Harvesting Thanksgiving 2008

Brian Ferguson

23 November 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Thanksgiving is part of a harvest cycle, where we plant and then hope we can be thankful for what we reap. In that spirit, I want to share a short and thankful focus from the Buddhist tradition showing us what we hope for every time we plant seeds – whether in the ground, in our lives or in our worship services:

Now we have finished. Everyone stand and we will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because even if we did not have a great enlightenment, we had a small enlightenment. If we did not have a small enlightenment, at least we didn’t get sick. And if we got sick, at least we didn’t die. So let’s thank the Buddha. (Hsuan Hua)

Amen.

HOMILY: Harvesting Thanksgiving

Davidson Loehr

Since I needed my Thanksgiving reflections today to be focused on something significant but fairly distant, I want to use a metaphor to transpose some deeper dimensions of Thanksgiving into history, politics and life. This may sound like the opening to the sermon of a few weeks ago, when I said I wanted to talk about the meaning of life, honest religion, God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the Army, amoeba, the Holy Spirit, the Marine Corps, and playing hide-and-seek. But it’s a homily, not a full-length sermon, so it won’t be that ambitious.

Thanksgiving, as we know, is a harvest festival, in the tradition of harvest festivals going back to ancient times. They planted, then they harvested what they had planted. What did they plant?

On the literal level, they planted the usual stuff – beans, squash, other vegetables, they cultivated orchards and the rest. But deeper, it’s different. So let’s start with the first Thanksgiving in this country, which happened in 1621.

You all know much of this story. In December of 1620, 102 Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts.

Mother Nature wasn’t on their side, though Father Time was. They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. One hundred and two of them arrived 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.

The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. 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. This was the preparation for the first Thanksgiving, and there was not a yellow Happy Face in the bunch.

The first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and his people. According to one source, 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.

But now let’s explore the metaphor. What did the Pilgrims really plant, that let them reap this feast? They certainly didn’t plant venison, wild turkey or oyster seeds.

What the Pilgrims really planted were two crops: hope, and empowerment. They planted hope rather than fear or despair, and empowerment rather than just rolling over and dying.

That’s an easy segue from history to politics because, to put it in a contemporary sound bite, what those Pilgrims were saying to life was “Yes, we can!”

We are just near the beginning of a new planting season in American history. And those seeds of hope and empowerment have been planted on lawns, bumper stickers and windows everywhere.

That’s a huge part of the reason this amazingly unlikely man Barack Obama will be our 44th president: because after the last round of political seeds planted and the harvest we have reaped from that, people were simply starving for hope, the power to make a difference, and the chance to make a difference. We don’t yet know how this new planting will work out, or what kind of harvest we will have.

But we should look over the last crops we’ve planted, because the harvest is damned near killing us.

Think of some of the seeds we have planted during the past three decades or so:

— We planted the seeds of what the French have called “savage capitalism”: an endorsement of high-level greed with only the barest of government restraint. We planted ideas and behaviors intentionally exalting profits over people, stock prices over the livelihoods and lives of human beings. And in the harvest was a crop of American workers forced to compete with the cheapest labor in the world, and unable to do so.

— We sowed the idea that healthcare was a market product deserved only by those who could afford it, rather than a necessary protection of all our citizens, as every other industrialized country in the world does. And we have reaped a harvest of perhaps fifty million citizens who cannot afford to be protected from accidents, disease, or astronomic medical bills that have plunged millions into bankruptcy and desperation. Also in the harvest are an estimated 18,000 deaths a year credited to their lack of adequate health care protection.

— We planted the idea that we could use our armies to invade any country with something we wanted. On one level, we’ve done this for a very long time, as have other strong countries. But in the last seventy years, the invasion, occupation and looting of Iraq was the first invasion of a sovereign nation on that scale since Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. And from this planting of violent militarism, we have harvested the deaths of over 4,200 American soldiers, and many times that number torn apart physically, mentally or both, as well as the deaths of nearly 1.3 million Iraqis, guilty of trying to defend their country from a foreign invasion, or of just being unfortunate enough to live in a country whose oil we lust after.

I could go on down the list of bad seeds we have planted and the bitter harvests we have reaped, but you all know those seeds, those crops, and those harvests of shame.

Choosing the seeds we will plant is not an isolated act. It is interconnected with everything that follows.

The wonderfully wise ancient Greeks coined a famous, short formula for how this kind of sowing and reaping works. Here’s how they put it:

Plant a thought, reap an action;

Plant an action, reap a habit;

Plant a habit, reap a character;

Plant a character, reap a destiny.

We rob ourselves if we treat Thanksgiving like a superficial happy-face festival. The harvest metaphor is too rich for that, and offers too much insight and power to ignore.

We plant, we reap, then we hope we can be thankful for the crop. But whether we can be thankful or not depends on what we planted, and our diligence in nourishing and attending to it.

No planting or crops are ever perfect. History doesn’t show us anybody who was ever that good. Even the wonderfully wise ancient Greeks had slavery, limited rights for women, allowed only about ten percent of the adult population to vote, and seemed to care about only those who excelled above the rest. The United States of America has, at its best, grown up around a very different dream, from very different kinds of seeds.

I wonder if you’ve ever read the full poem by Emma Lazarus that is engraved on a tablet within the pedestal on which our Statue of Liberty stands. She intentionally contrasts our dream with that of the Greeks, because she says we want a different kind of harvest. Her poem is titled “The New Colossus,” named in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Listen to the poem in terms of the harvest metaphor we’ve been using, and see if you don’t hear the American Dream in a new way:

The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Those are some of the most fertile seeds of hope and empowerment ever planted. That message, “Yes, we can!” is the most fundamental expression of the American Dream. Let us plant, in our nation and in our hearts, seeds of hope and empowerment. Let us tend to them, nurture them so they might flourish. Let us hope Mother Nature and Father Time will be on our side. And then let us pray that when the harvest comes, we can give thanks.

HOMILY: Brian Ferguson

Confession is not part of our Liberal religious tradition but I do have a confession to make. The Thanksgiving holiday remains a bit foreign to me. Now being Scottish I didn’t grow up with a Thanksgiving holiday but I don’t think we Scots are an ungrateful bunch. Yet again Scottish weather with its continuous rain and howling wind does not encourage a great sense of gratitude in anyone – except perhaps umbrella makers. The North American Thanksgiving holiday does not conjure family memories or traditions for me as it may for many of you. It also feels for me too close in time to Christmas – a holiday which has always been important to my family. Thanksgiving gets in the way of Christmas for me. Perhaps I’m missing the point but Thanksgiving seems to be predominantly about stressing oneself in preparation for the upcoming Christmas season. We attempt to fly or drive somewhere along with everyone else then express gratitude by eating too much. I’ve been your intern minister for three months now so I thought it was time you saw my curmudgeon side. That was it. The grinch that stole Thanksgiving.

More seriously, while not having a personal tradition of Thanksgiving I feel taking time to give thanks for our spiritual and material possessions to be a healthy practice. Meister Eckhart, the wise 13th century mystic, once said that if the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you that would suffice. The idea of “thank you” as a prayer, as an earnest appreciation of something beyond our selves, resonates with me. Giving thanks when we are healthy, content, and life is going well seems easy and appropriate to do. We are probably too busy having a good time to do it but expressing gratitude would be the right thing to do when life is good. Giving thanks after we have come through hard times and recovering might even give us a heightened appreciation for the simple gifts in our life. What about giving thanks during tough times such as many of us are experiencing now? How do we adopt an attitude of gratitude when many of us are struggling with the various hardships we are experiencing as a nation, as a religious community, and as individuals? I struggle with expressing gratitude at this time. Avoidance or complaining would be so much easier.

There have been many studies conducted saying that during times of economic hardship two things increase – going to movies and alcohol consumption. Such times of uncertainty can lead us to want to escape from our present circumstance. Temporary escapes from a difficult situation can allow us some relief from stress and gain some distance from the issue at hand. Taken to excess such escapism can also lead to an avoidance of reality and an abdication of responsibility. At the other extreme of escapism is the tendency to look to blame someone or something for the difficult circumstances. Blaming others for our own misfortune can really feel good in the short term. We hear of plenty of blame for the global economic conditions – Wall Street, predatory mortgage lenders, greedy Chief Executive Officers, our President, the Republicans, Chinese imports, immigrants to this country – of which I am one. Voting for the Democrats four and eight years ago is not an immunization to our own responsibility or complicity for the current turmoil. Similarly voting for John McCain a few weeks ago is not an abdication of responsibility for what happens in the next four years.

If escapism and blame are unhelpful in tough times then how can expressing gratitude be useful? We usually express gratitude in return for something we receive such as the help of another, a gift received, or simple appreciation of our good fortune. The gifts that life presents us are not always apparent in times of hardship. We are more sensitive, perhaps overly so, to what we have lost or have fear of losing than what we have. We may have less than we had a year ago, financially many of us have a lot less than just two months ago. Do we give thanks for the contents of the half full glass or dwell on the losses of the half empty glass? In hard times the half empty glass seems the much easier option.

Another wise person, who also happened to be my manager in my first job said to me that “it doesn’t have to be a good experience to be an experience.” I have found this observation to be very useful at various times during my life. Life provides learning opportunities whether we want them or not. Perhaps in times of hardship rather than times of plenty we can find what really is most important to us as we are faced with limits, loss, and scarcity. Times of hardship force us to make difficult decisions that we would rather avoid. External events force us to give up things that seem important to us and sometimes we find those things to have been more of a burden than a treasure.

Many of us turn to religion to make sense of the hardships and losses we experience. Sometimes it can feel that religion is just a spoil sport in our life. When things are going well for us religion can be the nagging reminder that tends to dampen our happiness by making us feel guilty for our good fortune and reminding us of the suffering of others. Some religious leaders call this encouraging humility but really we just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time. Alternatively, when things are going badly for us, then religion becomes the voice of hope or explainer of our fate – have faith then things will turn out alright or there is a reason for our hardship. The famous American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr claimed the function of the preacher was “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” In my less gracious moods this actually sounds like it could be fun. I think that is my curmudgeon side again.

While this view of religion as a counter-balance in people’s lives between comfort and affliction is popular amongst many I find it too simplistic and unhelpful. How can we in good faith separate people into the comfortable and the afflicted? Life is just not that simple. In our own lives most of us have that intertwining of good fortune and suffering simultaneously. Our jobs provide us both a livelihood and high level of stress. Our families can be both a source of support and a burden. Retirement is an opportunity for freedom and a source of insecurity. Even our religious community can provide us with both heartwarmth and heartache as we deal with the uncertainties of life. I think many of us have both doubt and suffering in our lives simultaneously with hope and strength. Religion at its best helps us to be grateful for the good in our life while providing comfort to the distresses of life. Good religion reminds us that we can be both the givers and the recipients of the great eternal values of gratitude, compassion and loving-kindness.

We are not individuals isolated from our surrounding community and our actions matter. Ultimately, this is what I am most thankful for since I do believe what we do and how we do it matters. While not everything we do may seem to be religious, I believe that how we do things can and should be religious. When we treat others with honesty, compassion and respect it is religious. While it can seem our small actions make little difference to the greater events around us, our actions matter greatly to those around us and most directly affected by them. I actually think our actions especially actions of gratitude, kindness and compassion are more significant in times of hardship and uncertainty. At such times people are in more need of help and support while there is less in terms of money and goodwill.

For me, the greatest gift expressing gratitude we have to give, is the gift of service to others and in troubled times it is often harder for us to give. In tough times then this gift is more needed and more appreciated, therefore our gift of service to others returns to us by making us feel more valued. The gift of service to others allows the giver to feel useful and the recipient to feel cared for. A gift that addresses the most basic human needs of being valued and being useful perhaps reflects a variation on our traditional view of Thanksgiving. Or perhaps our gift of service to others is a prayer that says thank you to the miracle that is each of our lives and maybe that is the very essence of Thanksgiving.

Or perhaps my view of Thanksgiving is too foreign for you in which case I’ll remind you of the Buddhist prayer Davidson read earlier: Now we have finished. Everyone stand and will bow to the Buddha three times to thank him. We thank him, because if Brian’s message of giving thanks through service to others was not enlightening, then we had Davidson’s message. If Davidson’s message of a harvest of hope and empowerment was not enlightening, then we had the music. And if the music was not comforting, at least we had comfortable seats. So let’s thank the Buddha.