PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 65:1-2, 9-13                                                                                     Debt  of  Thanks
Thanksgiving Sunday Sermon 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  Rev. Dan Griggs

            I think Thanksgiving is a very personal religious holiday.  There’s something that doesn’t quite ring true about a Presidential Proclamation that America will now thank God on the fourth Thursday of November.  Every president since Lincoln has signed such a proclamation, but to me Thanksgiving is a time for families to gather, or a time to remember family gatherings.  Thanksgiving is a time to speak to each other face-to-face about the things I’m thankful for, and the things you appreciate, to eat together, and to thank God for each other and all our blessings.

            That’s what it was for the Pilgrims who celebrated that first Thanks-giving in 1621.  They were the few who had survived a bad year in a hostile land.  The winter had killed half their original number, and these few had lived to plant and gather in  a harvest.  They invited some Native Americans who lived near Plimouth Plantation, Indians who had made friends with the new-comers, shown them how to farm the rocky New England soil.  The Indians brought the meat, and the Pilgrims furnished the vegetables.  For them Thanksgiving was a day to worship, because they really did believe that what they had managed to produce  God had given to them.  And they ate together with personal gratitude and joy that they had survived. 

            As Thanksgiving Day 2009 approaches, I invite you to remember our debt of thanks.  If you are alive, you owe thanks to other people, and you owe thanks to God. 

            I’m not a fan of bumper-stickers, but some are just so cynical that they stick in your mind.  I saw one that said, “If everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.”  But it has this merit:  it reminded me that there are people out there (maybe people in here) who have grown cynical and sour on life.  And there’s usually a reason people grow sour.  The dark woman, wrinkled with age twenty years before her time, whose mother is on welfare, and whose grandmother was on welfare, and whose home both growing up and now is bereft of adult men—sitting in a Welfare Office in inner city Wilmington, telling the social worker behind the computer screen for the tenth time that she never finished high school and she has no job skills; that woman is powerless, and because she’s powerless she is also angry. 

            The silver-haired man wearing patched overalls and a torn hat, living his life on paper forms from the Employment Office, wondering what kind of Christmas his children are going to have this year—is an angry man.  There are a lot of people living around us who’ll never be able to be who they are or have an influence on the direction of their lives:  they’re powerless.  And they have to do one of two things:  take it, or rebel.[1]

            But this isn’t something that just touches inner city and Appalachia rural poor people.  In the suburbs of our nation’s cities, there are high school girls who are contracting an emotional disorder called Anorexia, and its related disorder Bulimia.  These used to be “eating disorders” of up-scale suburbanites—one wag twenty years ago said, “It’s a disease you catch on vacation in the Bahamas”; but now it’s spreading to boys, and young adults.  Why do our youth do this to themselves?  They seem to have everything going for them.  Why do they hate themselves so much?  Because, in spite of their affluence, they feel powerless, and they’re angry.  And their mothers are into their own lives, and their fathers are doing cocaine after work; because they feel powerless, and they’re angry and scared.  And in the small towns of America, life is showing the same kinds of stresses and difficulties—we can’t escape.

            This post-Cold-War era was supposed to be an age of prosperity and triumph.  One scholar announced “the end of history” and the beginning of a whole new world.  In fact, more people feel empty and powerless.  There’s a run on the bank of the human spirit that’s far more devastating than any fall in the stock market.[2]  We don’t want to think about that:  I might grow sour and cynical, too.  Why even talk about it?  I mention it because the same feeling of powerlessness and anger and anxiety has taken root in us.  No need to look at someone in the next pew or across the room:  it lurks in your own heart as well.  There’s a run on the bank of the human spirit these days; and to go to Thanksgiving dinner without coming clean of that  would be to make a farce of our prayers. 

            Thanksgiving is a time to call bitterness by its right name and put it away.  It’s time to seek those positive claims of our Christian faith, to revive the feelings of Christian charity and forbearance, a time to build the human heart, to begin anew the search for those “eyes to see life’s invisibles.”  Then our hearts can’t help but realize the grandeur of God’s blessings to us.  We grow thankful for what is, not bitter for what is not.

            We sing the chorus of “America the Beautiful” and proclaim:

And it’s true.  In America our poverty is richer than the wealth of most countries.  Our ignorance is more informed, our tragedies are more quickly aided, our government corruption is more readily corrected, our homeless have tens of thousands working to find them shelter, our sick have more advanced medical care, our farmers have greater yields, our industries have greater depth of energy and a more informed work force.

            We know everything isn’t coming our way.  But look at what we do have.  You live between two rich waterways accessible for both work and play, beyond the dreams of most people.  You work hard, and that’s a blessing.  You’re a real human being in an age of artificial grass, electronic p reachers, and plastic money:  you are human.  You take pride in what you do, and you care about people—I can tell by your responses to all our Mission and Outreach Committee’s calls for involvement.  No, you’re not in the wrong lane!  You know in your bones that true value is not monetary, it’s human worth; it’s your creativity and love and self-giving.  Thank God for all that! 

            You give these gifts to each other and receive them from each other.  As Thanksgiving Day approaches, I invite you to remember your debt of thanks to other people. 

            But going back to that bumper sticker again, there’s another way to interpret it.  It carries a warning against selfishness.  There’s an old hymn we used to sing in my home church, titled “There Is a Sea.”  It’s about the two lakes of the Jordan Valley in the Holy Land.  The first is the Sea of Galilee.  The Jordan River flows in and out of this lake, and the water is fresh. The Sea of Galilee is surrounded by vegetation, and it’s full of fish; because the lake puts out the volume of water it receives, and there’s prosperity for all.  The Jordan River also flows into the second lake farther south, but this lake is called the Dead Sea.  All the water that flows into it stays there. The only way it leaves is by evaporation, which leaves ever-deeper deposits of soil, salts and contamination.  The Dead Sea is seven times saltier than the Atlantic Ocean, and there are no water fowl, no bulrushes, no boat docks, no fishing going on.  It’s dead.  The third verse of this hymn says:[3]

            There was once a baby born in a barn.  He grew up to learn the carpentry trade.  He gave up that career to walk over the mountains of dusty Palestine for three years, talking to the people who would listen about what God is up to.  For those who came to know him, he was the very embodiment of truth, of hope, of human concern.  But some people with vested interests heard him and planned to silence him:  the rich, the powerful, and the comfortable made plans against God’s messenger, though he was poor and homeless and kind.  And that man was beaten and cursed for you.  He was mocked and betrayed for you.  He was abandoned on a Roman execution cross to die for you.  But God had the last word:  God spoke the everlasting “YES” against all the “NO”-saying world, and he lives.  He lives for you, and he lives in you.  Truly his silent gift is the greatest we have received.  We are indebted to the Son of God for all our hope.  This, too, is part of our debt of thanks.

            So I say that Thanksgiving is a very personal religious holiday.  We’re heirs of a 400-year heritage of American life, from the Pilgrims, from the colonists, from the veterans of the American Revolution, from those pioneer farmers who first settled the ground we live on, from industrial capitalists and from labor, from African immigrants against their will who helped build a land they had not chosen, from Asians who came the other way around to help make it prosperous.  We are heirs from business, church and government.  And we’re heirs of 5,000 years of holy work and love and faith from the time of Abraham and Sarah who lived in tents, and David who lived in a palace, and ultimately from Jesus of Nazareth whose blood trailed down a rough wooden cross and into the spirits and hearts of ten-million-million disciples right down to our parents and ourselves. 

            Thanksgiving is a very personal moment.  I invite you to remember you debt of thanks to other people and to God.

AMEN