-- English Proverb
Meditation: by Howard Thurman from “A Litany of Thanksgiving”
Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.
I begin with the simple things of my days:
Fresh air to breathe,
Cool water to drink,
The taste of food,
The protection of houses and clothes,
The comforts of home.
For these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!
I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:
My mother’s arms,
The strength of my father,
The playmates of my childhood,
The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives of many who talked of days gone by when fairies and giants and all kinds of magic held sway:
The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the eye with its reminder that life is good.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!...
Reading: by British historian Godfrey Hodgson from The Great and Godly Adventure - The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (p.xix)
The feast [the Pilgrim Father] Edward Winslow described has come to be called the First Thanksgiving, and accounts from serious histories to commercial Web sites date the origins of Thanksgiving to the fall of 1621. Generations of Americans have been taught that the Thanksgiving meal of today not only celebrates that feast, shared with the Indians, but replicates its menu. It is clear that neither of these beliefs is true. There were no turkeys. Or cranberry sauce or pumpkins pies. Nor did the Pilgrim Fathers call themselves Pilgrims at the time, and strictly speaking they weren’t Puritan either. And of course it is stretching a point to call them Americans: certainly they always referred to themselves as Englishmen.
What we are seeing, when we sit down to a Thanksgiving turkey, is a prime example of what historians have come to call “the invention of tradition.” There is absolutely no harm in that. Indeed, Thanksgiving is one of the most innocent and happiest of American traditions. If it is not true, as the Italian proverb says, it is well invented.
Reading: by Frederick Buechner from Wishful Thinking – A Theological ABC (p. 51)
Lord’s Supper
It is make-believe. You make believe that the one who breaks bread and blesses the wine is not the plump parson… but Jesus of Nazareth. You make believe that the tasteless wafer and cheap port are his flesh and blood. You make believe that by swallowing them you are swallowing his life into your life and that there is nothing in earth and heaven more important for you to do than this.
It is a game you play because he said to play it. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Do this.
Play that it makes a difference. Play that it makes sense. If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child…
Reading: by Joy Harjo a poem entitled “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
Imaginary Meals
A Sermon Delivered on November 18, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
For the past twenty years or so, my Thanksgiving holiday has revolved around a scrumptious meal prepared by my loving wife, and gourmet cook, Elaine. It has involved a visit from relatives – every year Elaine’s mother and her husband visit us, usually driving here from Washington, D.C., where they live. And for the past sixteen-to-eighteen years, it has included our own children.
It is very much a family holiday, full of treasured traditions: cooking a turkey of course, sensitive negotiations about what should go in the stuffing, and what kind of pies are indispensable. The traditional scheduling dilemmas, when we realize the frozen turkey didn’t thaw as quickly as it should have. Or the oven didn’t seem to cook things as thoroughly in the allotted time frame as hoped.
The Thanksgiving meal is a treasured tradition. A spectacle that begins with the purchase of ingredients and the selection of recipes days in advance. And that continues well past Thursday, as the family’s designated dishwasher works his way through piles of dishes stacked high – the good dishes, that don’t go in the dishwashing machine. And leftovers are served up, again and again. Delicious every time.
And yet, every year is somehow different. This year, especially, because the grandparents from Washington won’t be able to make the trip. None of us are getting any younger. This year medical issues make travel impossible. And this year, when I call family in Germany, I will not speak with my grandmother. She died in the spring. This year I am especially grateful for family members and friends still with us.
* * *
There was a time when we imagined our Thanksgiving was a re-enactment of a memorable meal in 1621, which involved the pilgrims in Plymouth colony, and their Native Americans friends and neighbors. We imagined the European settlers were gracious hosts, and the Native Americans honored guests at a banquet that included key ingredients: turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie.
It is a good story: A band of travelers, religious refugees from Old World Europe, are in search of a new home in a New World. They reach the shores this country, but soon realize they are ill-equipped to live in this unfamiliar environment. They barely survive the first harsh winter here. They wouldn’t have made it without the kindness and support of the Natives. And so the next year, after a successful harvest, they put on a lavish feast of Thanksgiving to God, inviting into their midst the unfamiliar but friendly Wampanoag Indians. It is a timeless picture of gratitude, abundance, friendship and harmony.
Does it matter, that the story is made up? Does it matter that there was no turkey and no cranberry sauce on the table that day in 1621? Does it matter that these were inventions of imaginative writers, trying to paint a pleasant picture for an English audience, hoping to entice more of them to come to Plymouth? Does it matter that the relationship between settlers and Natives was in fact strained? And that in the years that followed they were often at war? Does it matter that the descendents of the Pilgrims were the undisputed winners, who finally drove the Indians from their land?
Despite an abundance of historical evidence that paints a much more complicated picture, we want to imagine a meal that celebrated peace and friendship – a new community in which people of differing culture and conviction joined together as one, in gratitude.
* * *
The symbolic power of sharing a meal reaches back much further than 1621. It reaches deeper than the particularities of the American Thanksgiving Day myth.
The Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong writes,
“The sharing of food in human experience is the very basis of all human community. Our language reveals that time and again. The word companion, for example, literally means the sharing of bread with another. In the act of breast-feeding, the life of the newborn infant was not only saved but sustained and enabled to grow. In the ancient world, the death of the mother in childbirth almost always guaranteed the death of the child. Feeding another is the experience in which life, love and being are first shared. So inevitably in our social order the deepest symbol of love has always been located in the act of feeding. That is why eating together is the primary way that relationships grow and are nurtured. It is the means by which love is shared.” (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 194)
Christianity has its own version of a shared meal that symbolizes the creation of a new community. It was the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples, before his death. As the story goes, Jesus invited his friends to join him for this final meal. When they were all seated at the table Jesus calmly predicted his betrayal and execution. He asked his friends to remember him.
In several Christian traditions, this communion is celebrated as a liturgical act and sacrament. Catholics believe that when the priest blesses the wine and the bread, the food is miraculously transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Many Protestants, on the other hand, see communion as purely symbolic. There is no consensus among Christians on the meaning of communion. And even the Gospel narratives disagree on what Jesus said and did, and when it happened.
Unitarian Universalists used to celebrate the Christian communion. And, in fact, it was a disagreement about the meaning and merit of the communion celebration that brought an end to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s career as Unitarian minister.
This is another story. Young Ralph Waldo Emerson followed in his father’s footsteps. His father, William Emerson, served the Boston’s Unitarian First Church. Ralph Waldo was called to serve as minister of Second Church. But in 1831, Emerson the younger got into a fight with members of his parish, because he refused to offer communion. For Emerson, communion was a stale and meaningless religious artifact, an empty ritual that only got in the way of a more authentic, personal experience of the sacred.
Church leaders implored Emerson to reconsider. They asked if he might be willing to at least offer communion to parishoners, even if he himself abstained. Emerson said no, and resigned from the pulpit. He still considered himself a Unitarian minister, but never served a church, or used the title “Reverend” again. Instead he became a free-lance lecturer and author, and eloquently shared his vision of God. “The Highest dwells within us,” he said. “Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related… When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius… when it flows through our affections, it is love.”
* * *
In the earliest Christian scriptures, the shared meal believers remember and ritually recreate is called the Eucharist. “Eucharist” comes from the Greek, and means “thanksgiving.” Because, according to Paul, in his letter to the congregation in Corinth, that’s what Jesus did first of all: he took the bread into his hands, and he gave thanks.
There is a famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, that shows Jesus seated at the center of a long table, with six disciples to his left, and six to his right. Painted in 1495, it surely has played a big part in how many Christians today imagine Jesus. Rather than Middle Eastern, Jesus and his disciples look distinctly European. No surprise that an Italian artist would invent an Italian Jesus.
Historians agree that the first Thanksgiving didn’t actually happen the way our school children learn the story. Historians agree that the last supper was not accurately described in any single Gospel story.
But a deeper and more profound truth is told in both of these Thanksgiving stories: that life a miracle. That we are sustained by powers we can’t our control, and blessed beyond our understanding. The only sensible attitude is gratitude. The most reasonable response is to share freely with others, what we freely receive.
“The world begins at a kitchen table,” Joy Harjo says. “No matter what, we must eat to live.”
A new world begins, when we sit down together with stranger and friend in gratitude. This is not the reenactment of an ancient event. It is the creation of something completely new. It is an act of imagination, envisioning a new community, a community in which all people partake in earth’s blessings, a community in which we each share freely our gifts of love.
To sit together at a welcome table is an ancient dream. But making this dream a reality, is a creative task yet to be completed. It is an act of imagination and courage we are called to carry out today.
* * *
To help spark our imagination, I invite you to join in a symbolic meal. I invite you to imagine us all gathered around a table.
(Bring out cornbread and apple cider. The following is adapted from “A Cider and Cornbread Communion” by Robert Hemstreet, from The Communion Book, edited by Carl Seaburg.)
For thousands of years, men and women all over the earth have gathered on festive occasions to share in the eating of special foods and the drinking of special beverages. Our American Thanksgiving is another one of those combined seasonal and historical holidays designed to celebrate the changing of the seasons and the blessings of the Earth.
So we celebrate and give thanks today, not with bread and wine, but with fresh apple cider and freshly baked cornbread. Both of these represent the fall harvest season and the stories told around Thanksgiving.
Think about cornbread. Native Americans taught Pilgrims how to grow corn and use it. Without corn, the Pilgrim community would have starved. And in the form of bread, corn could be kept and easily shared.
As we share this cornbread, let us be mindful of all those whose labor, love, energy, creativity, and suffering go into the growing, distribution, and preparation of our food.
And let us be mindful also, that this small morsel we eat now may be as much as some people get to eat this whole long day. Let us resolve to take whatever steps we can to end hunger in our neighborhoods and in our world.
(Distribute cornbread, ask folks to wait until all are served.)
As we eat of this small piece of bread, let us think of those things for which we have been thankful this year, and of those with whom we are called to share our bounty and blessings, both materially and spiritually.
* * *
Now let us consider this apple cider. As we prepare to enjoy this fresh sweet cider, let us meditate on the many symbols and meanings it evokes.
First, how good it is for friends to drink together. The sharing of a special beverage is one of humankind’s oldest rituals.
Next, let us think about what we are drinking. For most of us, cider is a seasonal drink; it’s special, an autumn treat. Some of us will probably not taste cider like this until next fall. So try to remember the taste.
Let us remember that the apple comes from a tree, long a symbol of the aspirations of humanity. Its roots search deep in the good earth, while its branches reach for the heavens.
And finally, let us remember that these apples were pressed for us. They are the products not only of the earth, but of all those people who till the soil, tend trees, pick fruit, toil in the vineyards, fields and orchards; people who we almost never see, but without whom we could not live.
(Distribute cider, ask folks to wait until all are served.)
Now, with gratitude for the earth, for life, and for love, let us enjoy. (drink)
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