Scripture: Psalm 107
Those of you who look at sermon titles in the bulletin know that I decided to give a “Thanksgiving sermon” this morning. Next Sunday we’ll be into Advent already so I thought I would gather together a few thoughts about Thanksgiving this morning.
Of course it makes a big difference whether you think of Thanksgiving as one word that begins with a capital T, or whether you think of it as two words with no capitals: on the one hand the official “Thanksgiving holiday” with all the national legend and sense of national heritage and national feeling that goes along with it, or the more modest uncapitalized, two word version of thanks giving without all the history and nationalism surrounding it. Since it was the Thanksgiving holiday that frankly occasioned this sermon, let me begin there.
But it’s not an easy place to begin, is it? At least not for me, and I’m guessing the same is true for a number of other Sojourners. Once upon a time in my life I had this inherited, nice notion of what Thanksgiving, the holiday, was all about—what I might think of as the Normal Rockwell version of Thanksgiving. That it was a day set aside for an appreciation of the good things in life, that those good things included mashed potatoes and gravy, and family, and also the many blessings bestowed by God upon us as a nation and a people: a beautiful land that produces a bountiful harvest, a culture characterized by freedom and faith, and a good-hearted diversity symbolized by the Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to dinner together in a spirit of gratitude and friendship. I enjoyed that version of Thanksgiving for as long as I could hold on to it.
However, that proved to be not forever, in fact not very long. Sooner or later you begin to realize, little by little, that this warm, fuzzy version of Thanksgiving was just maybe not exactly the whole truth. Peter Gomes, the long-time University Minister at Harvard is from Plymouth where the first American Thanksgiving is said to have taken place. He points out that even the image of these pious Pilgrims sitting around a dinner table being prayerfully thankful to God is a bit of a stretch. His description is: “After a harvest in 1621, more bounteous than their meager skills at husbandry deserved, they had a harvest festival to which they invited the natives. Grateful to God for keeping them out of the hands of the Indians (and) their English creditors, they ate and drank themselves silly for three days.” My observation is that they began more of the Thanksgiving tradition than we usually give them credit for.
Peter Gomes also writes that ever since 1970, the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, a coalition of native American people have conducted a non-Thanksgiving, anti-Thanksgiving alternative celebration, a Day of Mourning expressing what for many native Americans is the other side, and the under side, of the Thanksgiving celebrations, and expressing their non-thankfulness for the arrival of the Europeans and their non-thankfulness for their treatment at the hands of the Europeans ever since.
We all know, if not the gory details, at least the broad outlines of that history. In fact even the English settlers were aware of the moral ambiguity of their enterprise. One of the most prominent of the early ministers and theologians in New England, a man named John Cotton, once said that he realized that the land belonged to the Indians and that the English had absolutely no right to just move in and take over, except for the fact that God had reserved this land for them as the place where they were to build their Godly society free from the evils of the old world. In any case, once one has become aware that this image of Pilgrims and Indians breaking bread together gives you a false image of Pilgrim-Indian relations and conceals more than it reveals of the truth, there is no going back to the warm, fuzzy thanksgiving.
And so, every year when the Thanksgiving holiday comes around, I know that much as I might like it to be, this is not going to be an uncomplicated time of simple gratitude. It is going to remind me, even if I don’t want to be reminded, of a history that is filled with wrong-doing and sadness and which not only native Americans are not thankful for but which I am not proud of or thankful for. All that—I can’t help it—intrudes on my thankfulness on Thanksgiving.
But of course it is also not an uncomplicated time of simple moral outrage, righteous indignation, and social protest. It is also a time of thanksgiving, and thanksgiving in part for the beauty and bounty of this land and for heritage that is all wrapped up in it. There is so much to be grateful for in the land and the people and the ideals we have never quite lived up to and the diversity that has blossomed here sometimes in spite of ourselves. There is so much to be thankful for and just because one’s thanksgiving cannot be uncomplicated and pure does not mean that one can be without thanksgiving altogether.
And so, every end-of-November I find myself facing this rather involved sorting out process of trying to figure out where I stand emotionally in relation to my country, how I deal with all the good, the bad, and the ugly, how I deal with the forced in-moving of Africans and the forced removing of native Americans, how I deal with the fact that in spite of what I now know of the horrors of our history, I still feel so deeply grateful for this place and people that I am a part of. This kind of sorting out is an important task to be engaged in, it seems to me, and therefore I should be, and am, thankful to the Thanksgiving holiday for urging that task on me again.
But then the national holiday urges on me not just the national part of things and all the things the nation stirs up inside me. It also urges me to consider thanks giving (two words, small letters) as that more basic, more human quality quite apart from any context of national history or heritage. It urges me to consider in a more fundamental way what it means for me to give thanks.
That’s not even quite right. Yes, it urges me to consider what it means to give thanks, but even more how important it is to me as a human being and how—I don’t know—flat my life would be without it. It’s not even so much a question of why I ought to give thanks. I’ve given those kinds of sermons before. Why we should give thanks, as though it were a duty, an obligation, and which is not entirely wrong either, except that giving thanks is one of those things you can’t quite tell yourself to do because if you do it dutifully it’s not really thanks. It’s similar to: “Love your neighbor!” “Yes, sir, I will love my neighbor.” And of course you can act lovingly toward your neighbor in an obedient sort of way to a degree, though loving your neighbor from the heart is not something that can be commanded. But it’s not a pointless thing to say. “You will be happy!” “Okay, if you say so, I will be happy.” And you can at least try not to ruin everyone else’s fun, even if deep down you’re not happy. “You ought to be thankful.” “Yes, you’re definitely right. That’s the right thing to do. I will be thankful.” And it’s not all bad to say thank you dutifully, but you can’t really be thankful dutifully. That requires some kind of spontaneous bubbling up of the spirit.
It’s not really a matter of talking ourselves into being thankful. I don’t know as we can do that. Even trying to be rational or give reasons for being thankful somehow seems beside the point. But I do at least recognize some of the good things that happen when by some combination of the grace of God and my own willingness and desire I find myself being thankful. For today, just a couple of things.
It occurs to me that one reason being thankful is a desirable state to be in is that it is anti-acquisitive. The thrust of thankfulness being an ever deepening realization and appreciation for what is, for the richnesses of our lives as they are, as they have come to be. Not just the good things. Not just the parts we may casually refer to as blessings, but the whole of it, to somehow say yes to the whole of it, and maybe to understand blessings in a new way. Thanksgiving as a state of the spirit is not an approach that takes the various parts of our lives as if they could be separated from each other and then makes a judgment on each one about whether we are grateful for this or grateful for that, as though we are even in a position to make such judgments. I think of thanksgiving as a state of the spirit and I imagine life as a kind of a litany in which my response to things, to everything to each event or episode or person is: Thanks be to God. Sometimes there is a pause before I am able to say Thanks be to God. Sometimes a substantial pause while I stammer out a question or two. Do I have to accept this? Am I really supposed to say thank you. But then…”thanks be to God”. A pause while we let some sadness well up inside and fill our chest and clog our throat and then slowly maybe subside…and then…quietly, maybe not too joyfully but nevertheless, “thanks be to God”
Thanks giving is explicitly not a state of mind that grasps for more. Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting more at least of some things. This is not just a matter of materialism where we could all easily agree that greed for material possessions is not a particularly good thing. But we aspire, legitimately aspire, to all sorts of things, including material well-being. It’s just that there’s also a kind of state of mind where the desire for more leads to nothing more than the desire for more, an endlessly repeating state of desire that I believe Buddhism is particularly concerned to turn us away from. Jesus does it too, for instance when he says, “Do not be anxious about your life…” I hear him saying, “Do not be endlessly, tiresomely anxious about your life.” There is an alternative, and it is to try to nurture within ourselves a spirit that contains an abundance of thanks giving.
Giving thanks is anti-more. It is also anti-mine. It encourages in me an awareness that there is nothing really that is mine, that belongs to me. Again it is not just a matter of material things. There is nothing finally that is mine, not even my own life, which in the end of course is not mine to hold on to, which someday I will have to let go of, but also which even now is not mine to hold on to. Another way of saying it is that life my life, every part of it, every piece of it, every aspect of it, is a gift. It is not mine, and the only proper way I can relate to it is to say thank you.
Annie Dillard, author, poet, wrote in one of her best known books, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “I think the dying pray at the last not ‘please’ but ‘thank you’ as a guest thanks the host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you all down the air…”
I don’t know if Annie Dillard is right, or if she even meant to be. Maybe she was using her poet’s license, or maybe just saying what she hoped would be true, not what she thought was true. But in any case I do hope it will be true for me: that well before my dying time comes I will learn to say fewer pleases and more thank yous, and that whenever my dying time eventually arrives I may drift out of this life into the darkness, or some say it’s the light, but into the arms of God all the while saying thank you…thank you…thank you…thank you. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 23, 2003