Scripture: Psalm 146
I have some reflections related to or inspired by the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.
The first has nothing much to do with the holiday, except that it is a cause for thanksgiving. I want to begin by offering more formally my sense of gratitude that we have closed on the building and are officially the owners of a church property. I know that this is not the end of very much, that it’s really only the beginning of a whole lot more that lies ahead for us, “the first days of the rest of our life as a congregation”, to use a phrase I’m not especially fond of, but it is the end of this process of acquisition, which Cliff tells me has really gone exceptionally smoothly as such things go, but which has still been difficult enough and involved a lot of work, and I am grateful to have it done. I am grateful to Cliff for all the time and energy and care he has donated to this work. I am grateful to our friends in other parts of the U.C.C. who wish us well and have supported this venture in concrete ways, from prayers and letters of support to a loan of $720,000. I am grateful that we together, as Sojourners, have been able to do all that we needed to do, including raising $80,000 on short notice. But mostly I am just grateful that this part is over. There are a whole lot more things on the “to do” list, but we can draw a line through this one. Praise the Lord and thank you Jesus!!
But now let me switch gears. That was just a little piece of gratitude all by itself, unrelated to the rest of what I want to say. Among all the Thanksgiving-type thoughts I’ve been having recently, one that came late is the one I decided I had to begin with. I am a pilgrim. I say that partly to describe my spiritual condition, but also to describe my social identity, my place within American society.
Once upon a time—you’ve heard the story—there were these people in England who refused to abide by the rules of the Church of England, who refused to be dictated to as far as what they believed or how they worshiped, and who were persecuted because of these things. They fled, first to Holland and then to the new world, pilgrims in search of religious freedom among other things, and it eventually came to be that the Thanksgiving holiday celebrated their courage and conviction, and their success. Thank God for the Pilgrims. Thank God they survived those first difficult winters. We might not be here without them. Thank God for the ideals and the character they brought to this land and that have defined the spirit of this part of the Americas ever since. Yea, Pilgrims!
When I was a kid, I knew I was one of these pilgrims. Not that I was descended from anyone who actually came on the Mayflower. That was possible, but unlikely. But I was one of those people who inherited the spirit of the Pilgrims. I was proud that they were my cultural ancestors, if not my biological ancestors. Then I began to learn that these things that had happened once upon a time were a “once upon a time” sort of story—pretty much of a fairy tale. At the very least, the story I knew or thought I knew, left out some relevant information. For instance…
That Native Americans at the time and certainly over the course of later years would see these people not as pilgrims but as invaders.
That the first contribution of the pilgrims to the new world in New England was an infectious disease that almost wiped out the entire tribe of the Wampanoag’s without the need to so much as lift a sword or fire a rifle.
That the pilgrims sure enough wanted religious freedom for themselves but weren’t so keen about granting it to others—didn’t think the natives even had a religion since they didn’t see anything like church going on, and thought that the only freedom of religion Baptists and Quakers deserved was the freedom to practice it somewhere else, somewhere very else.
And that this notion that the Pilgrims represented the spirit of America doesn’t quite take account of the experience of African Americans, most of whom came here not as pilgrims, not as people in search of religious freedom among other things, but who were brought here against their will. The middle passage was not a pilgrimage. The great grandchildren of Pilgrims built ships that carried Africans here against their will and some of them got very rich from the slave trade.
All of these recognitions have made me wiser and a whole lot sadder about being a pilgrim. Now when I say to myself, “I am a Pilgrim”, there is a whole lot of baggage that goes along with that. It’s not all bad baggage by any means. Now that baggage also includes my religious identity as well as my cultural identity. The Pilgrims became the Congregationalists and the Congregationalists merged and became the Congregational Christian Church and the Congregational Christians merged and became the United Church of Christ and that, by adoption, is my spiritual heritage too, and I am mostly proud of that.
There were Pilgrims even in the early days who were at least Godly enough to struggle with whether it was right to just march in and take over a land that was not theirs displacing and destroying other human beings and cultures as they did. There were some who defended the natives. There were pilgrims, ancestors in the UCC who fought slavery, welcomed African Americans into the church and into the ministry, ordained women and have stood in a thousand ways for justice.
I am a pilgrim and sometimes, when I think of certain things, I can still be proud of that. But sometimes it gives me a headache, because I can’t shut out the rest of it. And it definitely interferes with my once upon a time celebration of Thanksgiving.
If you want to know the truth of it, sometimes I wish I could just shut out the rest of it. My hurting head and my hurting soul sometimes just want to sit down and say thank you God with no if, ands, or buts. My hurting head and my hurting soul need that I think, a time to take time out, to sit down and just say thank you in some simple, uncomplicated, very basic, from-the-heart kind of way. Not so much to think of all the specific things I should give thanks for, but to recognize somehow the gifted nature of everything, the giftedness of me and people I love, those I care about and those unknown, the animals, earth, sky, universe—just say thank you without anything interfering or intruding or turning such a deep gratitude into a partial and hesitant and qualified thank you. Sometimes I just want to say thank you, not even caring all that much who it’s addressed to. It’s good to say the name of God, but not really necessary. Just thank you. My soul just wants, needs to say thank you.
But that kind of thank you is hard for me. It’s hard to get to that point where my thank you is pure. I keep getting those headaches. The cultural part of Thanksgiving nags at me, gnaws away at the edges of my consciousness and conscience, even when I try to shut it out. And there are questions that keep coming after me: Is it really ok to just give thanks without any memory of the past or outrage about the present. Isn’t more than thanks called for? At least to acknowledge the injustices of the past and present? Isn’t thanksgiving without that a sacrilege? I have found that my thanksgiving is never uncomplicated, and I can’t help but be reminded somehow that I am a pilgrim with all that means, good and bad, in our culture, and I am never separate from that, and although it is not something that should just fill me with guilt and shame, it also tells me that I need to tell the story, the real story, the whole story of Pilgrims and natives and African Americans and many others and the land, and know that the story is still going on and I am not released by giving thanks from the need to change the story, change the direction of the story and do my best to bring it to a happy ending.
And it’s not just what we Pilgrims did to the Indians. It’s not just that we Pilgrims made a whole huge pile of money from the slave trade before deciding it should end. It’s also that…well, I’m not much good at disciplining my eating at Thanksgiving, and so I finish my dinner usually knowing that once again I have eaten too much, and it occurs to me that I would be a good poster boy for the excesses of North American consumption. I represent our culture well. Like me, our whole society seems not very disciplined about what it consumes. The over-consumption of food on my part, in itself not such a big deal when it’s limited to a few days like Thanksgiving, conjures up uncomfortable images and statistics about how much of the world’s resources we collectively consume. Thanksgiving is a holiday where most everyone who can afford it eats to excess. It is an all too accurate symbol of who we are as a society. I would be more thankful if I consumed less, but more to the point if all of us together consumed a whole lot less of the world’s resources, resources it seems to me were meant to be shared. No such thing, I guess, as a simple thanksgiving, though I tell you honestly I often wish there were.
I’m reminded of a piece I read recently that quoted the author E.B. White as saying: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” I identified with that when I read it. I guess I do, whether I’m quite aware of it or not, arise every morning with that sense of being torn in different directions. I feel it in a particularly pointed way as I think about our Thanksgiving holiday.
If you’re looking for a wise word that would somehow tell you how not to be torn in these two different directions, if you’re looking for that from me, you’re outta luck. I don’t have an answer as to which one is the truer or more faithful impulse. The only answer I know is that both are true and faithful, and so we will find ourselves forever in a situation where we wake up in the morning not really knowing how to plan the day.
Except to keep on being pilgrims in that larger, truer sense than having a heritage descending from certain fervently religious people of 400 years ago. We wake up every morning, perhaps not ever being able to plan our day but knowing it’s another leg in our journey, a journey toward the reign of God, a journey where ideally we would be able to sing songs of protest and songs of praise loudly and simultaneously, every step along the way.
I chose Psalm 146 as our scripture for today because it is one of the many psalms that is both—a song of protest and a song of praise. Jumbling the words just a little, it goes like this…
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul
I will praise the Lord…executes justice for the oppressed…I will sing praises to my God…sets the prisoner free…I will praise the Lord…watches over strangers…as long as I live…upholds the orphan…I will sing praises to God…gives food to the hungry…my whole life long…opens the eyes of the blind…I will praise the Lord…lifts up those who are bowed down…I will praise the Lord…executes justice for the oppressed…executes justice for the oppressed…executes justice for the oppressed…I will praise the Lord…I will sing praises to God all my life long.
I will sing praises to God all my life long. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 21, 2004