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AND STILL IS OURS TODAY

Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1985, 11:00 a.m.
Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God..."
--I Thessalonians 5:18 (RS¥V}

Scripture

Psalm 100
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
I Thessalonians 5:12-18

An article in the Sunday Times reported once again that tourists are often
disappointed with Plymouth Rock. "I don't know what people see in it," said a
i5 year-old from Califomia. Another visitor, from North Carolina, said: "Now,
I can understand that 350 years can create a lot of erosion. But friends, I've
turned over bigger rocks than this mowing grass." People expect something of
heroic proportions apparently. The Rock, which draws thousands of visitors
around Thanksgiving each year, evokes many responses, the most common of which
is disappointment. (New York Times, 11/24/85)

"The plantation itself," the article went on, "is a place where the popular
imagination clashes with historical reality." Visitors are annoyed to be told
that their mental picture of the Pilgrims is a product of the fantasies of the
Victorian era, not historic reality.

it is the purpose of a holiday to remind us of, and to recapture, the past. A
birthday is a time to hear about and remember the day you were born, to hear
stories about how it was on that day. We reclaim our identity when we celebrate
the past. We reaffirm who we are -- we say "I am who I am because that is who

I used to be." Some of that ought to happen for each of us individually on
Thanksgiving.

But there is a long distance to be covered. The original celebration was more
than 350 years ago and in a real sense the event we remember itself was based
on a tradition some 3,000 years older.

Our task then is to close the distance a bit: to reaffirm who we are today by
recalling who we were as a people.

The first Thanksgiving, or at least the first observed by European people --
native Americans had been thanking and revering the earth and the spirit of life
for a millennium prior to their arrival -- the Thanksgiving that happened in

1621 -- was observed by people of the Bible. The Pilgrims were people of The
Book ~- they knew the Old Testament and the three major festivals: Passover,
Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles -- known also as the Feast of Weeks or
the Feast of Booths. It is this one which was the model for Thanksgiving as the
Pilgrims observed it. Harvest festivals were not unique to Israel. The land
of Canaan, into which they moved after the Exodus and the decades of wilderness
wandering, was an agrarian culture, rich in the traditions and rituals of
fertility religion. The people of Israel, however, added a new dimension to
the existing harvest rites. At the conclusion of the harvest, all work ceased.
Bach family constructed and lived temporarily in a small booth or tabernacle
made of branches. The idea was to remember and to reclaim the past, in the
words of the Book of Leviticus: "that your generation may know that I made the
people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of Egypt." (Lev. 2:23)
That is the uniqueness of Israel's Thanksgiving. The God of creation is also
the God of history. The Lord of the earth is also the Lord of his people who
delivered them in the past. Then came the feast, the communal meal to which
were invited the poor and the travelers. Finally, individual offerings were
made, and as the cereal or animal was offered the individual recited a moving
confession of faith claiming his own past and God's mighty act of deliverence:
"A wandering Aramean was my father and he went down into Egypt...and the Lord
heard our voice and brought us out of Egypt...into this land...flowing with milk
and honey." (Deut. 26:5-9)

That is the historical root of Thanksgiving and it is what the Pilgrims were
reclaiming and reenacting. They read their own story, theix own names, in that
older story. God is thanked for the harvest. But the act of thanksgiving includes
an affirmation of who they are and gratitude to God for the events in the distant
past that gave them their identity. The Pilgrims remembered Exodus, Deliverance,
Wilderness, Conguest -- so we recall the Mayflower.

We have come such a long way from all of that. The fact of the matter is that
most of us have experienced nothing but prosperity. The majority of Americans
are under 35, born since 1950. That means they know about World War IT Yationing
as an item of historical interest; and the Great Depression as an artifact from
another generation. The sociologists tell us that for people who lived through
it, or were born near to it, the Depression is the single most influential factor
in the person's value system and world view. That is the reason, I suppose, why
one of the noblest of parental responsibilities is to remind your children of

how easy they have it and how difficult it was for you..."When asked to drive
them to school because it's raining, "Why, we didn't have a car when I was your
age, and I used to walk five miles to school in zero weather through a foot of
snow and think it was fun! Or, when they complain that they have to eat roast
beef again, "Why, when I was your age we only ate meat like that once a month!"
or "I didn't know beef came in a solid state till I was 30."...etc, etc, ad
nauseam... Most Americans alive today have come of age and are coming of age in
a time characterized by the longest period of sustained economic growth the world
has ever known. Not all are in on it, to be sure. Poverty is with us and in a
distressing way becoming worse, more entrenched, more institutionalized for an
increasing percentage of our population in what looks like a permanent underclass...
immune from the best Adam Smith can offer. Nevertheless, many are able today to

have -- almost instantaneously -- what their parents spent most of their lives
trying to build, earn and accumulate, and their grandparents never achieved.
We have come a long way.

In addition, we have become urbanized and industrialized. Very few of us know
much at first-hand about harvests. Sixty years ago, the late Reinhold Niebuhr
was a pastor in Detroit. After preaching at a Union Thanksgiving Service he
wondered in his diary “if it is possible to have an honest Thanksgiving Celebra-
tion in an industrial civilization."

Niebuhr was right. The harvest May or May not be in -- most of us don't really
know. Our forebearers may have heaved great sighs of relief and gratitude when
the barns were full for winter. You and I simply assume that they are. Our
closest contact with the process by which they get full begins and ends at the
supermarket cash register, and our sighs of relief are precipitated not by the
fact that there is bread to eat today, but by the fact that the price has not
visen again.

We have come a long way. : Our shelves are full. Our Thanksgiving gratitude
Focuses on our abundance, our wealth of food, clothing, shelter, conveniences
and life enhancing services.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony did its celebrating, on the other hand, in the
midst of what was a near disaster. Half of them were dead: all but three
families had lost someone. The barley they planted had done very poorly: the
peas had failed altogether. Can you imagine the English without peas? It was
the corm, given to them by the Indians, which made life possible: enough to
provide two pounds per person per day through that second winter. It was some-
thing less than a celebration of abundance or nature's kindness because nature
had not been kind. It was something more than that actually. As Israel before
them had remembered God the deliverer in the middle of a harvest festival, so
these saints celebrated God's good presence, the strength they had been given:
the strong hand they had felt leading them: the assurance that no matter what
happened they were not abandoned on the edge of the wilderness. Even when they
were burying their loved ones, God stood beside them. Governor Bradford wrote
in his journal: “The whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a
wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them there was the mighty ocean --
What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace? May not and
cought not the children of these fathers say, ‘Our fathers came over this great
ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness: but they cried unto the
Lord and he heard their voices, and locked on their adversity. Let them there-
' fore praise the Lord, because he is good and his mercies endure forever, '"

That is what is unique about an American Thanksgiving and it is part of our
identity which we need to recapture. Our abundance of food and comfort and
clothing and health ought to call gratitude out of us. But more important,
God is to be thanked for being God and for being with us. It is a gratitude
that lives loosely with external circumstances. To the early church in
Thessalonica St. Paul wrote, in the midst of dangerous and not very hopeful
events, "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in
Christ Jesus for you." Goodspeed translates it even more plainly, “Thank God
whatever happens."

The trouble with focusing too exclusively on full larders or good health or
prosperous families is that sometime the larder is empty and health is failing
and your son just lost his job. It is then that people of God recover their
identity and discover again that God's goodness is really not adequately
defined by the success of the bean crop.

Thank God whatever happens... Thanksgiving is a time to affirm an important
part of our heritage -- a theology of gratitude to a God whose greatest gift
to us is himself: the theology of joyful thanks for God's faithfulness and
love.

It i5 time today to do some quiet accounting: to take stock of our lives and
all the priceless gifts we have been given: the people who care for us and
love us and make life rich and meaningful: the air we breathe and the world
that so marvelously sustains us: a nation that has nurtured us with freedom
and given us a history of sacrifice and purposefulness and justice: a church
that has helped us to believe and has stood with us in good times and in bad.
But most of ail it is time to reflect on the goodness of the God who has been
with us in the past, who loved us into life, who has taken us by the hand --
even when we were not aware of it, and led us along our way: a God who walked
with Pilgrim fathers and mothers, whose firmest promise is that he will be with
us in the future and who, happily, "still is ours today."

Among theologians it has aiways been said that the real test of a theological
affirmation is neither its irrefutable logic, nor its eloquence, but simply
whether or not it can be sung. Our hymns of gratitude are our strongest, and
there is one in particular which gathers up all I have been trying to say and
which celebrates our faith more eloquently than a library of doctrines...

Now thank we all our God

With heart and hand and voices,...
Who wondrous things hath done,
For whom his world rejoices:...
Who from our mother's arms

Hath blest us on our way

With countless gifts of love

And still is ours today.

Amen.