People Who Say, 'Thank You' (or, Praying Shapes Believing)

Sermon for Thanksgiving
Nov. 27, 2025

When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a day of ritual for me, and I imagine some of you had a similar experience.  I’d wake up and watch at least some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.  I loved the huge balloons.  Plus, we were home from school; and even with the inane commentary, the parade was the best choice among Springfield’s four channels.  

But I didn’t watch much of the parade because of the next Thanksgiving ritual for us: church.  Probably not surprisingly, that wasn’t my favorite part of Thanksgiving, that we had to go to church two days that week.  But once we got there, and I put on my choir robe, and we came into the church singing, “Come Ye Thankful People, Come,” the gears in my heart slipped into place.  “Oh, yeah,” I thought.  “I do have a lot to be grateful for.”  And it was good just to sing that song again, a song people have been singing since 1844 to help them remember just how thankful they are.

After church, we’d go home for the other Thanksgiving rituals:  Football – both on TV and in the yard with my friend, Ted.  Family – whoever could get there, given my sisters’ obligations to spouses and their families.  And my mother’s turkey gravy – which truly is the best in the world and for which the turkey was just a necessary ingredient.  With the rituals completed, we did indeed find gratitude and the peace that gratitude brings … right before slipping into a turkey coma.

We each have our Thanksgiving rituals, right?  We have gatherings or practices or foods that make the holiday the holiday.  You may even think your mother makes better gravy than mine, which, in the spirit of Christian charity, I’ll strive to forgive.  But why do we keep these rituals?  Other than the comfort of habit, what do the parades and football and turkey and pie give us?

Rituals help us remember.  It’s the power I felt standing at the back of the church as a kid, hearing that old familiar hymn rise once again.  Rituals bring past, present, and future together for us, helping us see that the moment we inhabit is just that – a moment – but one connected to moments across time and space.  That’s what we remember when we say the Eucharistic prayer – when, each week, regardless of the liturgical season or the form of the prayer we’re using, we remember that we’re joining with “angels and archangels and all the company of heaven” as they offer this prayer with us.  As we stand here before God each week, we never stand alone.

And as we gather with one another and that heavenly company, ritual binds us around a common experience.  In fact, the theologians would say that ritual brings the common experience to life.  The Greeks had a word for it – anamnesis, which means active remembering, the kind of remembering you do when you hear a baby cry and you’re transported to your own child’s crib.  Anamnesis is bringing memory into lived experience, making the past present and banking on it for the future, too.  It’s what happens every time we offer that Eucharistic prayer and connect our bread and wine to Jesus feeding the 5,000, and the Last Supper, and the heavenly marriage supper of the Lamb.  We say we experience the real presence of Jesus in that meal as he brings us a feast out of nothing, and gives himself so we can live forever, and welcomes us home to the banquet that never ends.

And one of the most important memories our rituals bring to life is the active remembrance of “thank you.”  It’s no accident that this meal we share in worship is called Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving.”  Every week, we come together for the ultimate Thanksgiving dinner, reminding us of the full scope of gratitude – blessings past, present, and future; people we have loved, and do love, and will love; belovedness from the God who created us, and redeems us, and will sustain us eternally.

This is why we’re here today, when we could be doing anything else to enjoy a day off.  This is why ritual matters.  It reminds us who we are, which is fundamentally people who say, “Thank you.”  And “thank you” cures a multitude of ills.  It reminds us we’re in relationship with a power far greater than we are.  It reminds us that the nature of that power is love.  It reminds us that the consequence of love is always blessing.  And so, it reminds us that, no matter what, in all things, the right response to the love that creates and redeems and sustains us is, “Thank you.”

That doesn’t mean life isn’t hard.  Any one of us, every one of us, can lament the burdens we carry, the losses we’ve suffered, the cost of an embodied life.  But ritual helps us there, too.

Every morning, my routine includes a time of prayer.  Both the form and the content matter.  I make a cup of coffee, with sugar and half and half, my one cup of coffee a day like that.  I come into the sunroom where my wife, Ann, kept her indoor plants, nearly all of which are still alive.  I light a candle, and the dog and the cat join me in what was Ann’s favorite chair.  Then we listen to a podcast of Morning Prayer, which ends with something called the General Thanksgiving.  It’s the prayer we’ll offer here this morning, in place of the Prayers of the People, to voice our hearts on this day of gratitude.

Now, this ritual doesn’t guarantee that I’ll come out of prayer time happy.  A life of embodied blessing doesn’t work that way.  But it does guarantee that I’ll remember to say thank you – as that General Thanksgiving puts it, thank you for “for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for [God’s] immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory” (BCP 101).  My sunroom ritual is a way to remember, every day – “Oh, yeah, that’s right.  That’s who I am – someone who starts with, ‘Thank you.’”