"A Sermon for Thanksgiving Sunday "

READING

From the November 2007 Bulletin of All Souls Unitarian Church, New York, by the Rev. Galen Guengerich:

I believe that the first principle of the universe is utter dependence. Everything that exists is made up of constituent parts that are borrowed from, shared with, and related to others outside it. As humans, we are utterly dependent upon the parents who conceived us, the plants and animals who daily give their lives for our nourishment, the trees that give us oxygen, and the sun that warms the atmosphere and lights our path.We depend upon governments to provide for the commonweal, upon teachers for education, upon friends for love and companionship, and so on. These constitutive relationships make us who we are. None of us - indeed nothing in the universe - is what it is strictly by our own doing. The appropriate religious response to our dependence, I have suggested, should be gratitude. Gratitude links us to the past by revealing to us our identity: how we became who we are. And gratitude links us to the future by revealing to us our duty: what we owe back in return. It calls forth a discipline of gratitude, by which we constantly acknowledge our dependence upon the sources that make our lives possible. It also demands an ethic of gratitude, which ensures that what we as individuals require from the people and world around us, and what we return through our choices and actions, makes the world a better place for all of us.

SERMON

The first Thanksgiving, contrary to the iconic story about the Pilgrims and their rustic feast, actually took place when we were slugging it out among ourselves in a violent and devastating Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln called for a federal holiday to lift collective spirits and unify a divided people in gratitude for all that they had - or was left by 1863. Times were hard then, so perhaps it is easy to understand how a suffering country would adopt a national origin myth about its Anglo settlers triumphantly laying claim to the New World.

As "Los Angeles Times" columnist Gregory Rodriguez noted recently, "We all need narratives to give meaning to our lives . . . . But fact or fiction barely matters: What’s important is what stories we choose and what we understand them to mean." The American collective imagination has given Thanksgiving a meaning rooted in the national origin myth as well as the hardship and struggle of our history: that it is a time to give thanks for all we have.

That meaning seems nearly automatic, and it has worked well for us much of the time. Gratitude is a basic human emotion, a healthy response to all that gives us life. But making gratitude contingent on what life has given us is going to get us into trouble eventually.

We all take various inventories of ourselves when things get shaky. We have no money but good health is what really matters. We hate our job but love our family. The future may be uncertain but at least we have each other. These are universal reflexive thoughts that occur to us whenever we ask ourselves how we are. We take stock, and give thanks for what’s still there. But then comes a time when what we have is subject to change on any given day: like the Dow average, or the value of the dollar. The ground feels like it’s shifting under our feet. We sense that we really can’t count on what we have in the same way anymore.

It’s not just our fluctuating economy. There are other uncertainties, both material and existential, that affect us now as well. This Thanksgiving, uncertainty about what we have or will have is hitting many of us very close to home. Families in our community - in our congregation and all around us - are feeling the consequences of the writers’ strike more acutely with every passing day.

Last week I spoke to a couple of church members who had maybe another week of work left; one was planning to lay off her only assistant; another was waiting for the inevitable bad news about her job. What affects people elsewhere as the mere disappointment of not having their evening date with "The Daily Show" is a potentially catastrophic setback for people here. Thanksgiving will feel very different for them this year.

Thanksgiving has been in trouble for a while in my mind. Here we are in the throes of a senseless war, which has cost thousands of lives and divided us once again among ourselves and from the rest of the world. Our easy assumptions - in retrospect they were probably much too easy - about what it means to be an American are getting shot down one after another.

We are no longer the land of abundance. Other places around the world may be booming, but what we hear at home is talk of recession and home equity not being what it was two years ago. We may once have been good at having things, but what we have now is a lot less than we used to, even if it’s all still on paper.

I’ve been nervously tracking these developments, as we all have, for some time now. They feel like cosmic payback for everything we’ve done going all the way back to the Pilgrims. Our national myth doesn’t work anymore. It has always had too much to do with what we have or feel we’re entitled to have, at others’ expense.

Before I go further, let me reassure you that I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving anyway. I realize it may sound like I'm working up to suggesting we get rid of it. But I know that for many of us, including me, Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year. I'm not even including the food, since everyone in my family except my younger brother have always been terrible cooks and the complicated task of making a meal like Thanksgiving is really not in our range. I hope my sister-in-law doesn't read this, but the fact that she uses my mother's turkey stuffing recipe doesn't make me like it any more than I did as a child.

Even so, there is something about sitting down to a meal with people you love and don't see often enough, with presences and absences felt deeply either way, to know that this tradition taps into something that matters. At our Thanksgiving table we're not thinking about the Pilgrims or the trappings of our national origin myth. We're thinking - even though we probably won't say it out loud - about the wonder of family and friends: that we have each other. We're looking at each other and realizing, along with most of you, that we're really not a normal family, but in an odd way that helps us understand who we are. And somewhere in there, whatever our adversities and quirks, is the thing that makes Thanksgiving happen. "These constitutive relationships make us who we are," writes Galen Guengerich.
 "None of us - indeed nothing in the universe - is what it is strictly by our own doing." What runs below the surface of every Thanksgiving gathering, whether among family or friends, or as a guest among strangers, is the reality of all the connections that give us life. Or as Galen Guengerich puts it, how "utterly dependent" we are. Not just dependent on each other, but on every relationship that gives us life: "the plants and animals who daily give their lives for our nourishment, the trees that give us oxygen, and the sun that warms the atmosphere and lights our path."

"The appropriate religious response to our dependence . . . should be gratitude," Guengerich writes. Here is a different way to understand Thanksgiving. It’s not about what we have. It's about who we are,  alive and whole and part of all creation. To know that is to feel gratitude. It doesn’t take anything else - but it gives us, as Galen Guengerich reminds us, a responsibility to give back.

"What we as individuals require from the people and world around us," Guengerich writes, "and what we return through our choices and actions, makes the world a better place for all of us." This "ethic of gratitude" is not about abundance; it is about sustainability. It calls on us to preserve the precious connections that link us to each other and to all creation. If our "utter dependence" doesn't bring us to our knees, then our shrinking harvest will.

Creation is begging us to pay attention. It may not be too late to change course, restore what we have plundered. Just as the New World was not ours to claim, neither is the whole world ours to ruin. An "ethic of gratitude" may just save us all.

Though times are uncertain and we have reason to be worried, gratitude abounds this year. It is inside each of us, our response to the gift of life, our assurance that we are not alone. We belong to a network of relationships so extensive and so generous that we often forget that they are there. Yet they hold us all together, gently and surely; and they are there even when times are hard. All they ask of us is to remember how much we need them. Then we will do our part to preserve what is not ours to have, but makes us who we are.

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1 Gregory Rodriguez, "In the beginning." Los Angeles Times Opinion, Sunday, October 21, 2007.

2 Galen Guengerich, "A Time for Thanksgiving," in All Souls November 2007 "Bulletin." The Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York, NY. This and all the following quotes from Galen Guengerich are in the same article.