The Real Thanksgiving

Habakkuk 3:17-19 Rev. Todd B. Freeman

Bethany Presbyterian Church, Dallas November 16, 2003

This past week, when I saw Christmas lights and decorations in the window of Crossroads Market bookstore, and huge Christmas displays at every department store, I knew that Thanksgiving could not be far away.

Since there will be only a short message next Sunday, because of our annual Love Feast / Agape Meal during the service of worship, I wanted to share a few thoughts this morning about Thanksgiving and giving thanks.

Three years ago, as I was searching the Internet for information about Thanksgiving, I came across a somewhat disturbing discovery. I shared that information in a sermon back then because I thought it warranted our reflection from a spiritual and theological perspective. Now, three years later, I feel it deserves another look, especially in light of our current political and religious climate.

We've all known the traditional story of Thanksgiving since we were in grade school: Fleeing religious oppression in their homeland, English Puritan immigrants, known as Pilgrims, sailed across the Atlantic in a ship called The Mayflower. They landed rather by accident in Cape Cod harbor and claimed the territory, calling it New Plymouth. They worked hard, fought plague, disease, a frigid cold winter, made friends with Squanto and the local tribe of natives, and produced "The Mayflower Compact," along with lots and lots of children.

One year after their arrival, they organized a harvest festival after a bountiful crop in 1621 to which they invited the native Americans, which they called Indians. (Today we call such gatherings "Potlucks.") Grateful to God for keeping them alive and away from the sins and evils of England, they ate and celebrated for three days.

Most of us have a visual picture image of what that first Thanksgiving celebration at Plymouth might have looked like. For most of us that image includes the Pilgrims, dressed in their familiar Pilgrim way, and a group of American Indians, some sitting on their horses, some wearing long feathered headdresses, teepees in the background. There's a large wooden table with lots of food covering it from one end to the other - complete with roasted turkey, of course, and corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. The very next year they all got together and celebrated again, and the year after that, and the year after that.

Well, one of the hardest (though often satisfying) parts of preaching from a progressive perspective is bursting the bubble of the familiar. Because, when we look closely at the historical context of almost any familiar story we realize that there is often as much myth and legend and half-truths as there is fact and reality. We must continue to remember that history was written by the winners - with only their perspective. So yes, I'm afraid to report that the "First Thanksgiving" was much different than we were taught to believe.

The website that I referred to the beginning of this sermon is from The Center For World Indigenous Studies , located in Olympia, Washington. They provide a 16-page study guide of information debunking the image most of us have in our minds of that first Thanksgiving. The main issue the author, a Native American, brings up is: What do we teach our children - the same old familiar story and interpretation, with it's mixture of history and myth, or the more realistic, disturbing, and less historically distorted story and interpretation?

The same dynamic falls into play for me each week as I preach from old familiar Bible stories. Believe me, preaching a time-honored, traditional interpretation of a scripture passage would be a whole lot easier than digging into what modern progressive biblical scholars are uncovering about the origins and meanings of these stories in their original contexts. For if you're like me, letting go of the old familiar images of events, as taught in Sunday school or in the classroom, is very hard to do. There is comfort in the familiar - even for us die-hard progressives.

Yet at the same time, you, much like myself, may find a much deeper sense of meaning when you look at the familiar in a brand new way. And we're seeing a lot of history in a new way these days. Many claim that culture, society, and the church itself are in the midst of a major paradigm shift from how things have been perceived over the past 200 years. We are on the cutting edge of what has been and what is emerging .

Lets look now how this has affected how we perceive Thanksgiving, which, by the way, was not declared as an official national holiday until Abraham Lincoln did so in the 1860's. In 1970, the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Native Americans conducted a "Day of Mourning," and this event has been repeated with increased intensity each succeeding year. Many people living in the town of Plymouth today, and a large proportion of the Thanksgiving tourist population, resent what they feel to be the intrusion of these Native Americans upon the tranquility of Thanksgiving Day. For they are forcing us to reexamine what has become for too many of us an all to familiar story. This notion of redeeming the familiar is made in a sermon by Peter Gomes, the Chaplain at Harvard University. He writes:

Once we have been able to liberate Thanksgiving from the clutches of the Pilgrim mystique, as well as from the countercultural clutches of the protesters, and once we have been liberated from the 'count-your-many-blessings-name-them-one-by-one' routine, we will have made a significant step in that process of redeeming the familiar. An old story can give a new perspective, and we will be able to live in our time just as truly as our foreparents lived in theirs.

Today's Old Testament text from Habakkuk is one means of redeeming the familiar notion of Thanksgiving for our use. As Gomes reflects, "Rather than a litany of all God's goodness to us or of God's wonderful attributes, we find a rather bleak and depressing picture painted for us. Failure rather than success seems to be the order of the day, and yet in the midst of that failure, in the midst of that privation [adversity/hardship], is that cry of hope and confidence: 'I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.'"

Thanksgiving, then, begins not with our successes and not even with ourselves, it begins with God, and recognizing that God is with us and for us.

Gomes writes, "It seems to me that forgiveness between God and humanity, and between each other, is the true context for Thanksgiving." And he suggests that we should not thank God for our wealth, our health, or for our wisdom, but should rather thank God that God is, that we are, and that God's love shall be with us when time itself shall be no more.

But let's get back to that "First Thanksgiving." Let me share with you some of that information from The Center For World Indigenous Studies. Four quick points:

One . The Puritans in England were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were also political revolutionaries who not only intended to overthrow the monarchical government of England, but who actually did so in 1649, with their leader Oliver Cromwell.

Two . The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not simple refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often outcasts and even fugitives who, in some way or other, do not fit into the mainstream of their society. Fitting well within the Puritans' mission, historians believe they had every intention of taking the land away from its native people to build their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."

Three . The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. They saw themselves as fighting a holy war, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. [That sounds remarkably familiar in today's worldwide political climate doesn't it.] This rigid fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it sheds a very different light on the loving "Pilgrim" image we have of them.

This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623, just two years after that first Thanksgiving. In that sermon, Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the local tribe, the Wampanoag Indians, who had been their benefactors, even saving their lives during that first cold winter.

Mather praises God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for a better growth", i.e., the Pilgrims.

Four . A generation later, after the balance of power had indeed shifted from the native people to the immigrants, the children of these two peoples of that first Thanksgiving were striving to kill each other in the genocidal conflict know as King Philip's War. At the end of that conflict most of the New England Indians were either exterminated or became refugees among the French in Canada, or they were sold into slavery in the Carolinas by the Puritans. This is a fact. So successful was this early trade in Indian slaves that several Puritan ship owners began the practice of raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa for black Africans to sell into slavery to the colonies of the South, thus founding the American-based slave trade.

Well, I hope this new information has provoked you. Perhaps the story we tell our children in school and at home should be updated. Perhaps the interpretations of many the stories we tell ourselves from the Bible should be updated as well, now that we have a much better understanding of their original context and authorship. This continues to be a major goal of modern biblical scholarship and progressive theology. It has become on of my goals.

By the way, just for fun, here's a bit of a factual revision of that visual image of that First Thanksgiving, again based on what we know now.

Unlike the Great Plains-style Indians, the woodland-style Wampanoags didn't have horses, didn't wear huge feathered headdresses, and didn't live in teepees, but rather round-roofed houses called wigwams. And as far as the menu was concerned, sweet potatoes had not even been introduced to New England yet; Indian corn was only good for making cornmeal, not eating on the cob; there were cranberries, but not sugar to make cranberry sauce; and the pumpkin pie was more like thick pudding, without a crust or whipped cream topping.

At that 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim's arrival, a Wampanoag descendent proclaimed, "Today is a time of celebrating for you - a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people."

May we all remember this Thanksgiving that every person, everywhere, is just as human as the next. All people are children of God. That message is a very real part of our familiar story here at Bethany, especially in light of our inclusive and multicultural ministry. And let us remember to thank God that God is, and that we are.

Amen.