Excerpt from Fr. Mac's Thanksgiving Day sermon.
For there is one God;
there is also one mediator between God and humankind,
Christ Jesus, himself human,
who gave himself a ransom for all.
1 Timothy 2:5-6
What do we do every Sunday at the altar? We give thanks for the story of our salvation, which is the one true story of the whole world. The principle worship in Christ’s church is the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist. The word “Eucharist” just means “Thanksgiving.”
Thanksgiving Day is – for Christians – every Sunday, because every Sunday we gather around this bountiful table and taste the fruits of our redemption, sharing the meal that reminds us of God’s ultimate and everlasting provision. The Eucharist is a sacrifice. But it’s an unusual sacrifice, because the only thing we offer to God is something that he has already given to us. The only thing we 'do' is celebrate something that God has already done. We offer to God the “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,” which Jesus offered on the cross. In doing so, we realize that the only thing we ourselves have to offer is thanks.
I managed to come out of college and seminary with only a modest amount of student debt, and I was pretty intentional when I started my first job about trying to quickly pay it off. There came a day, though, when an older, well-established friend knocked on my door – and after we chatted for a while he asked, out of the blue, how much student debt I had. I told him, and he promptly pulled out his check book, sat down, and wrote a check for the exact amount. I was, needless to say, flabbergasted, and awkwardly stammered out something like, “But this is crazy! What could I possibly do to repay you for this?” His response: “Just say thank you, and enjoy the freedom.”
That, friends, is the Christian life. Just say thank you, and enjoy the freedom. The story that we tell as Christians, the story that makes us who we are, is a story of the gracious, undeserved, entirely free gift of God in Jesus Christ. God wants nothing from us in return but that we would say thank you, and enjoy that gift.
When we live that way, we can’t help but loving God and loving everyone else for God’s sake. That is why we say that the Eucharist we celebrate in church is to be the defining activity of our entire lives. Christians are “eucharistic” people, people who live in the grateful, joyful knowledge of the freedom from sin and death that God has granted us in his Son.
God bless you!
Fr. Mac
