Thanksgiving 2023
Eve of the Day of National Thanksgiving
Philippians 4:6-20
November 22, A+D 2023
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The epistle appointed for Thanksgiving, from Philippians 4, begins in the middle of a sentence. “Do not be anxious” is preceded by, “The Lord is at hand.” This reveals the source of a Christian’s anxiety: forgetfulness. We forget about the Lord’s role in our situation, whatever the vexation du jour.
Anxiety means whatever is monopolizing the heart’s concerns [EDNT]. Anxieties are the preoccupations of the mind, the things we obsess over and will not let go. Peter uses the same term in 1 Pt. 5, where it’s translated as cares: “Cast all your cares upon God.” “Cast everything that causes worry on God” [EDNT]. This echoes Ps. 54:23, “Cast your burden on the Lord, and He shall sustain you.”
Left to themselves, these burdens, cares, anxieties choke the life out of us. Jesus says in the Parable of the Sower, “The [seeds] that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity” [Lk 8.14]. Everything, both prosperity and adversity, has the potential to turn us away from the Creator, and so fall away from our telos, our purpose.
This is why St. Paul precedes his admonition about anxiety with a reminder that the Lord is near: “The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything.” In other words, since the Lord is near—and He is judge, He is right, He is Creator, He brings water from rocks, from heaven bread, and raises the dead—how then can we be troubled, anxious, downcast?
St. Paul then moves us to the proper posture of the disciple of Jesus: “The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” He is saying, ‘Since you do, in fact, have anxieties, cares, troubles, worries, here is what you do: pray and make requests with thanksgiving.’
What’s odd is that prayer and supplication seem to be synonyms. Why is Paul seemingly redundant? He’s not. The term prayer here is general, and supplication is specific. The Church has “general prayers,” like when we pray for peace, or the well-being of the nation. Supplication, on the other hand, deals with very specific requests. Supplication also has this special nuance: The supplicant communicates dependence and even perplexity. It’s often used of requests desperate people make of Jesus, where it’s usually translated as implore. E.g., Luke 5: “Behold, a man who was full of leprosy saw Jesus; and he fell on his face and implored Him, saying, ‘Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean’” [v12]. In Luke 9, you have a father who seems to have an epileptic son, who is also tormented by a demon:
Suddenly a man from the multitude cried out, saying, “Teacher, I implore You, look on my son, for he is my only child. And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out; it convulses him so that he foams at the mouth; and it departs from him with great difficulty, bruising him. So I implored Your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.” [vv38-40]
This is the cry of desperation, where there’s nowhere else to turn, and the entire situation is beyond anything we can do. That’s what St. Paul is telling us to do with our anxieties and worries and concerns.
But here’s the astonishing kicker: we are to present these cries of desperation with thanksgiving: “The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” We’ve been accustomed to think of thanksgiving as an acknowledgement of abundance. Thanksgiving is for the prosperous and well-fed, with family gathered in a warm house and a rest from work. But here, Paul directs our thanksgiving to arise from our lack, our poverty, our need, our desperation.
This means that the thanksgiving Paul has in mind is not specifically for the First Article gifts: clothing and shoes, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all that I have. Verily we should be thankful for such things. But the Apostle directs our true thanksgiving to be for the things that moths and rust cannot destroy, the things that thieves cannot break in and steal. The disciple of Jesus is even thankful for the troubles themselves, because they are teaching him not to trust in possessions or accomplishments, but to trust Him alone. Precisely in the time of lack, the time of trouble, the time of anxiety and then death, we give thanks for the Resurrected One, who holds the keys of death and Hades, who promises, “I am making all things new.”
The Lord’s Supper is also called the Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving, because there, in the body and blood of Jesus, is everything we need and the solution to every anxiety.
Be not anxious. The Lord is near. Bring your requests to His altar, with thanksgiving knowing that everything you need He will supply.