Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Thanksgiving Day! I hope your heart today is full to overflowing with gratitude for the manifold gifts and graces which God has given you and with which God continues to shower you!

And that having been said…sometimes it can feel difficult to give thanks. Sometimes there’s so much happening (or so much not happening), sometimes life can be so overwhelming, sometimes accidents, misfortunes, tragedies, stresses, anxieties, and pain seem to constantly beset us, sometimes our burden of woe exceeds or outweigh any weight of weal…that it doesn’t even occur to us that thankfulness is even a possibility. And while so often in scripture we’re bidden to give thanks in all things, in all circumstances—knowing that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the Name of the Lord—giving thanks in hard times is, well, hard.

Charles Williams, my favorite Inkling, was apparently fond of saying in every circumstance, whether good or bad, “This also is Thou; neither is this Thou.” Williams here is attempting to walk both the positive way (what he called the romantic way, the way of affirming that everything that is speaks to us of God and reveals God to us) and the way of negation (the way of recognizing that all images, all language, all knowing falls short of the reality of God), and his saying is a rather handy way of affirming the reality of the presence of God in every circumstance of life, however dear or dire, and recognizing, too, that God is not limited to those circumstances.

For me, this is one of the reasons why the cross is so central to my faith. In the depths of my own pain, whatever it is or may be, I know that Jesus is not far from me…because Jesus went to the depths for me. He harrowed hell to search for me, to find me, to share with me his infinite life. God is not far away from us in the midst of pain, but fully present, walking beside us, longing to hold us, uplift us. We’re not alone in our grief, in our hard times.

In our Office Gospel this morning, Jesus says to us, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” I think one of the things Jesus is saying to us here is this: “I know you’re hungry and thirsty for joy, for life. I know you long for fulfillment, for respite, rest and peace. I know that there are even times you yearn for something to be thankful for. I know. I know. And I want to tell you: I can be your joy. I can be your fulfillment and respite, your rest, your peace. I can be the thing you’re thankful for. I can be the thing that sustains you in good times and bad. I can be your life. I can be your love. I can be your food. I can be your all. In fact, I am already all of these and more than you can imagine! So come to me with your yearning, come to me with your hunger and your thirst, your restlessness, your pain, your heart aching to be thankful, and I will feed you and fill you. I will give you the nourishment you need. I will give you my very life.”

Friend, if you’re longing to receive the very life of Jesus Christ today, to give thanks for all the blessings of your life—but chiefly for the means of grace and the hope of glory (BCP p58)—to seek for a way by which the thankfulness of your heart may be unfeigned, even in the midst of sorrow, I would invite you to Eucharist today at Saint Philip’s at 11am. The Eucharist is the Church’s greatest act of Thanksgiving, whereby, in and through Christ, we even offer ourselves: our souls and bodies (BCP p336), all that we are, all that we have, all that we love, even all that we’ve lost, all of our failures, all of our emptinesses and desires, all of it all of it all of it…we offer it to God for God to do with as God pleases, knowing that God’s good pleasure will always lead to our ultimate bliss. After Eucharist, we’ll celebrate a community Thanksgiving meal, extending the fellowship of the Altar and of the Heavenly Table to the tables of the Galleries. Friend, particularly if you’re looking for community, for welcome, for joy, for love, I urge to come to church today!

And, dear Friend, if you’re going through the Valley of the Shadow and are finding things difficult, if you need to talk to someone who can bear your burdens with you, who can be with you, who can help you to seek for and find Jesus, please let us know! It can be hard to be thankful in the midst of trouble, and together we can discover that Jesus himself is the wellspring of all our thankfulness.

Finally, Friend, I want to tell you that I give thanks for you—I give thanks for whatever good God is bringing to fruition in your life however hard it may be for you to see it; I give thanks for the ways God is inviting you to grow and deepen your walk with God. I give thanks for you! And I wish for you a Happy Thanksgiving!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+