Thanksgiving Day Proper (1928 BCP)

Thanksgiving Day Proper (1928 BCP) is the appointed American 1928 Book of Common Prayer proper for Thanksgiving Day. In the 1928 arrangement it is not merely a civic observance with religious language added to it: the day receives a Prayer Book form consisting of a substitute canticle in place of the Venite, a collect, an Epistle from St. James, and a Gospel from the Sermon on the Mount. The proper therefore places national gratitude, harvest imagery, and daily providence under the confession that every created good is received from the Father through Jesus Christ.

Text of the Collect

O MOST merciful Father, who hast blessed the labours of the husbandman in the returns of the fruits of the earth; We give thee humble and hearty thanks for this thy bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness to us, that our land may still yield her increase, to thy glory and our comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The collect opens by addressing God as "most merciful Father," so its thanksgiving is filial rather than merely national or sentimental. The phrase "labours of the husbandman" keeps human work in view: the harvest comes through ordinary labor, but the fruitfulness of that labor is still God's bounty. The petition "continue thy loving-kindness to us" turns thanksgiving into dependence, and "to thy glory and our comfort" orders material plenty toward worship before it becomes private enjoyment.

Appointed Thanksgiving Psalmody

The Thanksgiving Day office changes the ordinary opening psalmody of Morning Prayer by replacing the Venite with selected verses from Psalm 147 and the Gloria Patri:

O PRAISE the Lord, for it is a good thing to sing praises unto our God; * yea, a joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful.
The Lord doth build up Jerusalem, * and gather together the outcasts of Israel.
He healeth those that are broken in heart, * and giveth medicine to heal their sickness.
O sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; * sing praises upon the harp unto our God:
Who covereth the heaven with clouds, and prepareth rain for the earth; * and maketh the grass to grow upon the mountains, and herb for the use of men;

This psalmody frames Thanksgiving Day around the God who both "build[s] up Jerusalem" and "prepareth rain for the earth." The appointed praise is therefore ecclesial and providential at once: God gathers his people, heals the broken-hearted, and feeds his creatures.

Epistle and Gospel

The appointed Epistle, James 1:16-27, prevents thanksgiving from becoming a vague optimism. It begins with the doctrine of divine gift and ends with active mercy and moral obedience:

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

James's "firstfruits" language connects directly with the collect's harvest vocabulary. The return of the fruits of the earth becomes a sign of God's wider work: he gives created goods, but he also begets his people "with the word of truth" so that thanksgiving becomes obedience.

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

The Gospel, Matthew 6:25-34, then turns the harvest prayer away from anxious possession and toward trust in the Father's providence:

Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than food, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

Read together, the collect, Epistle, and Gospel make Thanksgiving Day a school of ordered gratitude. The prayer asks that the land continue to yield increase; James teaches that every good gift descends from God and must bear fruit in mercy; Matthew teaches that bodily needs are real but subordinate to the kingdom and righteousness of God.

Historical and Liturgical Context

Bayard Hale Jones, a twentieth-century Episcopal liturgical scholar and member of the Prayer Book revision world, identified Thanksgiving Day as one of the Prayer Book's deliberately agricultural occasions. His comment is useful because it distinguishes the Prayer Book observance from theories that Christian festivals merely absorb pagan seasonal rites:

Thus our Prayer Book contains these recurring observances, whose undoubted origin was the celebration of the seasons of the solar year, but whose meaning has been converted to an entirely different purpose. But we also have two deliberately agricultural occasions for appropriate prayers for seedtime and harvest, namely the Rogation Days and Thanksgiving Day. These both originated within the Church and owe nothing to pagan influences.

E. Clowes Chorley, writing soon after the 1928 revision, noted that the new Prayer Book did not retain the older Thanksgiving Day office as a separate service, while still preserving its material elsewhere:

Three services found in the previous Prayer Book are omitted entirely from the new--The "Forms of Prayer To Be Used at Sea"; The "Form of Prayer for the Visitation of Prisoners" and "A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God" used at the service on Thanksgiving Day. While the latter disappears as a separate service its component parts are found elsewhere in the new Prayer Book.

The General Thanksgiving in Morning and Evening Prayer shows the same theological pattern in a daily-office form: gratitude for creation and preservation is crowned by thanksgiving for redemption, grace, and glory.

We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.

Anglican Use

In classical Anglican worship, the proper is most naturally used at Holy Communion on the civil Thanksgiving Day, with its collect and readings. It may also shape Morning Prayer because the 1928 proper explicitly appoints a Thanksgiving psalm in place of the Venite. The liturgical emphasis is restrained but concrete: harvest, work, food, land, and national comfort are received as gifts, and those gifts are returned to God in praise, obedience, and care for the vulnerable.

See Also

• Book of Common Prayer (1928)
• Church Calendar (1928 BCP)
• Collects Epistles and Gospels (1928 BCP)
• Rogation Days (1928 BCP)
• General Thanksgiving in Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)

External Links

• EpiscopalNet: 1928 Book of Common Prayer Thanksgiving Day Propers
• Bayard Hale Jones, Dynamic Redemption
• E. Clowes Chorley, The New American Prayer Book, chapter VII