A WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANT REFLECTS ON THANKSGIVING: On Offering Fruit Meet for Repentance

A sermon preached on November 21, 2018, in La Jolla, California, at the 38th Annual Thanksgiving Eve Service celebrated by Congregation Beth Israel and the First United Methodist Church of San Diego.  

I WANT TO BEGIN BY SAYING “THANK YOU.”  Thank you to the good people of Congregation Beth Israel for your hospitality.  Thank you to Rabbi Berk, for the many years of friendship and partnership, and congratulations on your upcoming retirement.  Thank you to Phil Amerson, our interim Lead Pastor at First United Methodist, for the generous invitation to speak this evening.  I think Phil knew how much this would mean to me, to preach on this occasion.  My brother and I used to ride our stingray bicycles across this land when there was nothing but dirt mesas as far as the eye could see.  I count it a great privilege and honor to share this time with you tonight.  Will you pray with me?

"Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer."

PERHAPS BECAUSE I AM THINKING OF MY CHILDHOOD, I am reminded of the story of the preacher – or perhaps it was a rabbi? – who, after services one day, came across two boys fighting over a dog.  It turns out the dog was lost, and the two boys had decided that whoever could tell the biggest lie would get to keep the dog.  “Why boys,” the preacher said, “you know you oughtn’t to tell a lie!”  He then went on at length about how lying is a mortal sin, and, as he reached the climax of his little sermon, declared, “Why, when I was your age, I never told a lie!”  There was silence, until finally one of the boys looked over at the other and said, “Oh, just go ahead and give him the dog.”

THE BOYS IN THIS LITTLE STORY ARE DOING A VERY HUMAN THING: they are stretching the truth. But there are different ways to stretch the truth, and stretching the truth can mean very different things, depending on the kind of stretching that is done, and the kind of truth that the stretching is done to.

SO TONIGHT I WANT TO BEGIN BY DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN TWO KINDS OF TRUTH – MATERIAL TRUTH AND MORAL TRUTH.  This distinction is easily understood by distinguishing between two kinds of questions, questions that begin with “how”, and questions that begin with “why." I learned this distinction from my friend Brian Greene, who, after I knew him in college, went on to become a well-known author.  Brian Greene is a physicist and has written several books, perhaps the most famous being THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, a book that is supposed to make complex astrophysics accessible to the general reader. I have only made my way through the first chapter of this book, mind you, but in that first chapter he draws this important distinction, between the kinds of questions that start with “how” and the kinds of questions that start with “why.”  (Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, New York: Vintage Books, 2000.)

THE FORMER – QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW – ARE QUESTIONS ABOUT MATERIAL TRUTH, and these can be answered by science, investigation, data, hard facts. How fast does light travel through time? How do living organisms function, how are they born, how do they live, how do they die? How does gravity work?  Now I can’t answer any of these questions myself, but I know people who can, people like Brian Greene. And I take these kinds of truth very, very seriously.  I grew up in a scientist’s household, and I understand the power of the scientific method.  I give thanks to God for doctors and biologists and chemists and physicists.  But I adhere to that little saying, perhaps you’ve heard it:  physicists define stress as “force per unit area;” the rest of us define stress as “physics.”

SCIENCE IS UNPARALLELED IN ITS POWER TO ANSWER QUESTIONS STARTING WITH HOW, BUT IT HAS NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT THE LATTER KINDS OF QUESTIONS – QUESTIONS ABOUT MORAL TRUTH, QUESTIONS THAT BEGIN WITH “WHY.”

Why do humans suffer?  Why is there evil in the world?  Why are we born? Why, toward what ends, ought we to live? 

ACROSS THE COURSE OF HISTORY, MOST HUMAN BEINGS HAVE SOUGHT TO ANSWER THESE KINDS OF QUESTIONS BY TELLING STORIES.  For a long time, many have thought that what distinguished homo sapiens from other species was the capacity for language.  But as we understood more and more about how other species communicate, this distinction seems less and less absolute.  I think it is better to say that human beings are a story-telling species, and that this is what distinguishes us from all the rest.

Some scholars of religion call religious story-telling an enterprise in "constructing and curating collective memory.”  To a scientist this sound like “making things up,” but that is the wrong way of thinking about questions of MORAL TRUTH.  To interrogate religious stories with "What" questions, questions like "what really happened?", is to miss the point. Religious stories are stories rooted in human history, but they are ultimately grounded in moral truth. Religious stories are designed to answer “why” questions.  Why are we here?  Why ought we to behave in certain ways, and not behave in others? 

 

THESE STORIES CAN BE RIGHTLY THOUGHT OF AS YARNS.  And when they are constructed collectively toward moral ends, they can be beautiful yarns, they can inspire the very best in human behavior. Stretched too far, or twisted and distorted to immoral ends, they can become the very worst kinds of lies.

IT’S INTO THIS TENSION – BETWEEN BEAUTIFUL YARNS AND THE WORST KIND OF LIES – THAT I WANT TO SPEAK TONIGHT, ON THE EVE OF THANKSGIVING DAY.  I want to speak personally, and I want to speak as a Protestant.  Even more specifically, I want to speak as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and you will forgive me if my reflection takes on a tone of confession.

The founding of the first European colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America by dissident Protestants from England and Holland in the 1600s was a monumental undertaking. It was an undertaking marked by a peculiar paradox: a paradox of bounty on the one hand and extreme duress on the other. According to the account written by the pilgrim, William Bradford, the 53 pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth colony were the only survivors out of 102 who had arrived the previous year and the Mayflower.  Disease and starvation struck down half of the original 102 colonists through their first winter in what they considered a New World.

But this devastation pales in comparison to the decimation experienced by native peoples.  The historian Peter Mancall notes that even before the famous events of 1621, the events that we memorialize on Thanksgiving, “indigenous communities were devastated by leptospirosis, a disease caused by Old World bacteria that had likely reached New England through the feces of rats that arrived on European ships.”  Mancall and other historians estimate that “perhaps up to 90 percent of the regional population [in and around the Plymouth Colony] perished between 1617 to 1619.”  And as far as the English were concerned, “divine intervention had paved the way.” “By God’s visitation, reigned a wonderful plague,” King James’ patent for the region noted in 1620, “that had led to the utter Destruction, Devastacion, and Depopulation of that whole territory.”

We Protestants are more likely to celebrate John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity, the famous early Puritan sermon that called on the English to establish their first settlement in North America as “a shining city on a hill."  But Winthrop’s sermon, preached in 1629 to Puritan exiles aboard the English ship Arbella, was not all brightness and light.  Winthrop encouraged the pilgrims that they had been called into a special “covenant” by God, but he also cautioned:  "If we should so frustrate and deceive the Lords Expectations ... then All were lost indeed; Ruine upon Ruine, Destruction upon Destruction would come, until one stone were not left upon another."  

In the ensuing generations, the English in New England were haunted by this darker side of their conditional covenant. In a famous 1667 sermon called A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy, Increase Mather decried and bemoaned a lack of faithfulness in the younger, American-born generations of New England. Sermons in this tradition, in the early Protestant experience of North America, became known as the “jeremiad,” for they conjured  the prophet Jeremiah’s prophesies that the Kingdom of Judah would fall because its people had broken their covenant with the Lord.

As the famed historian Perry Miller has argued, these “jeremiads” were not actual chronicles of historical trends.  There is no evidence that New Englanders in the late seventeenth century were any more or less pious than their forebears who first settled the English colonies in North America.  These colonies were not in decline – in fact, materially speaking, their best days lay ahead of them.   Rather, the jeremiads represented “a kind of ritual incantation” offering “purgations of the soul.” As Miller concluded, “The exhortation to a reformation which never materializes serves as a TOKEN payment on the REAL obligation, and so liberates the debtors” without requiring of them true repentance.  Paradoxically, the jeremiad offers cheap grace. (See for instance: Perry Miller, "Errand into the Wilderness," The William and Mary Quarterly 10, no. 1, Jan., 1953.)

AMERICAN PROTESTANTS ARE HAUNTED BY THIS SPECTRE OF A BROKEN COVENANT. We have never reconciled the fact that our ancestors were both noble explorers and also merciless exterminators of native peoples, that they were both ingenious inventors and entrepreneurs and also ruthless traders and drivers of slaves.  This is the legacy we commemorate each year on Thanksgiving – it is a STORY about upstanding English people discovering a “new world” that was, in fact, only new to them.  This American story has been constructed and curated in our collective memory – some scholars call this a generalized version of the Protestant myth – and it is a double-edged sword.

THIS DARKER SIDE OF AMERICAN HISTORY INVITES TWO RESPONSES IN THE PROTESTANT AMERICAN SOUL: DENIAL AND REPENTANCE.  AND BETWEEN THESE TWO RESPONSES ALL AMERICAN PROTESTANTS MUST EVENTUALLY CHOOSE.

THE FIRST OF THESE OPTIONS, DENIAL, goes a long way to explaining a lot of what is wrong in American culture. From this deep wellspring of denial comes the longstanding tradition of American politicians and preachers, declaring America to be a sordid mess, placing responsibility for this entirely at the feet of others, shamelessly scapegoating the latest enemy.

I am thinking of the Puritan men who conducted the witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts in the 17^th century, the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan who established the brutal regime of Jim Crow in the 19^th century, I am thinking of Joseph McCarthy and the architects of the Red Scare in the 20^th century … I will let you complete your own list.

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER RESPONSE AVAILABLE TO AMERICAN PROTESTANTS AT THANKSGIVING … TO PROVIDE FRUIT MEET FOR REPENTANCE This kind of repentance does not require us to discard our stories.  Rather, this spiritual posture of humility invites us to bring our stories, our yarns, as “fruit meet for repentance.”  If we embrace our stories, but if we can resist the temptation to hold them too tightly, 

WE CAN BEGIN TO KNOW A GREAT JOY, THE JOY THAT COMES FROM TAKING OUR YARNS AND WEAVING THEM WITH OTHERS:

Do you know that Texans claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in 1598 -- twenty-three years before the Pilgrims' festival? Upon his arrival on the banks of the Rio Grande, in a little community named San Elizario, near modern-day El Paso,  the Spanish explorer Juan de Onate De Onate is said to have held a big Thanksgiving festival after leading hundreds of settlers on a grueling 350-mile long trek across the Mexican desert.

Did you know that at the Berkeley Plantation on the James River in Virginia they claim the first Thanksgiving in America was held there on December 4th, 1619....two years before the Pilgrims' festival?

Did you know that the first Jews to settle in North America arrived in 1654, over a decade before Increase Mather preached his famous sermon on the dangers of Puritan apostasy? That year 23 Sephardic Jews arrived in New Netherlands, today’s New York City. 

THERE ARE A THOUSAND MORE THANKSGIVING STORIES LIKE THESE, AND THE ABUNDANCE AND DIVERSITY OF THESE STORIES REMIND US WHO WE REALLY ARE AS AMERICAN.  THIS ABUNDANCE AND DIVERSITY INVITE US TO TELL A STORY OF AMERICAN THANKSGIVING THAT IS GENEROUS AND OPEN AND BEAUTIFUL.

Will we embrace the exclusionary strands of our traditions and weave from them garments of scapegoating and blame? Or will we embrace those parts of our tradition that remind us that our offerings are always mixed with the offerings of others, and that, therefore, always and everywhere, it is right to give thanks to God, the One who is creator of all.

WHAT DO ALL THESE STORIES HAVE IN COMMON?

AMERICA’S THANKSGIVING STORIES RESONATE WITH THE BIBLICAL WITNESS: the story of the Exodus; the ancient Israelite observance of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths; the commandment we heard tonight, (found in Deuteronomy 26:1-11) to bring the Bikkurim (first fruits) to the Temple in Jerusalem; the Christian story of Jesus’ miracle, feeding five thousand with just a few fishes and loaves; the accounts found in the Christian gospels of Jesus’ last supper, which Christians memorialize with a prayer we call “the GREAT THANKSGIVING.”

When we rehearse these stories, we do not ask of them the question,”what really happened?” for that is the wrong question to pose to stories that have been constructed and curated by our ancestors for the purpose of communicating to us MORAL TRUTH.

THESE STORIES, UNDERSTOOD CORRECTLY, REMIND US THAT THIS PASSAGE WE CALL “LIFE” IS A FRAGILE AND PERILOUS JOURNEY.  NONE OF US CAN MAKE THIS PASSAGE ON OUR OWN.  ALONG THE WAY, WE ALL NEED A LITTLE COMPANY AND WE ALL NEED A LITTLE HELP.

And this realization, my friends, invites us to a deeper way of celebrating Thanksgiving, by calling us back to a deeper question, the deepest of all human questions, the question of “why”?

WHY DO WE CELEBRATE THANKSGIVING?  Why do we bother with all of the traveling and cooking and overeating?  Why do we bother with all the reminiscing and story-telling and truth-stretching?  Why do we bother to invite strangers to our table, to make a special effort to go out of the way to feed the hungry at this special time of year? 

The answer to these questions is simple:  BECAUSE OUR GOD IS A GOD WORTHY OF THANKSGIVING.  And the proper response, the only fitting response, to our safe passages in this life is Thanksgiving to God.

THERE IS NO BETTER WAY TO GIVE THANKS TO GOD THAN BY SHARING FROM OUR ABUNDANCE, WHATEVER THAT MAY BE. The true spirit of Thanksgiving requires more than words. We bring our “first fruits” as sign and symbol of our determination to live thanksgiving lives, lives of gratitude to the One who is the giver of al fruits, the one God from whom all blessings flow. When we do this together, when we join with others, our baskets overflow.

NEXT YEAR WE ARE CELEBRATING THE 150th Anniversary of First United Methodist Church. We are very proud of this, and I was looking forward to telling you a little bit about our plans.  You can imagine my plans changed when I looked up the history of Congregation Beth Israel and discovered that you all celebrated your 150^th anniversary seven years ago.

THE PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC might inspire me to declare our intent: someday we will catch up to you! 

BUT, INSTEAD, I WILL SIMPLY TAKE SOLACE IN THE MOST WONDERFUL INVITATION THAT ONCE AGAIN YOU HAVE EXTENDED TO US, YOUR CHRISTIAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS.  ONCE AGAIN YOU HAVE INVITED US TO SIT TOGETHER AT A COMMON TABLE, ON THE EVE OF THIS GREAT AMERICAN HOLIDAY.   

THIS IS WHAT WE DO ON THANKSGIVING EVE BECAUSE THIS IS WHO WE REALLY ARE.  We come together, we sing, we affirm our common heritage as children of Abraham. We try to outdo each other in a reception afterward … and hopefully we try to outdo each other in our giving to the good causes we are supporting tonight.  

And then, when the table is prepared, when we have each of us offered our best gifts, including our fruit meet from repentance, when all is right and good, then we look each other in the eye, and we declare with joy and confidence:

"SHALOM TO YOU!  PEACE BE WITH YOU!  AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING!"