Every year when Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday comes round, there is something I am itching to get up and share with everyone. So please bear with me while I tell you something about the Harvest Festival, and once I have got it off my chest, we can get on with the sermon.
As you probably know by now, I come from Cornwall in the South West of England. Now, did you know that Harvest Thanksgiving is a Cornish invention? Well it is. It was introduced in the Church of England by a very eccentric Victorian clergyman, the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker. I am tempted to spend the rest of the morning telling you stories about this wonderful man, but I mustn’t. To give you a flavour, however, he once spent three consecutive nights sitting out on the breakwater of Bude harbour disguised as a mermaid; he wanted to test the credulity of the local populace. Unfortunately, on the third night he was shot at by a farmer with a blunderbuss, and he decided to give the project up. In his own parish church, R. S. Hawker used to celebrate the Eucharist wearing a pair of pink cotton gloves, claiming – as he did for most of his peculiar liturgical innovations – that this was the custom in the Eastern Orthodox church. Robert Hawker used to go about his parish of Morwenstowe, making his pastoral visits with a pet pig on a lead. R. S. Hawker was also a fine poet [WAVE BOOK]: he wrote not only Cornwall’s unofficial national anthem, ‘The Song of the Western Men”, as well as writing the words to half a dozen of the hymns in the standard collections.
I could go on; indeed, I would love to go on. But the main point is this: the Harvest Festival, which we are celebrating today, was the invention of a Cornish parish priest in the mid 19th century.
It is not, as we tend to assume, a time-honoured practice followed by the medieval peasantry. If you have visions of serfs trekking into church in the middle ages, with sheaves of corn and their prize pumpkin, forget it. It never happened.
And here’s another thing: the American holiday of Thanksgiving also does not go back in an unbroken line to the Mayflower pilgrims giving thanks in 1621, after they had survived their first year in the New World. America’s Thanksgiving holiday too is also largely the invention of a more recent age. Indeed, credit for its establishment as a national holiday is really due to Abraham Lincoln, who reintroduced Thanksgiving in 1863, at the height of the American Civil War.
How curious! Two of our great public festivals of Thankgiving turn out to be – dare we say it – somewhat bogus. Why is that? Perhaps, because as the story of the ten lepers in today’s Gospel makes abundantly clear, saying thank you really does not come naturally to human kind.
Taken at face-value, the Gospel reading we have just heard seems quite straightforward. Jesus has mercy on ten lepers and tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. One of them – only one of the ten – came back to thank Jesus for the amazing healing he has received. We are told that this man was a Samaritan. Jesus announces that his faith has made him well: the one leper who returned, and hence the act of giving thanks, is commended.
Indeed, for our Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday, this face-value reading is quite sufficient for our purposes.
However, when you look at it more closely, this passage is not as straightforward as it seems.
Firstly, I’m sure that if I asked you what happened in today’s Gospel, quite a few of you would say ‘Jesus cured ten lepers and told them to go and show themselves to the priests’. But that is not what happens. Look again. Jesus tells them to go, and ‘as they went they were made clean’. For all we know, they could have been ten miles away before the healing actually took place.
Secondly, in first century Palestine, as had been the custom for centuries, any one who was cured of an infectious disease, such as leprosy, had to go and present themselves to the religious authorities, who would then announce that they now had a clean bill of health. Their self-isolation was over. But that was the law for the Jews. Was it also the law for the Samaritans? Perhaps the Samaritan came back, or hung around, because he wasn’t under the same obligations as the other nine. The other nine were all too busy doing exactly what Jesus had told them to do. Anyway, St Luke seems to have a soft spot for the Samaritans: he gives us the story of the Good Samaritan. He also – and he alone – tells us about the Samaritan leper who came back to say thank you.
When I was taught to say my prayers, at about the age of eight, I was taught to use ACTS. How many of you know what I mean when I say ACTS?
Adoration
Confession
Thanksgiving
Supplication
For most people, the most natural order is to say them in reverse. We start with Supplication: asking God for things. Often when we are in a tricky situation. ‘Oh Lord, get me out of this mess!’ We progress from asking things for ourselves to praying for other people – but it is still a form of supplication.
Next we progress to Thanksgiving. Learning to be grateful, for the many, many blessings in our life. Indeed for the gift of life itself. As with the lepers, nine out of ten people miss this. But actually, it is truly transformational. Most of the time we are apt to complain, to look on the glass have empty, and so on. And yes, sometimes we do have reason to do so. I’m not denying that. But as Christian we should never be a BMW: we are supposed to be a light in the darkness, a city on a hill. And we can only do that by cultivating an attitude of gratitude. A BMW? Yes: do not be tempted to be a BMW – a bitcher, moaner, or whinger.
Indeed, a good way to pray, perhaps when you pop into a church, and don’t really know what to say, is to sit down and simply count off ten things that you are grateful for – that you can give thanks to God for. Why ten things? Because you have ten fingers; because there were ten lepers.