Thanksgiving
Sermon preached on Sunday, November 30, 2025 by Subdeacon JD Swartz
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
On Thanksgiving Day, 42 years ago, Fr. Alexander Schmemann gave his final homily, and while it is well known, I will venture a guess that not everyone here has heard it, and I believe the first line bears frequent repeating: “Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.”
Why are we here if not to participate in thanksgiving? Or, in the Greek, εὐχαριστία (efcharistia), from which we get the word Eucharist. Is this not why we are here? To participate in the Eucharist? To receive our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ Himself?
But to participate in the Eucharist is not the mere act of consuming. As Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh succinctly put it, “for here to consume is to be consumed, to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self…”[1] While the Eucharist may be the chief Mystery of the Church, it does not exist in isolation, for it is the Body and Blood of the Word of God, the very instrument which spoke all of creation into being, after which, “…God saw everything He had made, and indeed, it was very good. Thus heaven and earth and all their adornment were finished.”[2] You see, Fr. Schmemann held that “the fall of creation means the fall of the human being ‘from the awareness that God is in all,’” and that “the sacramental sense of the world was lost;”[3] not its sacramentality, merely our sense of it. And it is here, in the Church, where we are meant to rehabilitate our relationship to God and to one another.
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” the lawyer asked of Christ. And “Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Christ Himself could not separate the two – love for God and love for one another – for without one, the other cannot be had.
It is not our gathering together here which sets us apart from the world outside, it is not even partaking of the Eucharist – it is our engagement with, and how we interact with, and how we love that world “out there” which sets us apart from it – apart from its systems, apart from its desires, apart from its selfishness and its brutality. It is in living with the awareness that God is in all that we live as is intended.
It is living as persons, not as individuals, which restores and redeems relationships, which grants us the grace to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. For to live as a person is to live according to the image of God – according to He from whom all things draw their very being. And it in this way that, like the priest who offers unto the Lord the bread and wine in behalf of all and for all, we offer ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our souls, our time, our effort, our relationships, our interactions, and all things which make us persons – and we give them to God so that we may be an instrument in the resacramentalization of all things and all persons.
And in this we give thanks. We give it, for thanksgiving is not a feeling, but an action. Inaction due to the idea that someday God will take care of everything is not a life of thanksgiving – it is the justification of another’s suffering and pain so that we may remain comfortable. St Isaac of Syria wrote, “What is [hell] compared to the grace of the resurrection?”[4] Brothers and sisters, wherever we find hell, it is imperative that we, as fellow workers with God, make it heaven. This is not accomplished by any means less than love. Today, we heard in the Gospel Christ calling of the first Apostles and in his commentary on this text, St. Bede the Venerable wrote, “it is clear what it means to follow the Lord…You follow the Lord if you imitate him.”[5]
The intended role of ourselves, of one another, and of all things is to imitate Christ – to reveal heaven, to proclaim the power of the resurrection. We are not here to work backwards for a paradise lost, or to exist as though strife, pain, and death never entered the world – we are here to accomplish the purpose given to creation from its very beginning – perfection of our relationship with and in God, and as such with one another. We were made for union with God; not as individuals, but as the entirety of creation, together.
Fr. Schmemann said, “The world was God’s gift to us, existing not for its own sake but in order to be transformed, to become life, and so to be offered back as man’s gift to God. Man was created as a priest: the world was created as the matter of a sacrament.”[6] This is the vision we are called to restore, this is the world in which we were made to live. Let us give thanks because it is only through this action and in communion with Christ and one another that we, and those we encounter, and the world may become what it was made to be.
Amen.
[1] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Grand Rapids, MI: WM B Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2008. Pg. 84
[2] Gen 1:31-2:1
[3] Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. Pg. 202
[4] St Isaac the Syrian. Daily Readings with…” Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1990. Pg. 58
[5] Bede
[6] Schmemann, ibid. pg. 223