Sermons

'Thanksgiving 2001: Bittersweet Our Thanks'

The poet, Langston Hughes, wrote nostalgically of the holiday in his poem, “Thanksgiving Time.”

When the night winds whistle through the trees and blow the crisp brown leaves a-crackling down,

When the autumn moon is big and yellow-orange and round,

When old Jack Frost is sparkling on the ground,

It's Thanksgiving time!

When the pantry jars are full of mince-meat and the shelves are laden with sweet spices for a cake,

When the butcher man sends up a turkey, nice and fat to bake,

When the stores are crammed with everything ingenious cooks can make,

It's Thanksgiving time!

When the gales of coming winter outside your window howl,

When the air is sharp and cheery—so it drives away your scowl,

When one's appetite craves turkey and will have no other fowl,

It's Thanksgiving time!

I, too, love this holiday and I’m drawn to its warmth, its aromas and tastes in much the same way as Langston Hughes. In another poem though, “Autumn Thoughts,” Hughes wistfully, and most unwittingly, speaks to us of the bittersweet realities of this year’s Thanksgiving.

Flowers are happy in summer.

In autumn they die and are blown away.

Dry and withered,

Their petals dance on the wind

Like little brown butterflies.

In this week's Time magazine, Nancy Gibbs declares,

"Thanksgiving has always been a feast day for the gods of paradox. It's an ordeal to travel and yet we do; family reunions can be wildly stressful and yet painful to miss. It was invented by a bunch of Puritans who celebrated freedom by throwing a party, and so bequeathed to us a holiday both secular and sacred, with parades and prayers that dare us to reckon with all that has changed, and recognize all that has not.

“This is the kind of holiday we need right now, an intrinsically complicated one that comes at the end of a bittersweet harvest and yet still finds something sweet to celebrate. Everyone is a pilgrim now, stripped down to bear essentials and a single carry-on bag to sustain us in a strange new world...”

Thanksgiving has always been my very favorite holiday. It's an American holiday. It's not overlaid with supernatural stories of traditional religious origins. It's not even based in religion, but in the universally religious theme of thankfulness. We all have great cause, and great need of being thankful. Thankfulness allows us to be gracious recipients of this incredible gift of life, and it reminds us to be generous in our response to it.

It does have its ambiguities; that's for sure. The English settlers didn't move into uninhabited lands. They moved into a world that was new to them and when they moved in, they moved the Native Americans out. Maybe this ought to be a holiday of forgiving as well as thanksgiving.

We cannot change what the pilgrims did or did not do. We can though, acknowledge their errors and move to address them. We can remember their achievements too, and celebrate, like they did, in earnest thankfulness.

We needn’t be limited by their shortcomings. Maybe we can pick up where they left off. Maybe we can dedicate ourselves to the work of antiracism, for their sake. For today though, let us put thankfulness at the top of our list. The Pilgrims were thankful, not really so much for their successes at living in the New World, as much as they were thankful for having even survived. And though I don’t imagine they heeded Emerson’s encouragement to laugh often and much – they were a dry people – I have to trust that they did fairly well following his other prescription for success.

“To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better…to know even one life [had] breathed easier because [they had] lived.”

And to the settlers, I don’t think these accomplishments represented success as much as they simply represented the elements of good living. Except of course, that the Pilgrims replaced the notion of laughter with the inescapable burden of hard work.

It’s the Puritan work ethic, brought forward, that we might want to take a look at this morning. We live in a rapidly changing world. Since September 11^th, the rate of that change has increased astronomically. Autumn is a time for bringing in the sheaves. Perhaps Thanksgiving is an occasion for separating the wheat from the chaff.

The Puritan work ethic has indeed moved forward in our nation’s character. Hard work is what industrialized the cities of our East; it plowed the prairies of our Midwest, and it settled the vast expanses of our Wild West. By the 1950’s, the psyche of White America – we still hadn’t got this racism thing worked out – but the psyche of White America was assured that, if one prepared well, worked hard, and worked harder still, that the rewards would be the good life of higher education, clean, indoor, managerial working conditions, and an abundance of affluence in life style.

We know something about affluence here in our church. By world standards, we are all extremely affluent. Even by national standards, most of us continue to maintain that standing. And while affluence is pleasant and comfortable, it is not a substitute for Emerson’s definition of success, and it’s not really synonymous with hard work either. (I’d also suggest that this affluence we enjoy is closely related to our longstanding theme of racism – but again, let’s stay with the thankfulness.)

Somewhere along the way though, especially since World War II, our cultural consciousness became confused; in all honesty, the material payoffs for hard work came to replace the spiritual pay offs. We were no longer working to promote the common welfare through industry, community, compassion and appreciation. We were working instead to make sure we had access to the very best rewards available: getting our own kids into the best schools, building McMansions, and driving SUV’s.

Then September 11^th came along, and we were awakened from our confusion. When the WTC came crashing down, with it came many of the illusions about what really matters. We started talking to each other differently. We started treating each other differently. We started to recognize and respect our own vulnerability, and that of our neighbors. Even some of our ever-present racism, so integral to the fabric of our country, began to unravel. Our illusions about materialism really did start to crumble that day. If we allow them to, maybe now is the time to let them go.

My colleague, Tony Johnson of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation over in Orange, in a recent paper on the theology of solidarity wrote, “There is going to be a long overdue loss of faith in the markets as a measure of the worth of individuals. Can we talk about this? Do we know how to talk about this? Will the doors of Unitarian Universalist meeting houses be as open to the unchurched who are economically distressed as they are presently open to the unchurched who are economically comfortable?”

We are going to be seeing some hard times in the days to come. The fortunes of some of us here have already begun to change. Those of many more are sure to follow. We are going to need to reassess the meaning of success. We are going to need to discover or rediscover what is most meaningful in our lives. Beyond what can be destroyed, who are we?

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” offers the Buddhist perspective. (P. Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)

Victor Frankl wrote in his monumentally powerful book, Man’s Search for Meaning:

“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a (person) but one thing; The last of his freedoms – to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way.”

We are free to choose our own way. No matter what we may have lost, and I am not just talking about the fallout of September 11^th, but no matter what we have lost, no matter what we may yet lose, we are free to choose our course. And perhaps this is the time to reset that course, so that it might better reflect what it is that we’ve been learning about what is important.

If Thanksgiving 2001 is going to mean much of anything to us, it will mean that it is time for us to straighten out the confusion between material gain and spiritual gain. Spirit does not exist in isolation. It is the breath that connects us all with the one.

If Thanksgiving 2001 is to have meaning, it will mean that we have reclaimed our thankfulness for the opportunities to do the work of our lives instead of spending our days working for that which can be taken away. If Thanksgiving 2001 is going to have great meaning for us, it will because we have accepted the bittersweet call to give thanks – that we have survived, that we have loved and that we might still love.

In this season of thanksgiving, it is finally time to stop sweeping away and postponing atonement for our sins of racism. If we are going to truly give thanks, we will also need to be forgiven and forgiving. So then, let our thanksgiving and our forgiving be in the Universalist spirit that reminds us that we are all saved; we are all worthy recipients of the love the universe holds for any one of us. Let it be in the Unitarian spirit that reminds us that God is one, that we are one, and that access to this nation’s, this world’s resources are for none of us any more than for any of us. If we are going to be forgiven and forgiving, let it not be by forgetting, but by remembering so that we might better set our course.

Thanksgiving is a paradoxical holiday with its prayers that dare us to reckon with all that has changed, and to recognize all that has not.

So, may we indeed find great joy and be comforted this season by the company of our families and friends. May they help us to remember the truly important things: the love of life and each other. And may we be challenged to take that love with us from our Thanksgiving tables, out of our homes and into the streets, into the courthouses and into the schoolhouses to do the work of justice, the work of compassion, the work of building a true America the beautiful, a new promised land, based on promises we are committed to keeping.

We all have great cause, and great need of being thankful. Thankfulness allows us to be gracious recipients of this incredible gift of life, and it reminds us to be generous in our responses to it.

It is hard work we are talking about, but it is honest work, work we can be proud of and thankful for. And its rewards can make us far richer, as individuals and as a nation, than any material awards we might have ever imagined.

Let us set our faith and our hope on a mighty cause and a virtuous course, and let us give thanks for the opportunity to do right by this gift of life we have been given. Let us in more than thought, but also in deed, give thanks.