"Giving and Receiving
A Message for All Ages
for Thanksgiving"

There is something strange and magical that is about to happen to those of us here in this room. It has something to do with food, tradition, neighbors, friends, parents and children, sitting down to table, sharing a sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude at life, and, unfortunately for many of you something to do with airports, rental cars, and full-body security scanners.

What is this mysterious force, that traps us in its tractor beam, that pulls us back home for Thanksgiving, that leads us to purchase and consume that king of birds, which Benjamin Franklin wanted as our national bird, but lost out to the wisdom of other Founders, who voted for the eagle rather than the American turkey?

Is it peer pressure? Is it mindless adherence to tradition? Is it football?

Is it a relentless quest for satiety, for filling ourselves up with all good things until we can eat no more?

Is it a cultivated sense, what a friend of mine told his eight-year-old son to develop, an attitude of gratitude, that leads our wandering minds, eyes, ears, fingertips back to this moment, the grace of this day, a day we did nothing to earn or deserve, a day we have been given nonetheless? Probably not, though I wish it were so.

I didn’t grow up, as some of you here today are growing up, with a sense of the welcome table. This is an odd thing for me to think about, since as I have shared with you before, I spent many of my growing-up years abroad, in expatriate communities and diplomatic enclaves in Japan and India. A fabulous opportunity to welcome and be welcomed by these cultures into timeless rituals of hospitality – welcomed into what Greg Mortensen, and American mountain climber and activist now well-known for his dedication to building schools in Afghanistan, learned to call a “Three Cups of Tea” way of welcoming the stranger. This is based on a proverb of that country, which says,

The first time you share tea at my home, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family.

But I do not recall many instances in which we had friends from these communities – or even friends from within the American community – over for dinner, a common enough ritual, but one I didn’t grow up with.

I wonder if this stems from a reluctance on my family’s part to “entertain” guests, to host them with some degree of flair or forethought. To “entertain” a guest requires some formality, cleaning, a rich meal, planning, a dishwasher. But to welcome a stranger, I do not think all this is required.

What is required, though, is a willingness to both give and receive.

I have encountered many times even in the past few months here a generosity of spirit in this community, a willingness to give – it’s in the 125 names in our Caring Network, folks who signed up last spring to give rides, make dinner, write get-well cards, and generally look out for one another when they could. It’s in the practice of giving tuna and canned beans to the food bank every week, leading one of the folks from the foodbank to finally show up on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, and I asked him why he had come, and he said, I wanted to see who was giving us all those barrels of food.

I don’t believe there is a cosmic balance sheet to all this, that because you put a can in the basket this week, a penny, a dollar, a check in the box this week, someday you’ll get a can or a check back out, when tough times knock on your door, but I do think it is powerful to remember how we travel back and forth on both sides of this equation, how within the space of a day, an hour, a moment, a lifetime, we will always be both givers and receivers of so much.

I don’t think the two are the opposites we make them out to be. I hope all of you have known the deep pleasure, the sweet relief, of receiving the thing you needed most in that moment: the hand up, the bear hug around, the kind word of encouragement, the big-enough check, the cup of flour, the good news. And I hope all of you have known, too, the overflowing of spirit made possible by acts of true generosity, a giving of yourself and your resources that has made a difference in just the right way, at just the right time.

In both giving and receiving, I think there is a feeling “something like freedom, like falling in love,” in the words of the essayist and career counselor Martha Beck.

Freedom and falling in love aren’t the opposites we make them out to be, either. In the words of our opening hymn, only when we are bound to one another, bound to one another, to human care and hope, are we truly free.

As we sit together at the welcome table today in our sanctuary, in sharing our apple communion, and in a hundred homes across the country next week, with our filling-up boxes marking the chairs where our sisters and brothers working for justice in northern Uganda, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Ecuador ought to be, I hope we will feel that feeling of giving and receiving abundantly, to taste that love and touch the freedom it makes possible for each of us: the freedom to be most fully who we are, and to give to one another and to our world as abundantly as we can.

May it be so.