Thanks and Giving - A Sermon by the Rev. Jim Lee (Thanksgiving C)

Lectionary readings

Last week, our nation remembered the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, as well as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is hard not to be awed, even haunted, by the 278 words that make up this historic speech, especially in the wan light of that horrific shooting in Dallas just 100 years later. Lincoln’s words seem not only to honor the war dead on that field in Pennsylvania, but for the one killed in Texas: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” We know now what many in 1863 didn’t fully appreciate, how resonant these words would be to capture the spirit of what it means to live out our vocation as Americans, as people who live in this land, to strive to live out the better angels of our nature.

When Lincoln began his address with the famous words, “Fourscore and seven years ago out fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,” he was tapping into an ancient Jewish practice of calling forth a recital, a rehearsal of the salvation story that marked the covenant between God and God’s people. Read the Hebrew scriptures, and you’ll see recitals punctuating the text, beginning often with that elliptical description of Israel’s patriarch Abraham, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” This particular recital from Deuteronomy is read right before the start of the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, as if to remind the people every year of their corporate identity, where they came from and where they might be going, and to renew their commitment to this identity, by retelling the ancient story that binds them together. It is a powerful story of God’s partnership with God’s people, of God witnessing the suffering of Israel, of God bringing the people into the land promised to that wandering Aramean centuries earlier. It is a story that Jews read while in prison camps in Babylon, and yes, a story even read while in the death camps in Poland and Germany.

For sure, there must have been years when those reading this recital and those listening to it must have wondered where God’s promise was, so deep was their suffering, so far the land of milk and honey seemed to be from their reality. And yet it is this dogged persistence within Judaism, this demand to read this story, to remind the people, to remind God, of the covenant made with their ancestor, that we see in Jesus’ invitation to his followers to work for the food that endures. Jesus knew, just as his fellow Jews generations earlier knew, that in the course of a community, of a family, of a person, there are years of abundance and years of poverty, times of celebration and times of mourning. There are days that feel and look just right, and there are days so dark that you and I wonder if morning will ever come. Jesus reminds you and me what this true bread that endures, this bread of life, is: the story, the recital, of God’s collaboration with God’s people in the work of redemption and liberation of all creation. Tell this story over and over, through thick or thin, through good times and bad, with full bellies or empty stomachs. Tell the story of the community, that will sustain the community not in spite of but especially when the chips are down.

When we tell this story, then our response is two fold: first, like the ancient Israelites, like Americans today, we respond with gratitude to the renewal of faith, God’s faith in us, our faith in God. We set our first fruits before God as a reminder that it is this relationship that is the true sustaining bread of life. Thanks. Second, we celebrate! We eat! We feast! We dance and sing. We drink. Some of us drink a wee bit too much! And with whom? “Together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you”: we open our banquet for our families, those we love, and we open our tables and hearts to those we don’t know, those who are yet strange to us, those marginalized by our society, those who don’t feel like they belong. Giving. This response, this responsibility toward not just our own but to others, to whomever is the Other in our midst, is also how we partake in this enduring Bread of Life, because in doing so we enact the life-giving generosity of God, whose story we tell over and over.

President Lincoln knew something of this story, of this promise, of this response. 150 years ago, a month before he stepped onto the fields of Gettysburg, he penned a proclamation calling on the formation of a national holiday of Thanksgiving, which would eventually occur a few years after his assassination. In this proclamation, he writes of the bounties for which the American people should be grateful even in the midst of a calamitous civil war: “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” Gratitude. Thanks.

And what then should Americans do, how should they respond? Lincoln continues: “And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.” Giving.

When you and I tell the story of our community, when you and I recite God’s saving work in our lives, and when you and I respond by bringing into our midst the aliens who reside among us, then you and I will have begun to live out this day of Thanksgiving, not only as a day set aside, but a day that points to that community of freedom and courage that shall never perish from the earth.