A few weeks ago I spent a night down the canal on my boat.  I anchored in a small bay, away from lights and noise.  It was a beautifully calm and warm night.  No clouds in the sky.  As dark fell, I watched the stars shining in the sky.  Without any lights to hinder my view, I saw the universe of stars and galaxies spreading across the heavens.  It was a brilliant night and it seemed that every inch of the sky was filled with lights.  I saw two shooting stars and two satellites moving across the sky.  I sat transfixed for about an hour in the dark, hearing only to the gentle lap of ocean against the shore.

Below me, the ocean was alive with fluorescent amoebae.  Like the sky above, it twinkled, and as fish moved through the water they were like comets shooting across the sky.  The ocean mirrored the sky.  I sat transfixed between the beauty of heaven and earth.  I was filled with a deep calm and a profound sense of gratitude to live in such a beautiful place and to witness such profound majesty.  I was filled with spontaneous prayer and gratitude for such a blessing on such an evening.

That night echoed the words of two  Psalms. Psalm 46 “Be still and know that I am God.”  And Psalm 100, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth… enter God’s gates with thanksgiving…for the Lord is Good, God’s steadfast love endures forever.”

Decorating the sanctuary for Thanksgiving brought another occasion to say grace, and to pull into our thanksgiving God’s promise not to fear, that God is in the midst of our lives.  Helping hands gathered the leaves, flowers, vegetables, and homemade preserves, placing them in love on and around the communion table.  The Table where we celebrate the gift of Christ’s love and sacrifice for us.  After finishing the work, thoughts wandered out into the beauty of the forests and the growth that comes at this time of year. One woman marveled at the many mushrooms and their colours dependent upon the rain for their growth.  Such a small thing, the mushrooms, yet like the stars in the sky, and the fluorescent amoebae in the ocean they spread out almost unnoticed, under the canopy of the forest.

Again, there was sense of thanksgiving.  Each of us has experienced moments of gratitude.  Gratitude for a beautiful scene in nature, for healing, for recovery from addictions,  for friends helping out in times of tragedy.  A woman I knew whose husband was dying was filled with gratitude at the help of the community.  “The community is feeding me,” she said, “even people I don’t know.”

So when I went out this past week looking for a Thanksgiving banner for the church, I was amazed at how few references to Thanksgiving I found.  The main focus was on Halloween and “trick or treat.”  It felt like something very basic and important was missing.   I know thanksgiving is still a time of gathering families together, but I wonder if it is still a time of giving thanks.

Giving thanks for the harvest I assume is still celebrated in farming country, but have we lost touch in the towns and cities?

Everyone gathered here this morning knows that thanking God for the harvest is part of our faith.   And sharing the harvest is part of our thanksgiving.   We have a deep biblical tradition of God instructing us that our living is to be based on gratitude ? awareness that our thanksgiving is the underpinning of our existence, the place from which we relate to the world.

The gifts on the communion table remind us that God’s goodness is the basis of our bounty.  The communion table reminds us of Christ’s response to God’s goodness, and our gratitude to Christ’s sacrifice.  The baked goods for our neighbours represent our response to God’s goodness, along with our offerings, our M&S, and our service in the community and in the church.

In the face of famine, God speaks through the prophet Joel, “Do not fear, O soil…you animals of the field, o children of Zion.”  "The rain will come again, the harvest will follow, I will be faithful" says God.  We are a people of hope.  We trust in God’s providence, knowing God is more loving than we can  ever comprehend, and out of this gratitude we dare to live lives of hope.

We have more than the harvest of food to be grateful for.  Through Joel, God says, “My people shall never again be put to shame.”   This is not a perfect world. Shame, pain, poverty and hardship exist. It is hard to watch someone die of cancer, or a parent or spouse come down with dementia, or to live in Hudson House or over the Chieftain Hotel, or suffer from depression, or chronic pain, or unemployment, or the many other things that wear us down.  It is hard at times to have a sense of gratitude, or to feel love.  Sometimes, we are too exhausted with life to care about or have time for gratitude or love.

Our North American lifestyle engenders discontent and resentment.  Because more is always better, you can never be satisfied with what you have.  Because commercials are constantly showing us ecstatically happy people with lots of stuff, we feel that we’re just not quite making it.  Then, when we see how much money rich people have, we feel envious.  All these feelings make us discontent with our lives, causing us to fail to be grateful for what we  do have.

Despite all this, some do live from the centre of gratitude.  It doesn’t mean their life is perfect, by some standard of “perfectness”, it means their thankfulness is not rooted in possessions, but rather in relationships of the heart with God and neighbour.  They do not take for granted God’s goodness, but remember it daily.

We have a gift to offer to the world ? the model of living from the basis of thanksgiving.  From this place comes action and true discipleship. These people give of their time, talents, and money ? because they know that all they have comes from God.  And they remain thankful.

The rich man in Mark’s story was a good man.  Jesus loved him. He followed the commandments of the church and we can assume he was a good Jew.  But something was missing.  Jesus didn’t commend him for being religious, or try to say that was good enough.  He named the one thing that trapped the man ? his possessions.  I think most of here would feel exactly like the rich man if Jesus gave us the same advice.  We would be shocked, and leave grieving or angry.

I’m not going to tell you to give away everything you have to find salvation, because that would be irresponsible, and unfaithful to the gospel.  But what I hear in this story is placing our gratitude in God’s abundance in our lives, not in the abundance itself; and living our lives from that centre of Gratitude.   In living from the centre of Gratitude, we are attached to God’s will and not to our own desires.  Our possessions, our desire for perfection and the dream of a perfect life are not central to a life of gratitude.

And when we have found this centre of gratitude, then we can’t help but follow Jesus.  Amen.

Brenda Faust