"Gratitude for the Garden"

As you see from the hymns and readings, the theme of this Service is Thanksgiving. There are at least two dangers in a sermon dealing with Thanksgiving. The first danger is boredom for both preacher and congregation. How many different ways can one talk about the Pilgrims and their fine example of giving thanks? After a few Thanksgiving Sundays the whole matter could easily become like an extended ride in the country: "a cow is a cow is a cow. . . ."

The second danger of thanksgiving sermons is the temptation to be cute. Sometimes when we ministers are afraid we will bore you we over react by trying to be clever. Seems to me much of what passes for "innovative worship" or "innovative preaching" is little more than gimcracks for jaded congregations.

I hope neither to bore nor entertain you with this sermon. I hope both to comfort and challenge you. Someone once said the duty of the minister is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. I invite you to think with me about the relationship of aspiration to thanksgiving.

I mentioned this relationship briefly last week when I used the illustration of the morning exercise walk which Betty and I take. At the end of the first mile, thanksgiving for having made it that far quickly becomes aspiration as we turn around for the mile back home.

As I understand the Colonial America thanksgiving tradition our Pilgrim forebears were at once both thankful and aspiring. I read somewhere the statistic that the Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts, but nevertheless set aside a day of thanksgiving flavored with their hopes for the future. They hoped for better times, for a "city set on a hill" to be a light of freedom. Perhaps if we, like the Pilgrims, can associate aspiration with thanksgiving we will be saved from boredom.

By aspiration I am not talking about false modesty or pessimism. We have all known persons who never seemed to appreciate themselves or their accomplishments. Their unending chorus is: "I didn't do a good job." Or "Seems I never get anything done." That is more cynicism than aspiration.

Aspiration is the ability to recognize reality. Reality, by the way has nothing to do with so-called "reality television," which is anything but real. Realism is the ability to recognize what has been accomplished as well as what needs to be accomplished. Harry Emerson Fosdick, great preacher of several generations ago used to talk about "divine discontent." Aspiration is the kind of discontent which keeps us going.

To say it another way, aspiration keeps us stretching. In Browning's words, "Ah, but a man's (or woman's) reach must exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for." Aspiration is our human ability to reach beyond our grasp. When I was in high school I took voice lessons. My voice coach used to tell me when I was reaching for a high note to aim above it and come down from above.

Thanksgiving is what saves aspiration from being nothing more than dissatisfied grappling. Persons who are never thankful are never satiated; they never get enough. Thanksgiving and aspiration must go together. Thanksgiving without aspiration is complacency; aspiration without thanksgiving is cynicism.

In the first Reading for today, retired UU Minister, Rev. Max Coots talks about his vegetable garden. Year-by-year vegetable gardens are perfect examples of thanksgiving and aspiration. I had a small vegetable garden when we lived in Massachusetts. Our grandchildren, who were in elementary school, lived a few miles from us. I can still feel the sense of warm thanksgiving when they came to visit and rushed out to the garden and pick and eat the sugar-snap peas right off the vines.

I join Max Coots in gratitude for the garden. However, like him, I also could hardly wait for the next growing season. Burpee's seed catalogues came just after Christmas. In the dead of winter with the garden covered by two feet of snow, I poured over the catalogues dreaming about the new vegetables I could grow for those grandchildren.

Growing a vegetable garden is a risky business. In Max Coots' words there are " . . . about as many weeds and wilt and bugs as vegetables." In Massachusetts if I planted too soon, a cold snap would come and destroy my work. Then there was the problems of drought or rabbits; you get the picture.

Thanksgiving with aspiration is not risk free. For the Pilgrims, a Thanksiving with limited vision - limited aspiration - would have been much less risky. They could have enjoyed their Thanksgiving feast and been content to clear
no more land, build not more houses, plant no more crops, and risk no further settlements I have heard that in some traditional cultures the proper way to say goodbye is to say, "May nothing new happen to you." That is a sure sign of failure of risk and failure of aspiration. We are thankful for what has been; we aspire, even with the risks for what will be.

One of the dangers of thanksgiving is to grow comfortably content with things as they are without seeing how things might become. William Gibson's play, "The Miracle Worker," is the story of Anne Sullivan's work with Helen Keller. In the play there is a conversation between Anne and Helen's older brother, James. James is trying to persuade Anne to accept what he called Helen's incapacity to learn. He asks Anne just to give up. Anne Sullivan replies, that her understanding of original sin is giving up!

I do not wish to belabor the point. Real thanksgiving will include aspiration, even with the risks. In his old radio play about Christmas, Stephen Vincent Benet said it this way:

"Life can be lost without vision but not lost by death,
Lost by not caring, willing, going on
Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude
To something more . . . ." (Stephen Vincent Benet;, "A Chld is Born," speech of "Dismus.")

I can almost see your eyes glazing over and hear your question, "Well, yes, Reverend, you seem to have a point, but can you make it more specific?" At the risk of seeming to have stopped preaching and started meddling, I will make a couple of specific suggestions about how we, who are favored in our culture, can unite aspiration with thanksgiving.

We live in a culture of plenty; the Pilgrims would have been nothing short of amazed at our wealth. I am not only talking about a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. I am talking about all of the things which make our lives more comfortable from appliances, to wash-and-wear fabrics, from well-stocked supermarkets to readily available gasoline, the latter at prices we haven't yet learned to appreciate.

We have much to be thankful for. However, we live in a world of "Guests at our Table" who lack the basics of life. The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is emphasizing the need for clean water for people not only in foreign countries but right here in the United States. "Fortune Magazine" is quoted: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations."

Thankful for water which we enjoy, we can aspire to help others get clean water through contributing through the "Guests at Your Table" boxes.

Here's another specific way to include aspiration with thanksgiving. This Congregation has a marvelous heritage of ministry to congregants here as well as to this Community. We can be thankful for a heritage of excellent preaching and music; for the heritage of this building, soon, we hope to be expanded to accommodate all of us; and a marvelous heritage of religious education for children and youth. The Pledge Committee is particularly thankful for your response on last Sunday. I suppose by now the Congregation is about half-way to realizing the financial goal for next year. When that thanksgiving is paired with aspiration you have the potential of an enriched ministry of service and caring.

In other words, a specific way to combine thanksgiving with aspiration will be to complete your pledge, if you haven't yet done so, or even to increase your pledge.

I add one more specific which has to do with the culture of which we are a part. I've already mentioned examples of our wealth. One of the dangers of wealth, particularly in a consumerist culture is comfortable thanksgiving without sensitivity to what we are doing to ourselves.

There is a bank in San Diego with a new slogan, something about "It's all for you." Our culture is very dangerous, could even be damaging to our humanity because of the emphasis which appeals to selfishness. Someone, I believe a member of this Congregation, told me about "Buy nothing Friday." The Friday following Thanksgiving is sometimes called 'Black Friday," because that is the day many retailers move their bottom line into the "black." Evidently "Buy Nothing Friday" is a challenge to aspire to something other than consumerism; to be thankful for what we have without adding more.

In a sense this turns aspiration upside down. Rather than thanksgiving for what we have and aspiring to have more; an expression of our thanks will be aspiring to have less; to place ourselves with empathy alongside the "Guests at our Tables."

The annual "Guests at your Table" emphasis is just one small part of an appeal to social justice. The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is in some sense the "conscience" of our uncommon denomination, reminding us of "guests" who inhabit this globe with us who are the "have nots" of the world. They live in plain sight of we who are blessed with all we have.

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee was founded in 1939 to rescue victims of Nazi persecution, and continues it work for human rights, including most recently a campaign against torture.

For thirty years, Unitarian Universalists have participated in the Guest as Your Table program as a way to give thanks for all we have and aspire for a better world for all people.

This year the Guest at Your Table program is emphasizing such basics as affordable water, defending civil liberties, and serving people victimized by natural disasters.

The final line of Max Coots's litany of gratitude is a reminder of our "kinship" to everything. I think he is speaking about the seventh principle of Unitarian Universalism: "Respect for interdependent web of which we are a part." That "interdependent web" includes kinship with our fellow human beings. As we gather at our tables for Thanksgiving and for all the meals between now and early January, we can be thankful for the food we eat; and mindful of our kinship with brothers and sisters who will not eat that day. Our thanksgiving can be completed with aspiration to care enough to help alleviate human misery. May it be so. Amen.

READINGS

". . . The harvest will be an attitude, not a time of year. And maybe I'll be wise
enough to feel a sort of litany of gratitude:
For seeds - that, like memories and minds, keep in themselves the
recollection of what they were and the power to become something
more than they are. . .
For soil - that accumulation of lives piled up by death that gives
new life. . .
For the justice of the earth - that gave me about as many weeds and
wilt and scab and bugs as vegetables but, in the end, gave me enough
for what I need. . .
For hands - those miracles on the ends of my arms that let me tend
my vegetables and pull my weeds, and for mind enough to know
the difference between the two. . .
For calluses - life's defense against that softness that makes
survival difficult. . .
For the ability to work and the will to work and the work to do,
and the time to do it in. . .
And, finally, for that sense of kinship to it all, that singleness, that
unity that is the basis of faith. . . ."
(Rev. Max Coots, Minister Emeritus, UU Church, Canton, NY)

"When I think of all the things to be thankful for, there are so many I
cannot count them. I am first of all thankful for my friends and for their
support through these hard times. I think of each one and their faces rise
up before me in a great host of love and smiles." (May Sarton, "Encore: A
Journal of the Eightieth Year," p.173)