There has been great debate about whether we should even celebrate Thanksgiving any more. Most of you know the Indigenous people of this nation, First Nation peoples, who see this holiday as marking the beginning of genocide. On the other hand, this holiday for many has little or nothing to do with the stories of First Peoples or Pilgrims. It is about being grateful – being grateful for the morning, grateful for a warm house, grateful for community, grateful for all the elements that uphold and make our life possible, grateful for the reminder of beauty. Well, I have five minutes to bridge this gap for all of us.
The truth is I can’t bridge it. I can’t do it in 5 minutes, 5 years, maybe 5 lifetimes would be a start. I don’t think mere words can both make amends for a violent nation disrespectful of land and people, and to honor the very real human need to come together in community to be grateful for what we have. Gratitude is the practice of making living amends. True gratitude is willing to see that there are many different sides to this morning. The past can deepen our gratitude if we let it.
Gratitude as a practice can only go so far if we only focus on being grateful for things we like. Gratitude can be misused if it is used to get us to ignore or overlook critical aspects of this morning. A deep gratitude is able to take in the whole panorama, including the parts we haven’t made sense of yet, and allow it to change us.
This is the first year I’ve thought of the land during Thanksgiving. I’ve mostly been focused on people – First Peoples, Pilgrims, Sarah Josephine Hale who wrote Mary, Mary had a Little Lamb. Hale lobbied Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday to heal families and communities following the Civil War. I think about them. I think about churches across the nation who have Thanksgiving like ours. I think of my own journey of never celebrating Thanksgiving for religious reasons, and now preaching Thanksgiving sermons. This is the kind of stuff I usually think about. It’s a very complex holiday, full of hope, omission, full of the need for amends, hope for reconciliation, hope that all may come and enjoy the harvest. But I can say to my own embarrassment I’ve only seriously thought of the land this year, even though without the land we would have no harvest, without the land we would have no food, without the land we wouldn’t have genocide, without the land we wouldn’t have war, without the land we would never have the need for healing and reconciliation. I am beginning to learn a simple but necessary lesson: that I belong to the land, I belong to the morning and not the other way around. I think this is something that comes through or has the possibility of coming through during this holiday, if we let it. The morning is beautiful because it is there for us, and we have an opportunity to be there for it, to pay attention to it. The land beckons us to remember those who have lived on it including our grandma, including Northern and Southern soldiers during the Civil War, including Indigenous Tribes. The land has been here for all of us, but we have not always been there for it, and for the people who made this land thrive. And right now we yearn for this precious land to last as long as it can.
The land has seen everything we’ve done as a people. It has seen everything that has transpired, and still, it keeps providing the harvest. I am grateful for the harvest. I am grateful for a community like UUYo. I am grateful for a community like this where we expand our vision to include those who are too often forgotten and ignored. I am grateful for the continual challenge to see the world as it is and as it could be. I am grateful for a place like this that doesn’t try to omit history but offers us practices to live with integrity. One of those practices is gratitude – gratitude for grandmother’s house, gratitude for this church, gratitude for the land which supports both, gratitude for this morning, gratitude for knowing that we belong, gratitude for the opportunity to make a living amends and together find healing for a nation.
