed that they didn’t have to do and that I had no right to expect. The virtue of gratitude, expressed in a word or gesture of thanks, involves precisely acknowledging that someone didn’t have to do whatever they did for us, but they did it anyway.

This disposition of gratitude is what St. Thomas Aquinas and the tradition he represents would call a natural moral virtue. That is, there’s nothing particularly Christian about it. It’s capable of being exercised by Christians and non-Christians, by believers and unbelievers alike. Aquinas would argue further that it fulfills the natural moral law that God has both written into creation and implanted in the human conscience, so that we all have some awareness of it and ability to act on it, however obscured and distorted it may have become by the Fall and Original Sin. 

To my mind, one of the unique blessings of the American national Thanksgiving holiday is that it’s something we can all share with our family, friends, and neighbors, no matter what our religious convictions or lack thereof. Very few among us object to the idea of setting aside a day to express our gratitude for all the gifts we’ve received in our life as a nation—and indeed to recommit ourselves to working for a more equitable distribution of those gifts among all members of our communities.

Now, I might have some excuse for stopping there, but I don’t think I can, because I’m a Christian. And I suspect that most of us here are too, or else we wouldn’t be attending this ecumenical service of Christian worship. And from a theistic and a Christian perspective, much more needs to be said. But I will try to say it briefly.

We begin with creation itself. A basic tenet of the theistic religions—especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that our very existence is itself a free gift. God didn’t have to create us; he was under no constraint or compulsion; but he chose to do so anyway. So we owe our gratitude first and foremost to God as our creator. And then we owe thanks to God for his providence: giving us the necessities of our existence, beginning with food, shelter, and clothing.

The great contrary temptation is to fall prey to the delusion that we ourselves are the creators of all that we are and of all that we have. So this afternoon’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy warns us against thinking: “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” For that is to commit the sin of ingratitude par excellence, not to mention the deadly sin of pride.

More specifically, as Christians we owe our gratitude and thanksgiving to Jesus Christ, for the redemption that he’s won for us by his life, death, and resurrection. Here we have no better model and example than the Samaritan in the Gospel reading, who having been healed of his leprosy, prostrates himself at the Lord’s feet and thanks him.

As Christians, also, we owe thanks for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who stirs our hearts to praise and thanksgiving for all God’s blessings. Here, in a curious way, we come full circle. For the virtue of gratitude not only disposes us to give thanks for  gifts freely received from our benefactors, beginning with God himself, but it also moves us to exercise the further virtues of generosity and kindness, by which, as the saying goes, we “pass it forward.” So Saint Paul writes in our reading from Second Corinthians: “God loves a cheerful giver … You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God …”

So, even in the face of the stresses and strains of the past year-and-three-quarters—and it’s been rough for all of us—this Thanksgiving holiday affords us the opportunity to consider how we may further cultivate the virtues of gratitude and generosity in our own lives and communities. May God grant us the grace to become a truly thankful people. Amen.