Happy Thanksgiving! It’s good to be with you this morning and to begin our celebration of Thanksgiving together. Most likely, we will all go from here to a feast sometime today. Someone said the definition of an optimist is a person who starts a diet on Thanksgiving. I’m not going to be an optimist today—at least by that definition! I am a procrastinator. I’ll diet tomorrow!
I love the service at Thanksgiving because of the music. “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” “Now Thank We All Our God,” “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing” are hymns I remember from my childhood, not only from singing them in church, but also from learning them in school. Although I went to public school, we used to sing them there at this time of year. I suspect that’s not something that happens today in public school.
This morning I’d like to tell you a story about a person named Henry Alford. Henry was born in London in 1810. His father, as well as his grandfather, great grandfather, and two grandfathers even before that were clergymen in the Anglican Church. Early in life, Henry decided he, too, would be a priest. In fact, by the time he was 10 years old he had written several Latin odes, a history of the Jews, and a series of homiletical outlines. When he was 16, he wrote in the fly-leaf of his Bible these words which characterized his entire life: “I do this day, in the presence of God and my own soul, renew my covenant with God, and solemnly determine henceforth to become His, and to do His work as far as in me lies.”
Alford went to Trinity College in Cambridge, distinguished himself as a student, and then began his public ministry in London. He rapidly rose from one position to another, until he was named Dean of Canterbury Cathedral at the age of 47, where he remained until his death in 1871, some 24 years later. It was as a Greek scholar that he attained his greatest distinction during his lifetime.
As I said, Henry Alford was English, and one of the great traditions throughout England is the celebration of a harvest festival. There is no particular date for the harvest festival. Most of them are celebrated in September or October once all harvesting of crops has been finished. The festival has ancient roots dating back to pre-Christian times, but now it is celebrated in the churches, and offerings of fruit and vegetables are placed around the altar. After the service the offerings are given to those less fortunate.
Now let’s switch our focus to America in the 1600s. The Anglicans who settled in what they called Jamestown in 1607, named for King James I, as well as the pilgrims, who settled Plymouth Colony in 1620, came from this tradition of celebrating a harvest festival. Our tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving goes back to those two communities, which, after a difficult first year, as we all know, celebrated their first harvests. Thus, Thanksgiving was a natural thing for them to do as a result of their first harvest, having experienced harvest festivals all of their lives. Those first Thanksgivings must have had a great deal of meaning not only because they signified surviving to that point, but also because they reminded them of many such celebrations in their past. By the way, what did they call these harvest festivals? Not Thanksgiving—that’s our American word. The English called them Harvest Home.
Now let’s get back to Henry Alford. I told you about Alford’s deep piety and his excellent scholarship, that he was an Anglican priest in a line of Anglican priests going back five generations, and that he was Dean of Canterbury Cathedral for many years. The reason we remember any of that, however, is because he loved to write hymns. And it just happens that one of his hymns has survived to current use and is sung not only in his home country of England, but also here in America. It was written specifically for the Harvest Festival, and it is the hymn most closely associated with Thanksgiving here in the U.S. It is “Come, Ye thankful people, Come, raise the song of Harvest Home.”
I have chosen to tell you about Alford because his hymn is such a good way for us to look at our feast of Thanksgiving. The first stanza is all about the material harvest, giving thanks to God that all has been safely gathered in before winter.
The second stanza recalls Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, together sown. Wheat and tares look like each other, but tares are weeds, and they are only distinguishable from the wheat at the harvest. But the parable is not about plants. It’s about the judgment of humanity at the close of the age. This second stanza, thus, moves us from thinking about the material harvest—from thinking about that wonderful Thanksgiving meal–to thinking about our own spiritual journey, the goal being eternal life. “Grant, O harvest Lord, that we wholesome grain and pure may be.”
The third stanza reminds us that Jesus will come again and will take us to himself. “For the Lord our God shall come, and shall take his harvest home.”
The hymn up to this point through the third stanza is a recitation of what the Church believes. The fourth stanza is a prayer: “Even so, Lord, quickly come to thy final harvest home; gather thou thy people in, free from sorrow, free from sin; there forever purified, in thy presence to abide; come, with all thine angels, come, raise the glorious harvest home.” From the beginning of the hymn to the end, we have come from thanking God for providing daily bread to referring to ourselves as the harvest that the Lord will bring to his heavenly home.
As we all will gather around a Thanksgiving table of one sort or another later on today, may we keep in mind this fuller view of the harvest of God. This harvest festival of Thanksgiving should not just be about eating our “fill of the loaves,” as Jesus puts it in today’s Gospel, but “laboring for the food which endures to eternal life.”
Sermon preached by The Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Thanksgiving Day
28 November 2013
*Information regarding Henry Alford quoted from 101More Hymn Stories, by Kenneth Osbeck