Thanksgiving

Hannah Wells

23 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

This morning’s prayer was written by Max Coots, the emeritus minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Canton, New York. It is called “Let Us Give Thanks.”

PRAYER: “Let Us Give Thanks,”

by Max Coots

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.

For children who are our second planting, and, though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are.

Let us give thanks:

For generous friends, with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms;

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we’ve had them.

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as potatoes and as good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you throughout the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts, and witherings;

And, finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter.

For all these, we give thanks.

PRAYER: (for 5:30 service only)

Let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Let us learn to be grateful for the blessing of life, even though it be a terribly mixed blessing, with enough of sorrow and loss to make us bitter if we let it.

When our vision becomes narrowed and our expectations become inflated, we wonder how we could ever be thankful for something as flawed and often unsatisfying as life can seem to be. Our job is not as we had imagined it would be. Our relationships are not as fulfilling as our fantasies of them had been; our friends are neither as numerous nor as true as we feel we deserve. Our families have problems.

We think, perhaps, that if only life would get better, we would be glad to be thankful for it, but that surely no one would be thankful for this kind of life. Yet it is precisely this life for which we must learn to be thankful. For it is the ability to see life as a blessing rather than as a burden which can lift its burden from our backs and let us sing and dance with the sheer joy of being alive.

This is the season when we are given the opportunity to renew our attitude toward life: to recapture the sense of joy and of gratitude for the simple fact that we are here, that today life is ours, and today there is the chance to relish it.

And so let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: “Thanks-giving”

Davidson Loehr

Thanksgiving is a holiday especially for people who have lost a lot and need to know how to go on. If everything in your life is just swell, and it has been just swell for as far back as you want to remember, Thanksgiving will just be another swell day, with turkey.

But if you have lost something this year, you need to lay claim to this holiday, because it is for you. I mean hard, painful losses: a parent, a partner, a child, a beloved friend or relative, even a pet you loved. Or a more abstract pain: a loss of innocence, outgrowing a faith too small to cherish you without yet knowing how to replace it. Or the loss of a job, or the loss of confidence, optimism and hope.

It was so long ago, that first Thanksgiving, it’s hard to imagine it could still be such a big thing. It took place 382 years ago. Bach wouldn’t be born for 64 more years. The founders of the United States – Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington – wouldn’t be born for another century or more. The United States itself wouldn’t exist for another 155 years. Charles Darwin was 200 years in the future, and the new world he would help establish wasn’t even imaginable back in 1621 at the first Thanksgiving.

But one of the most enduring and life-affirming stories in our history was being lived out back then, in real time.

The year before, 102 Pilgrims had left to make their way to the New World. They started out in two ships, but one wasn’t seaworthy, so they came over in just the one ship, the Mayflower. They left on September 6th; the trip took 66 days, they arrived on November 11, 1620.

They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. Of the one hundred and two who left to come here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.

Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.

They had the amazing good luck to land near a village where the famous Indian named Squanto lived. Squanto probably spoke more English than any Indian on the continent, and he helped them survive and plant crops. Without him, they might all have died.

The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. I cannot imagine how they might have felt: the combinations of life and death, tragedy and joy, famine and feast. It was like all of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead.

Maybe that’s why the first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and ninety of his people. The menu for the feast was venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and everyone ate their fill.

After dinner, legend has it that Chief Massasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popped popcorn, which the Pilgrims had never tasted before.

These are the bare bones of the story of the first Thanksgiving: we don’t know many other details. It was the story of a small group of people who seemed to have both the character and the courage necessary to transform hell into heaven.

By all rights, all 102 of them should have been dead by spring. But they were not dead, and they proved it in a way that still beckons to us by its sheer magnificence of spirit. After the harvest, in the midst of a field dotted with the markers of almost four dozen graves, graves of wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters-in the midst of this field, they threw a party of thanksgiving. They invited over some new friends, had a sumptuous feast, they said some prayers to honor the still-warm memory of those they had lost, and then they did a simple thing so powerful that it freed them from despair, a simple thing so powerful that it can still do the same for us: they gave thanks.

They gave thanks because they knew that this life, even as it is punctuated with occasional pain, suffering, loss of life and loss of love, is still pure miracle, the greatest gift we will ever receive.

May we all, this Thanksgiving, find again that more adequate and more honest attitude toward life: that attitude that overwhelms us with the sheer wonder of it all. May we give a rest to our habits of complaining that the gift is not perfect, long enough to recognize that the gift is miraculous, and fleeting. And may we not let it pass us by without stopping to give thanks.

SERMON: “A Patriotism of Optimism”

Hannah Wells

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. What chokes me up about it is that I’m convinced Thanksgiving is really a religious holiday dressed up like a secular one. It fools us all. Yet it is inclusive of ALL Americans, regardless of what their faith is, what color they are, how rich they are, or any of that. All are welcome at this table.

It is an American holiday where patriotism is celebrated in a more subtle manner than other holidays. Thanksgiving returns us almost to a more feminine and maternal interpretation of patriotism. That we are all part of this motherland, and we give thanks for the gifts we receive from the land itself – that America has provided us with such bounty, with such a rich way of life. On one level, Thanksgiving celebrates what makes living in this country so great – that ideally, all Americans are invited to participate in the American way of life – to work hard, to have plenty, to be content – again, regardless of race, class, or religion. This is the America I love, and partly why I hold this holiday dear to my heart.

This year, Thanksgiving is coming at a time when our country is growing with agitation and discontent. The war in Iraq is beginning to divide us much in the same way the war in Vietnam did. The economy hangs in the balance. We need a time-out from this and give any feelings of powerlessness a break. Thanksgiving this year offers a time when this divisiveness can be put to rest for a few days. Perhaps a gentler mode of celebrating patriotism can be an opportunity to reclaim a patriotism of optimism. I am convinced that what this country needs right now more than anything is a sense of hope; we need a bold reassurance that better days are to come, that this country will once again be proud of its presence in the world and in the manner in which it cares for its own people.

What I am most thankful for this year, is that I truly do believe in a better tomorrow, that I hold this faith in optimism sacred. Hope and optimism are religious postures. As in the times surrounding Vietnam, it was the posture so many leaders took – John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy all carried a sense of undeterred commitment to their vision of service: to make justice accessible to all Americans, and to attain higher standards towards equality and moral responsibility. They were optimistic that such changes were possible – they really believed it because changes were happening so quickly around them. Their powerful faith directed their profound influence on the country.

What they had was an optimistic patriotism, or a patriotism of hope. And it’s been said that it died when they did. That losing those three leaders plunged three swords in the heart of optimistic patriotism. I’ve been told this heart stopped beating when theirs did, and hasn’t been resurrected since.

As you know, yesterday was the 40th anniversary of John Kennedy’s death in Dallas, TX. But I want to talk about Bobby Kennedy today, the last one, the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was not aware of the story of his death until just this past week, when I turned on the PBS station to watch while I ate a bowl of soup. There is a series of Kennedy documentaries airing, and I happened to catch the story of Bobby Kennedy, which I had never heard before.

I’m not a total space cadet when it comes to American history, why didn’t I ever learn this? Sure, I learned in 3rd grade that John Kennedy was assassinated, and I still remember the oral report I gave to my class. I stated the famous quotation, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I still think that smacks of something Jesus might say.

And it was later that I learned about Martin Luther King – perhaps it registered in 5th or 6th grade what an awful tragedy that was for the country. But I don’t remember ever hearing about Bobby after that. I’m convinced it’s because the first two deaths were already too much. And Bobby’s death was even more than death. It was a marker of the end of the civil rights movement. A lot of people gave up after that. It was the end of an era, the end of hoping for the country to move in a moral and sane direction. It was the day the music died. And that is perhaps too esoteric to explain to a Jr. High American history class. Most US history curriculums I received ended just before Vietnam, just as summer vacation arrived to conclude classes for the school year. Teachers ran out of time and wouldn’t have to tell or revisit these sad chapters of recent American history – and I think in the 80’s, we were only beginning to find the words to tell them.

So it wasn’t until I became 30 years old that I finally got this history lesson. Bobby Kennedy was running for the presidential primary in 1968 and his platform was economic justice for all Americans, regardless of race. I wasn’t aware that he so passionately believed in this – I have grown up in an era where it seems no politician so courageously prioritizes the simple ideal of equality for all people, of the dream Martin Luther King had.

As he campaigned across the country, Bobby drew great crowds of people of color, of African Americans and Hispanics – they could hardly believe a presidential candidate cared about them so much, but he really did and he convinced them to have faith in him. When King was shot, Kennedy was about to speak at a campaign rally, and he had to inform the crowd of the shocking news. This is what he said to them:

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and disgust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, and he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

That is what he said the night Martin Luther King was killed, and I know I have never heard a politician speak that way since.

California was a crucial primary to win, and after losing in Oregon, Bobby Kennedy came to California behind in the race. So when he DID win the California primary, it was a very ecstatic and hopeful victory indeed. As he was leaving the press conference after the win, Bobby Kennedy was shot.

As I watched this footage on the documentary, a hidden reservoir of emotion broke loose from deep within me and I began to weep. I wept hard. I relived one of the most painful moments in American history which I had not in fact lived through. It was like a final puzzle piece was put into place, as I realized that it was this event that cast a shadow of despair on the American political climate for decades to come – up to now, up to today.

I never understood that the last days of the civil rights movement were quite this definitive. Because I’ve always wondered: what happened to the optimism and hope of that era, and HOW can we get it back? I see now that a lot of it died with Bobby Kennedy.

Yet – I want to convince you today that there is plenty of indication that we can revive a posture of optimism and hope. Now – in November of 2003. We have reason to believe that good changes are coming.

It seems to me that the patriotism we are most familiar with now is one of fear – we have been urged towards a patriotism of fear of the other – that what makes America great these days is that we can squash those we fear into submission. It’s a patriotism of coercion, violence, and hatred. But Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s patriotism actually EMBRACED the other, and insisted that this is our country’s greatest strength – that investing in our diversity is what builds a strong nation.

There are so many Americans who still believe this and know it to be true. Molly Ivans, the liberal journalist who is the pride and joy of Texas, represents such a voice. I heard her state her testimony of optimism on the radio lately. She said, “living through the 60’s Civil Rights Movement as a southern democrat in Texas has given me eternal faith that change can come about by the people, by the distinctly oppressed people, and this change can come about very quickly.”

I think she’s right. She is using the lens of the past to view the present and the potential of the future, and I think we should try to do the same. One example is that it’s been about 20 years since the gay rights movement first got rolling, and with the steady perseverance of the people major changes are happening now – a landmark law was passed just last week in Massachusetts, granting civil unions to gay couples.

Positive changes do happen and will continue to happen.

I have a wish, a Thanksgiving wish. A wish that we keep in mind that we – ourselves, and this country – the political landscape, are all works in progress. That simply having faith in change, or a religious conviction of optimism, is a huge step in the right direction – and that sometimes, that is enough. We don’t give up on ourselves or the people we love, just as we cannot give up on our beautiful country. There are just too many of us who still have The Dream – who still believe that such dramatic revisions are possible.

This is a faith of love and hope. It can define a fervent and vibrant brand of patriotism, too – a love of country founded on the belief that justice and a better life is possible for all its people. If we look back in history, all battles won for a just society were preceded by a lot of bad days, days of terrible struggle. It’s the same for our personal victories – we change our own lives when we overcome fear and work hard with a lot of hard days along the way.

That is the American character I love and cherish. Working hard for worthwhile changes. And recognizing that we need each other along the way to do it. Above all, this patriotism of optimism that we are reclaiming is about returning to the truth, that ultimately, WE are responsible for The Dream, WE are responsible for asking, “what can I do for my country?” But the difference when we have hope, is that we ask this question with optimism. We don’t say, oh, there’s nothing I can do. We say, OH, there is SO much I can do!

The beating hearts of patriotic optimism do not have to stay dead. The Dream will be brought back to life once the people have the will to do it. WE are those people. This favorite saying of Bobby Kennedy’s can be our springboard:

“Some see things as they are, and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were, and say “why not?”

Why not?