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November 17, 2017
I hope many of you will be able to join me at the Chapel by the Sea for an Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service. I am humbled and honored that Pastor David C. Laughner who has preached the Good News on this Island for the past 25 years and is therefore the ‘dean’ of Tybee clergy has asked me to preach at this service. But I find it somewhat ironic, not only because I am the new guy in town and therefore untested as a preacher, but also because we just observed the 500 th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk at the time, posted his 95 criticisms of the Catholic Church on a Church door in Germany on October 31st, 1517. That act set in motion years of theological sparring and bloody wars. It also led to the flowering of Protestantism and its many distinct denominational traditions. I think even many of our Evangelical friends would say that it was not a good thing for Christianity, after all the Bible calls for followers of Jesus to be “completely one
In the 16th century, we were killing each other over theological differences. Efforts to create Christian unity or ecumenism have to overcome memories of past violence. For more than a century following Luther, Christian reformers and their political allies across Europe battled with the Holy Roman Empire. Catholics slaughtered Protestants; Protestants slaughtered Catholics; and both persecuted groups like the Anabaptists, who championed adult rather than infant baptism. We still have a long way to go, but praise God relations among Christians are far more peaceful today than they were 500 years ago. The idea that Catholics and Protestants would get together to cooperate on anything was almost unheard of before the 1960s. Gathering in Thanksgiving for all the ways the good Lord has blessed us, is one of the better ways to deepen our sense of Christian unity. I hope you will join with me in doing that: 6pm this Sunday. I hear Baptists always serve good food after the service.I love Thanksgiving, so much so that I take a week of vacation. So Monday morning after Mass I’ll be headed up I95 and Fr. David Arnoldt will be arriving to fill in for me. As I head north to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family, my heart is filled with gratitude for all the blessings I experience here on Tybee with you, my faith family. Thanksgiving is a day that helps us be aware of our many blessings. I’ve always believed that the best way to begin the day is by celebrating the Eucharist (the Greek work for Thanksgiving). I hope a good many of you will be able to participate in the 9:00am Mass on Thursday. I am so very grateful to Fr. Dave for celebrating that Thanksgiving Mass.
The following is a reflection by Pope Francis on today’s gospel:
I ask: have you thought about the talents that God has given you? Have you thought about how you can put them at the service of others? Don’t bury your talents! Bet on big ideals, those ideals that enlarge the heart, and those ideals that will make your talents fruitful. Life is not given to us so that we can keep it jealously for ourselves, but is given to us so that we may donate it. Dear young people, have a great soul! Don’t be afraid to dream great things! -- St Peter’s Square General Audience, October, 2014
And from time to time in this space, I’ll be offering some reflection questions that you can consider on your way home: In today’s Gospel when the wise servants report to their master, he says, "Come share your master's joy." Have you ever felt joy after you have done a good job at something? When God gives talents and blessings, what does he expect? Why does the third servant bury his talents? Have you ever been afraid to do something good? What makes you afraid?
Fr. Jerry Ragan