Thanksgiving Ecumenical Service

I just returned from our annual Colchester Ecumenical Thanksgiving Service.

Tonight we gathered as Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists and did the one thing all Christians should be able to do together. We said thank you to God.

Every year I tell my congregation that the ecumenical service is no small thing. As I said when I preached the service two years ago, our forebears would not have liked what we are doing. The vileness that was embedded in the Reformation and responses to it persisted well into the first half of the last century.

But we live in a new world today. Our forebears might not have liked it, but I do believe God does.

I think we as Christians need more of these kinds of ecumenical encounters. We need them because it helps us to see that Christ is working in and through the ministries of other churches and other traditions. Our real enemies are not those with divergent ecclesiologies or atonement theories.

The church's true enemy in the 21st century is a dehumanizing secularism that sees self-gratification as the summum bonum and will thererfore exploit, consume, annihilate, or subject any person or nation that stands in the way.

An old - but still fresh - word helps keep everything in perspective: "Those who are not against us are for us."

Besides, I just like the whole ecumenical service affair. It's half super formal with collars, and genuflects, and responsive prayers and half low-brow Baptist with me in my dapper tweed asking God all impromptu like to bless the canned foods that have been brought forward in a recycling bin.

And I hear Jesus' prayer to the Father, "That they might be one as we are one."

Amen to that.