The Gift That Creates Gratitude

“The Gift That Creates Gratitude” is a homily I delivered at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Thanksgiving Day, 27 November 2025 (Year C, RCL), at the invitation of The Rev. Taylor Vines. Rooted in Deuteronomy 26:1–11, Psalm 100, Philippians 4:4–9, and John 6:25–35, the homily considers how Christian thanksgiving begins with God’s saving action toward a vulnerable and oppressed people, finds its center in Christ as the bread of life who gives himself in the Eucharist, and reorders the lives of the faithful toward shared celebration, truthful remembrance of injustice, and concrete solidarity with neighbors and strangers who hunger for daily bread and for hope.

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today the Word of God speaks to us in the middle of a national holiday that we call Thanksgiving. Many of us carry into this day a mixture of things: there is real joy, there is real sorrow, there is anxiety about tomorrow, there is heaviness over the past year. We stand before God as people who know very well that our gratitude is incomplete. And into this, the Word speaks.

“Enter his gates with thanksgiving,” says the Psalm, “go into his courts with praise.” It sounds simple enough. Yet if we are honest, we do not know how to enter those gates. We do not know how to give thanks as we ought. Either our gratitude becomes a sentimental feeling that avoids the world as it really is or it dries up under the weight of what we have seen and suffered. So, perhaps the question today is not first, “What are you thankful for?” bur rather, “Who gives thanks in the church? Who is able to give thanks in truth?”

The reading from Deuteronomy helps us here. God commands Israel to bring the first fruits of the land and to speak a very strange confession. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” That is how thanksgiving begins. With the memory that our story does not begin in strength. “A wandering Aramean.” A small family. No power. No land. Then Egypt. Harsh treatment. Forced labor. Affliction and oppression. The people of God begin as those who cry out. They do not free themselves. “We cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors,” they say, “and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.”

Only then comes the great divine action. “The Lord brought us out… with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” The land, the harvest, the house, the table, all of this stands on that prior act of God who hears the cry of the oppressed. So, Israel is taught to take a basket of grain and fruit and say, in effect, “We have not built this life on our own. We have not secured this land on our own. We stand here because you, Lord, have acted for us.” Thanksgiving is not a report on what we have accomplished, it is the admission that our existence is a gift that rests on God’s mercy. And because it rests on mercy, it cannot close in on itself. The text ends with this command: “Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty.” This includes the landless priest, the resident foreigner, those without claims and protections—their presence at the feast belongs to the very truth of the thanksgiving: a table that excludes them would be a lie about who God is and how God has given.

Psalm 100 sings the same truth. “Know this: the Lord himself is God; he himself has made us, and we are his.” We do not belong to ourselves. We did not call ourselves into being. We are sheep in a pasture that belongs to another. For that reason, “the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting.” Our thanksgiving rests, not on the mood of the day, but on the unchanging faithfulness of God.

Then we hear the Apostle Paul. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” These are not easy words. Paul does not write them from a holiday table, at which many of us will sit today. He writes from prison. He writes without any guarantee of release. So, when he speaks of rejoicing, he is bearing witness to the nearness of the Lord. “The Lord is near,” he says. That is the condition for any Christian thanksgiving. We rejoice in the Lord who has drawn near to us in Jesus Christ and who does not abandon us, even when everything visible falls apart. We do not give thanks because we can see how everything will work out. We give thanks because the crucified and risen One has bound himself to us, and because his peace “guards” our hearts and minds even when we do not understand.

We come now to the Gospel. People have eaten their fill of bread and fish. They have tasted a sign of abundance in the hands of Jesus, and they come looking for more. Jesus reads their hearts. “You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” He does not despise their hunger. He reveals it. Then he says, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.” The people ask, “What must we do to perform the works of God.” It is a very religious question. What must we do? Which law? Which technique? Which discipline? But Jesus overturns the question. “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Jesus reveals that the “work” that matters is not our performance but is rather God’s own work in the sending of the Son, and our faith is simply the opening of the hand to receive that work as gift.

The people demand a sign. They speak of manna in the wilderness. They want bread that falls from the sky and proves God’s care. But here, Jesus points them beyond Moses. “It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.” Then he gathers it all into one sentence. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Now we stand before this promise in a church where the Eucharist will be celebrated. What happens at this table? What kind of thanksgiving takes place when the priest takes bread and cup into their hands and speaks Christ’s words? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” At table, God answers this prayer in a strange and deeper way. Here, God gives us, not simply bread for the stomach, but Christ himself as our life. The one who once said, “I am the bread of life,” is the one who now gives himself to us in this sacrament.

It is important to say this clearly: the sacrament is not a mechanism in human hands. We do not own the grace of God as a thing or an item. We do not control the presence of Christ. Here, as always, God is the subject. We are the ones addressed. Christ, the living Lord, is present by his Spirit. He binds himself, by his free promise, to this simple act, to this bread, to this cup. He says again to his church, “This is my body, given for you. This is my blood, poured out for you.” Jesus is not miserly; he does not loan us a part of divine power that we can then distribute as we see fit. No, he gives us himself. Our eating and drinking do not pull him down from heaven. They are the bodily form of faith, the way in which we say, “You are the bread of life for us, here and now.” He is the one who invites. He is the one who feeds. He is the host. He is, at the same time, the meal.

In that sense the Eucharist is the Great Thanksgiving. Yet we must be honest. Left to ourselves we cannot offer such thanksgiving. We may feel thankful. We may try to summon the right emotion. None of this reaches God. Real thanksgiving happens when Christ himself gives thanks in our midst and draws us into his own gratitude to the Father. Christ is the Israel who remembers; he is the one who can truly say, “All that I have is from you, Father.” He is the one who entrusted himself to God in suffering and death and received life again on the third day. When we gather at this table, we are taken up into his movement, his prayer, his thanksgiving. The church borrows its “thank you” from the Son of God.

This also means that our thanksgiving cannot remain a private matter. The Collect today asks that we may be “faithful stewards” of God’s bounty, for our own necessities and for “the relief of all who are in need.” That is nothing other than the shape of Christ’s own life. He is the bread that is broken and handed on. Whoever receives him is sent out into a world of empty hands. The command from Deuteronomy returns to us with force: “You, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty.” At the table of the Lord, there are no owners, only guests. The earth, the land, the harvest, our homes, our positions, all come under judgment and mercy here. We live in a land marked by dispossession and broken promises, by the suffering of Indigenous peoples, by the labor of those who plant and harvest and pack and cook, often without security or honor. If Christ is the bread of life for the world, if this table is his table, then our thanksgiving must learn to speak truth in this place. It must remember the wandering and the slavery and the crying out that continues in our own day. Here we learn to see the neighbor, the stranger, the one who is missing at our family gatherings, the one who has no feast today. Here, at the Lord’s table, they are fellow guests for whom the same body is given and the same blood is poured out.

What shall we do on this Thanksgiving Day? First, we bring our emptiness. Our lack of gratitude. Our worry and our stubborn self-reliance. We confess with Israel, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” We confess with Paul that we do not know how to rejoice rightly. We confess with the crowd that we often seek Jesus because we want something from him, not because we have recognized him as the bread of life. Then, precisely there, we hear the gospel. “My Father gives you the true bread from heaven.” “I am the bread of life.” “The Lord is near.” The command to rejoice, the summons to thanksgiving, are grounded in this reality. God has given himself to us in his Son. God comes to us today in Word and sacrament. God does not wait until our gratitude is strong, he himself creates it in us.

So, come! Come as you are! Come with full baskets and with empty ones. Come with clear joy and with silent pain. At this table, the living Christ will again give himself to you. Receive him as your daily bread. And as you go from this place, let his thanksgiving become your own. Let his peace guard you. Let his generosity loosen your grip, so that others may also taste and see that the Lord is good.

To this God be the glory, in the church and in the world.

Amen.