Mass readings for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
2 Kings 5.14-17 Psalm 98.1-4 2 Timothy 2.8-13 Luke 17.11-19
I’m sure I was not the only person, the only preacher, struck by the tremendous coincidence of our gospel reading for this Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend. It’s about ingratitude! And I would go further; it’s ingratitude specifically toward Jesus Christ. And we must wonder how that is pertinent today, this weekend and holiday Monday.
Well, I came to consider that it’s only in Canada that this weekend is Thanksgiving. Our American cousins celebrate their Thanksgiving in November, and in the rest of the world, Catholics will hear this gospel outside of the context of a national thanksgiving. Yes, it’s still about the issue of gratitude or lack thereof, but how poignant that as Canadians come together for an intentional time of thanksgiving, we are called to consider this story of how so many could walk away from Christ (9 out of ten) even as they’ve so obviously benefitted from him.
When Canada came together in confederation in 1867 it was formally constituted, not as a kingdom, or a republic, or a union, or a state, all designations we find for national, geographically-defined communities around the world. No, Canada was designated as a “dominion” as in “he (that is God) shall have dominion from sea unto sea.” These words are from the 72nd psalm, and for those who paid attention in their civics lessons, they heard in that also Canada’s official national motto. On the Canadian coat of arms, it is A Mari Usque Ad Mare, which translates from Latin “From Sea to Sea” and so, is a direct reference to the same psalm. Canada was founded as a Christian country; and not just in the sense that all the Fathers of Confederation were Christian men, but that the foundation of our laws and culture was Christianity; and as part of “western civilization” the rebrand name of what was formerly Christendom, this was most definitely so.
Now, of course, as ideological fashions among our ruling elites shifted, and these include both liberalism and Marxism as significant influences, there has been a concerted effort to move us away from our heritage, and over the past fifty years to encourage Canadians to reconceive the national project along very different lines of thought and belief. Religious observance of our Christian heritage was systematically stripped out of the public culture, and in recent years, it has been demonized. There are those things such as the Lord’s Prayer no longer being said in public schools, to more egregious actions such as the shutting down of catholic school systems in many Canadian provinces despite being constitutionally guaranteed. We will get yet more petty assaults on Christmas by militant activists intent on removing all references to what it’s actually about. And all the while, as legal analysts point out, Canada puts in more and more legal protections for other religions, and communities constituted around secular beliefs, through “hate” legislation, which leaves the only legally acceptable target for hate being Christians. We’ve seen attempts to make quoting from the Bible a hate crime.
We hear reference to “Canadian values” as being what constitutes us as a nation and people. I’m baffled to understand these as being in anyway distinctly Canadian. These of course vary greatly in our public discourse, depending on who is speaking, their political party, whatever the currently fashionable cause is at the time, and of course, whose votes are being sought. Really, among the few things that Canadians from sea to sea possibly share that would be distinctly ours would be… what? Maple syrup, and ice hockey?
All these values spoken of are derived from something else, from someone else, from somewhere else other than Canada. According to Statistics Canada, more than 80 percent of Canadian believe in equality before the law, and equality between men and women. But any honest historian will know these are Christian principles derived from the Bible and our tradition. Yes, a long time in coming, but it is only through the long centuries of Christians developing their understanding of the gospels, working out what it truly entails do we see uniquely these principles coming to be articulated, then championed, and then held to be not just Christian, but universal.
Go to countries whose cultural foundations are not Christian and we see the differences pretty quickly: lack of regard for individual human life; women as second-class citizens, even as non-persons before the law; caste systems either formal or informal that relegate millions to subservience and poverty; and slavery is still practiced in many parts of the world and has been reported as resurgent in places like Libya and South Sudan. Insofar as we do see western values at work in non-Christian societies, recognize that these have been imported and note how these values struggle to be articulated and properly understood by those whose formation as individuals and as communities lacks the gospel. Heavens, take note of our young people and their poor grasp of our values because they are instructed outside of an explicit Christian context. See how so many can support violence, the suppression of free speech, and all manner of violation of “Canadian” or “western” values out of emotional responses to events around us.
Again, the Christian ethos of prayerful discernment, and constant striving after virtue, the very things that help us navigate difficult moral questions, being discarded leave us with nothing but emotion and the grasping after power as the only source of security. And this leads to disintegration into the chaos of competing communities and constituencies, and that primitive state of constant war of all against all. St. Paul commended to us a life in Christ where there is neither Greek nor Jew, man nor woman, slave nor free; and we know from whom he got that wisdom.
What so many fail to understand is that the great flow of grace that comes from Christ, a river of healing and reconciliation, justice and truth, sacrificial love and mercy, is what brings the life which we so cherish, what it is that draws people from across the globe to come here. These things don’t come into being as a natural product of our geography; good people don’t spring spontaneously into being just because they stand inside our borders. There is nothing magical in the dirt here. If that were so, our great export of the last century and half should have been truckloads of our topsoil and perhaps, bits of the Canadian shield to those unfortunate lands that have lacked, and continue to lack peace and prosperity. When we hear in the first reading the story of Naaman’s healing in the Jordan, we get that curious request for two mule-loads of earth to take back home with him to Syria. Whatever became of that dirt, maybe there are traces of it in a rose garden in Damascus, the effect was not to convert the ancient Syrians to faith in the one true God. No, what made Syrians into believers in the ancient world was the person of Jesus Christ. Some believe the first purpose-built church to be in Antioch, which at the time of St. Peter was part of Syria.
We say ‘thank you’ to people, to persons. That’s the only proper reason to say such words. And in saying them we acknowledge a relationship, a connection even if ever so slight. To utter them to a cold indifferent universe before carving up a turkey or a ham, well, what a strange thing to do. The stars and the void through which they move don’t hear. We in the Church know that our “thank you” is to a person. The Eucharist itself, as I’m sure you know, is literally “thanksgiving.” Those who in ministry frequent the sanctuary during the mass will hear me, quite apart from the words of the mass, say to our eucharistic ministers, to our altar servers, and to those taking the sacrament to the sick and shut-in, “thank you.” And after I repose the sacrament, but before I return to the presider’s chair to chant the prayer after communion and make the announcements, I bow to the altar of Our Lord’s sacrifice, and again say, “thank you.”
I am so glad we here have turned back from the busyness of life, like the Samaritan lately cured of leprosy, to say “thank you” to the one who has made all that we enjoy in this life possible: Jesus Christ the Lord
Amen.