Now Thank We All Our God

Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,

For the first time since classes started last month, this weekend the neighbourhood around Huron Street will be a little quieter, as students who can return home for the long weekend will have done so. Everyone else will be here, including my own U of T student, my elder child, who will be studying biology, and calculus, and chemistry, and psychology, as usual. (In other words, all the creampuff courses.) Exam season is a little closer than any of us would like to think. The leaves are turning, the light is getting low, and the smell of someone’s roasting turkey is in the air, though at Smoky Tom’s, the odour of holiness remains the same.

I grew up celebrating the “other” Thanksgiving: late November, Pilgrims, parades, and football. But I’ve come to think that the Canadian holiday is the more honest of the two. It has no founding myth. It began as a series of proclamations giving thanks for various mercies, and since 1957 it has simply been about the harvest. It comes six weeks earlier than Thanksgiving in the States, in part because the harvest up here comes about six weeks earlier than the harvest down south.

Canada’s first national Thanksgiving after Confederation, in April 1872, was held to give thanks for the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid. In other words, this country’s Thanksgiving began with a healing. And that happens to be exactly what this Sunday’s Gospel is about. Not the Prince of Wales. Healing.

Ten men with leprosy call out to Jesus, and he sends them off to show themselves to the priests in accordance with the Law. On the way, all ten are healed. Only one turns back to say thank you. Jesus asks, rather archly, as I hear it: “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?” (Luke 17:17). I have some sympathy for the nine; they didn’t commit a faux pas in etiquette by not turning back to thank their healer. They just did what their healer himself told them to do, and after the priests signed off on their clean bill of health, I imagine they just got on with life. I’m sure they meant to thank Jesus the next time they happened to see him. Having good intentions describes most of us, most of the time. Gratitude is the thing we always intend to get round to when we get the chance.

Notice, however, that Luke informs us that the one person who turned back to thank Jesus “was a Samaritan.” Jesus calls him “this foreigner.” In a neighbourhood where so many people are a long way from home this weekend, including international students, newcomers to Canada, and people for whom home is no longer somewhere they can go, that detail matters. It is often the person far from home who appreciates a gift most intensely. Speaking as an immigrant who has been welcomed here, I can vouch for that.

Sunday’s first reading has a word for the rest of us too. Moses tells a people about to enter “a good land” that when they have eaten their fill and built fine houses, they should beware: “Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth’” (Deuteronomy 8:17). On the doorstep of one of the world’s great universities, that warning lands close to home. Academic life, and ambition generally, trains us to think of what we have as something we earned. The more we think we’ve earned something, the less grateful we tend to be for it. And coming so soon after the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, it is worth remembering that the good land we live on was a gift before it was ever a possession.

So here is my invitation for the long weekend: Be the one who turns back. Before the leftovers run out, thank someone you’ve been meaning to thank, whether a teacher, a parent, a colleague, or a friend, in person or in writing. And if you have room at your table on Monday, think about who might be spending the holiday alone and invite them if you can.

If you’re one of those far from home this weekend, you have a place at Smoky Tom’s table. Our Masses on Sunday are followed by coffee hour, and the Young Adults Group meets after Evensong for food and conversation. Next Sunday, October 18, there is a Welcome Lunch after High Mass for anyone new to the parish, and on Saturday, October 17, John Fraser returns to host our third annual Hymn Festival, where gratitude will be sung at full volume.

That reminds me. If you come to High Mass on Sunday, listen for how the music begins and ends with the same tune. Bach’s setting of “Nun danket alle Gott” opens the service, and “Now thank we all our God,” followed by Egil Hovland’s toccata on the same melody, closes it. The hymn’s author, Martin Rinkart, was a Lutheran pastor in Saxony during the Thirty Years’ War, and in the plague year of 1637 he is said to have buried thousands of his own townspeople. The hymn we will sing so cheerfully was written by a man who knew exactly how much there was not to be grateful for. I didn’t know this about the hymn until our first Hymn Festival, when John Fraser told us about its origins. It has changed how I sing it. Rinkart didn’t wait for the plague to lift or the war to end before giving thanks. Like the Samaritan, he turned back in the middle of the road, not at the end of it. Perhaps that’s why St. Paul’s words sound less like a conclusion than a habit: “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15).

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, wherever your table is this year.

Yours in Christ’s service,

Nathan J.A. Humphrey+

VIII Rector