It was August the 26, 1833, when something incredible happened. It was the day that Krakatau, the volcano in Indonesia, as we call it today, erupted. It erupted with such incredible force that the lava was travelling at 675mph. Seventy per cent of the archipelago on which it stood was destroyed; 40,000 lives were lost within days and 20 million tons of sulphur were released into the air, and due to the equatorial stream and then the jet stream, went all over the Earth.
For the next two years, the average temperature on the Earth dropped 1.2 degrees Celsius, because of the ash that was in the air. The devastation was so great, it took five years until the skies were clear of Krakatau.
Two days later, on August the 28, 1833, in New England, people got up in the morning to find that the sun did not come out. No roosters crowed, no birds sang. There were no morning sounds typically found in nature. People gathered in churches by the thousands. They weren’t sure if this wasn’t the end of the world, and they were frightened.
They huddled and prayed together, and they didn’t leave one another for fear of stepping outside and what they might find there. As the day went on, it remained dark. They prayed that in the morning the sun would come up. In the morning they got up early and went to the hill tops to see if the sun would rise. It did. As surely as it had done every other day.
But this time there was an orange ring around it, probably from the sulphur in the sky. You see, the people in Massachusetts did not know about Krakatau, they only knew what they saw. And what they saw was a day without the sun. As one of the great pastors in New England said, this was the first time that he had ever remembered people saying thank you for the existence of the sun.
Writing on this, Dale Burkhart, an American preacher, has commented: “You know, sometimes our prayers of thanksgiving are awkward.” We’re never really sure quite how deep and sincere they are. Sometimes our prayers of thanksgiving are just sort of ritual and rote. We have all these good things and in our sort of smugness, are grateful for what we have, but it doesn’t really find any great depth in our souls.”
Other times, as we experienced even here some years ago after 9/11, people gather for thanksgiving and worship and prayer, asking for almighty God’s blessing, and are suddenly thankful for the things that they have, but it takes a moment of destitution or fear to bring them to their knees.
Burkhart is right, thanksgiving is awkward because we’re never quite sure if God almighty finds our prayers obnoxious, even. Maybe because our sense of thanksgiving is so rooted in self-interest. Or maybe they are deeply sincere, from the depths of our hearts, recognising that what we have is by grace alone. And then God rejoices and hears the thanksgiving of his people gladly. Thanksgiving is not a time for guilt, it’s a time of celebration.
But for that celebration to be real and powerful and meaningful, it must come from a deep place. No one understood that more than Moses, who wrote in the Book of Deuteronomy our passage this morning, which is really three sermons that Moses gave to the people of Israel. Probably on the plains of Moab after the people had left the wilderness, and were on their way to Canaan, to the Promised Land.
This was the land that God had promised Israel, and the Israelites are getting ready, under Joshua, to take them into this new land. But Moses gathers them together and he has some strong words for them. Reminders, maybe, of the things that really matter. For Moses, what was central was the law, was God, and what was needed was repentance, because what he wanted from God’s people was an authentic thanksgiving, something deep from the soul that meant something, not just words or platitudes.
In the seventh century B.C., where scholars agreed Deuteronomy was finally put together and written, there is a reflection in all of this about the promised land of Canaan. But there was this hope, even hundreds of years before by Moses that this Promised Land would bring the people of Israel to a deep, utter sincere thanksgiving. More than a feeling, but a gratitude that arises from the depths. As you look at this passage, the clues are all there for there is a very authentic, appropriate thanksgiving. I quote: “For the Lord, your God, is bringing you into a good land, a land flowing with streams.” In other words, God is being faithful to you, he is taking you to a good land. And then he describes what this good land is like, all the things that would mean so much in their time: olives, pomegranates, vineyards and wine, an abundance of wheat.
These were the things that were manifested in God’s grace in the Promised Land. There would be fountains and streams and flowing waters, all the things that they didn’t have when they lived in the wilderness they’re going to have them all.
Even the stones of Canaan are going to be productive, producing iron, and eventually have copper mines. All of this, of course, was realised when the people went in to the area around the Dead Sea and they were able to take the iron from the sandstone and the limestone under the Dead Sea. The copper mines in Arabah, south of the Dead Sea, were rich copper mines that the people of Israel would be able to use. So mining, food, water, the land, it was all there.
He says, “God is going to be taking you to this good land. You’re going to have so much for which to give thanks.” And a sort of national pride arose within the people of Israel, as they’re going to this Promised Land, that God had blessed them and given them good things.
Of all the people on Earth, who has been more blessed with an abundant land, than we Canadians? Who has got more fertile land, more magnificent oceans, more wheat fields? Who has got greater fishing rights? Who’s got greater streams and rivers and lakes? Who’s got gorgeous mountains and white caps? We do. We are blessed. If there’s a nation that should be thankful for anything, it clearly and absolutely should be ours. And it is right to give thanks. It is right to look at what the sanctuary guild have produced so magnificently and thoughtfully for us this morning, in the cornucopia. Here it is, right before our eyes, the product of our own land. There is so much, and nations, true nations, understand that.
I love what the great Sir Walter Scott wrote. “Deep within his own heart breathes there a man with a soul so dead who never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land.” There is something powerful about our native land. And while other nations enjoy it too, while other nations have their moments of thanksgiving and of praise and joy, it is good, and it is right, and it is proper for us to give thanks. But unfortunately, there is an underside to thanksgiving. There is that inappropriate thanksgiving. That thanksgiving that is born out of smugness, a forgetfulness, and of avarice.
That all the wonderful things that have been given, and wealth that has been accumulated, and things that have been given and received somehow are deserved by us, or have been created by us, or manufactured by us, as if it is a right for us to possess such things. Moses was afraid that when the people went into the Promised Land, brought out of the house of slavery and suddenly abundant with food and streams of water, iron and pomegranates, oil and bread, that they then would stop, and they would forget their God.
He wrote: “Take care that you do not forget the Lord, your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances and his statutes, which I am commanding you today.” In other words, there was a clear message from Moses that you are not the author of your own success. You are not the sole hands that have received this. Yet, throughout history, there have been those that have tried to suggest that we’re only truly free, we’re only truly liberated, when we feel that we’re no longer dependent on anyone else.
Karl Marx, in the 19th Century put it this way, and I want to quote him: “A being only counts itself as independent, when it stands on its own two feet, and it stands on its own two feet as long as it owes its existence to itself. A man who lives by grace of another considers himself a dependent being.” Now, I’m going to tell you this: Marxian ideology is not too far from the lips of people in our day and age. The same sentiment that our being dependent on a higher being, or even being dependent on the grace of another, ceases to make us free is one of the great lies of all time.
Just ask the people who worshipped in New England in 1833. Who, when they woke up in the morning, expected to see the sun, probably thinking they had a wonderful day ahead of them, only to find that forces way beyond themselves had taken away their sun. So, there is this profound sense and our forbearers knew it, maybe more than we do because they were probably more connected to the land than we are, that there is no such thing as a free and independent person, nation or peoples. That we are, according to Moses, all dependent on the grace of almighty God.
True thanksgiving understands that. Like Walter Scott, their souls know something greater and deeper, that they recognise, very much at the core of their being, that they are what they are and have what they have by grace and grace, alone.
The law is also important according to Moses. Not only must we not forget the land and the Lord who brought us out of slavery. Not only must we not forget the wilderness experience that we had, but we should obey the law. And what is the essence of the law? Jesus told us this, “it is to love, the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy strength and all thy might, and love thy neighbour as thyself.” Thanksgiving is born out of the loving of the other, out of the recognition that we do not forget the needs of the other. Otherwise our thanksgiving simply becomes a form of narcissism. As if we say to the almighty, look at all we’ve got! Isn’t this wonderful that we are blessed! In the meantime covering our eyes to the needs of those around us who need a blessing often more than we do.
Whatever you call thanksgiving in the world, every nation pretty much has, particularly in the Western hemisphere, some form of thanksgiving or harvest festival, or recognition in the autumn that we bring in the fields and the wheat; that we reap what we had sown. Every country I have been in, whether it has been here in Canada with our wonderful thanksgiving, or in the UK, with its harvest festival, has celebrated that and I’ve always loved it. I love the food. I just do. Even if I’m cooking it, I still like it! But I must admit there was once where my whole understanding of the harvest festival changed forever.
The cape winds in South Africa had been blowing, it was the autumn and it was harvest festival weekend. When the rains come in off the Cape of Good Hope, they soak you. It was a Saturday morning and fellow students in the University of Cape Town went with me to the crossroads migrant camp. The rain was torrential. Our job on behalf of the Student Health and Welfare Center Organisation was to deliver schoolbooks to the children of migrant labourers, who had no schools of their own.
As I walked into the houses, maybe better just to call them homes, the rain had been devastating. The floors were all covered in cardboard, thick cardboard and as the rain had fallen through the cracks, the cardboard had become soft and squishy and the water had lodged in it. The floors became uneven as the soft cardboard molded to the mud floor underneath. The corrugated steel, which was the roof and the walls, leaked like a sieve so the people had taken their clothes and towels and curtains and stuffed them in the edges where the corrugated steel met, in order that the wind and the rain wouldn’t come through.
The mealie pap was boiling on the pots in all of them. Sort of a meal, an oat meal type, and even those had become soaked with rain dripping in through the roofs and had become runny. Outside, the latrines, which were rough and shared maybe by a dozen shacks or more, had become waterlogged, and were leaking on to the streets. I handed the books over to the little children who were waiting anxiously for them and in the midst of the stench of the wet-soaked earth, these children were grateful for the books that we had brought them.
We got in the bus and we went home, along the M2 into the M62 into Pinelands, where we lived. My mother had prepared a harvest festival dinner. She was a great cook. We’d invited neighbours around. It was a festive time. My father said the grace in his usual eloquent way, and I simply couldn’t taste a thing. It was as if all my sense had just disappeared.
Nothing tasted like anything and all I could smell was mealie pap. We went through the day, and to church the next morning, and I was grateful for all that I had. But I would never experience harvest thanksgiving again in the same way. Sometimes our thanksgiving and our sense of being blessed are just not deep enough. But when they are deep, when they care for the other, when they’re born out of the grace of God, when they come from the soul, the Lord, our God, rejoices with us as he said to the people of Israel, “My power and the might of my own hand are with you.” Remember the Lord, your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his Covenant that he swore to your ancestors as he is doing today. For everything, thanks be to God. Amen.