The Fifth Sunday after Trinity
Sermon
30 June 2024
The Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis
Incorporating the Thanksgiving for the Gift of Rhion John Crawford Tucker
It is an unusual privilege to have at the centre of this service a ceremony of thanksgiving. We are giving thanks today for Rhion, and at the same time we are giving thanks for his parents Peter and Josie who have brought him here today. So I thought I would focus this sermon on Thanksgiving, what it means and how we do it.
It won’t be long before Peter and Josie are teaching Rhion his p’s and q’s, telling him in other words to say please and thank you, like all polite people do. In normal human dealings we expect to begin by saying please, when we want something, and leave thankyou till the end, a more or less heartfelt thank you, when we have got what we want. But in our dealings with God, and in the realm of faith, we find it is the other way round. We begin our conversation with God by saying thank you; and only later may we dare to say please.
For saying thank you to God is a natural and proper way to start our conversation with him. We have so much to give thanks for: the beautiful world in which we live, our homes, our families, our friends, our money and our possessions, the society and the country in which we live, our democratic process of voting this very week, all of these are sheer gift and nothing that we have achieved in our own strength; above all to give thanks for our lives, the extraordinary gift of life given to each of us uniquely and individually, complete with our talents and our sins. The great thing about having Rhion with us this morning is that he is a visual aid. We see him, and as we give thanks for him, we are each reminded of the preciousness of our lives and all that we have to give thanks for.
But whereas we might find ourselves unfeignedly thankful for all the blessings of this life, there is I think a distinction between being thankful and giving thanks. Being thankful is a blessed state of thankfulness which we hope one day we might achieve. Giving thanks, on the other hand, is a positive action which we do, and we do over and over again, because we have faith in our God from whom all blessings flow. Our giving of thanks is rendered to God – it has direction, we send it up to heaven, you might say, we ask for our feeble thanks to join in the unending thanksgiving of the Holy Trinity, and the mystery is that in this offering we receive back from God a deeper sense of belonging to him in faith.
But, we only may dare to make our offering of thanksgiving because God has redeemed the world by his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ has opened for us a way of praying, in which giving thanks plays an essential part. And he has shown us something of the overwhelming love which God has for us. The gospel reading we have just heard describes Jesus carrying out two healings. After each of these there is a thanksgiving. The woman who had been ill for so many years, “knowing what had happened to her, came… and fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth”. What thanksgiving must have been in that confession. And the little girl, who was as good as dead, “got up from her sick bed and began to walk about …and at this the parents were overcome with amazement”. What a thanksgiving was that.
But, as I said earlier, in the life of the spirit we say thank you before we say please. Rhion’s thanksgiving ceremony will be followed by our intercessions. This is the opportunity when we are together to bring to God our requests, our longings, particular people, special places, asking God, please, to bring peace to our world, to our families, to our homes and to our hearts.
And all of this is summed up in the Eucharist, when we offer ourselves to God and receive Christ. Eucharist is a Greek word which means “Thanksgiving”, for what we do at the Eucharist is both a thanksgiving for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, in the Last Supper, in his death and in his resurrection; and also for what God is yet to do for us in the life hereafter when we shall join with angels and archangels to sing an endless thanksgiving in heaven.
“Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving.”
