“Now Thank We All Our God”
A Thanksgiving Homily by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
November 19, 2006
READINGS
The first reading is from the Calcutta poet and holy man, Rabindranath Tagore:
I bow to God over and over again who is in fire and in water, who permeates the whole world, who is in the annual crops as well as in the perennial trees.
Our second reading, from the work entitled, “Who Is Man," is by Abraham Joshua Heschel, considered by many to be one of the most significant Jewish theologians of the 20th century. He served as Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City from 1945 to 1972:
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however, remotely, for something supreme.
Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine,... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
SERMON
One of my responsibilities as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association is to serve as the Board liaison to the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Committee. This committee has been tasked with assessing and monitoring progress towards our UUA’s commitment to becoming an antiracist, anti-oppression and multicultural institution. That commitment was made by a vote of congregational delegates to our General Assembly, exactly 10 years ago this June.
Unlike so many of our federal agencies these days, this committee is actually staffed by individuals who believe in the cause of the agency they serve. They are deeply committed to the transformation that is the objective our work. In fact, one of my great joys in serving on the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Committee is the opportunity to work with these very dedicated, gifted and spirited colleagues. Together we are lay and ordained, and we represent the broad diversity of class, race, ethnicity, physical ability, sexual orientation and gender to be found within Unitarian Universalism.
Everybody on the committee is my favorite. Among them is one of our co-chairs, Rev. Monica Cummings of First Unitarian in Los Angeles. Monica is an African American, lesbian, a former college basketball star and a former Peace Corp volunteer. She has overcome incredible challenges in her life, and she has a heart as big as the pipe organ that resides up in our choir loft. Whenever Monica is asked, “How are you?” or, “How you doin’?” (A question that here in New Jersey typically receives the same question in response – “how you doin;” “how you doin’?”) her confident and ready answer is, “I’m very thankful.” Or, “I’m very grateful.”
“How are you?” - “I’m very thankful.”
“How you doin’?” - “I’m very grateful.”
“How’s it going, Monica?” - “I’m very thankful.”
The truth is she really is very grateful. She’s grateful for having survived her childhood in inner city Philadelphia and so many other things along the way. She’s grateful for being alive and grateful to the Spirit of Life that holds her in being. She knows that she’s grateful, and it’s important for her to keep that knowledge front and center. So, whenever anybody asks what’s up with her, she shares her number one viewpoint, “I’m very thankful.”
I have two wishes for you at this Thanksgiving holiday time, wishes that I’ll hope might carry you through the holiday season, into the New Year and quite beyond. My first wish is that, like my friend and colleague Monica, you might come to find gratitude as a central experience in your life and find a way, or many ways, of expressing that gratitude that will promote its experience for you and in the world around you. So, How you doing?
My second wish has to do with the title of the hymn that we sang at the beginning of our service, “Now Thank We All Our God.” It is that, if you haven’t already, you might come to recognize the object/source of your gratitude so that you might be more in synch, more in touch with what it is that you hold most dear. If you’re struggling with the word “God” here, my hope is that you might let go of that struggle and dig a bit deeper for its meaning. It’s quite enough, I think to use the term “God” as Ralph Waldo Emerson did in his essay, “The Choice of Theisms.”
“Everyone has a God. The human heart requires a God. Some God, a true or a false one, it will and must have. There exists no mind but is possessed with love either of good or of evil. It will make a God of conscience, or of riches, or of power or of science, or of honor, or of hatred, or of the belly... For everyone may see, who will look at the mind as a philosopher, that who ever made us, we were made not by ourselves, but from the beginning to the end of our structure and of our progress, do plainly discover a reference to something else than ourselves.”
“Everyone has a God.” It’s time for us to let go of the gods we don’t believe in. Holding them too tightly, we suffocate ourselves. It’s time for us to find and embrace that which, for us holds the deepest meaning, the greatest endurance and perseverance and permanence. From time immemorial those qualities have been assigned to the word God, but we can name them what we will. And we don’t have to dismiss the word God because of the way some people use it in limiting ways.
I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw several years ago. Maybe it was in the New Yorker. Two hand puppets are talking to each other and one of the puppets is saying to the other, “You know, sometimes I don’t really think there even is a hand!”
And so my second wish for you this holiday season is that you will know what you have fashioned as your God. We all recognize, at least on some level, that we are indeed a part of something much larger than ourselves, whatever we might choose to call it. But how much do we allow ourselves to give credit to, give thanks to that largeness, that source for our very being? How much do we allow ourselves to have a grateful heart?
How willing are we to have confidence, to have faith in a universe that has really had a very successful track record, going back billions and billions of years? How willing are we to let go of the idea that we are in control of what happens in this creation. Its not that we don’t have an impact on it – for good or for ill – we do. It’s not that we aren’t responsible for what we do to it and to each other – we are.
It’s that we are not in charge. Instead we are a part of, partners in a process that goes all the way back to before we can even imagine. We are held in that process, given life by it, and one day will return into it. And I have to believe that on some level, be it personal or impersonal, it wants – that process wants – for us to survive; it wants for us to do well. The Spirit of Life that has pressed forward through the ages…wants life. And, I have to believe that we are the result, the manifestation of that incredible, universal want – that need to be. And I thank God it is so, not just that I’m here, but that you are here.
And so, in this Thanksgiving season, I wish for you a God that is large enough to merit your gratitude. I wish for you a God that will sustain you with faith through your darkest hours. I wish for you a God that can help you to laugh at your own folly, one that will weep with you through your greatest griefs and one that will work by your side in your quest for justice and a better world. I wish for you a God that is large enough to grant you a grateful heart. So that when you might be put to the test, or even simply asked, “How you doing,” your response might be, “I’m very thankful.” And in your heart you might be able to give thanks to your God, however you have named it.
I wish for you a very blessed and grateful thanksgiving.
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