What Americans commonly call the “First Thanksgiving” happened sometime between Sept. 21 and Nov. 11, 1621 at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts. Out of the hundred Europeans who came over on the Mayflower, fifty had survived to see a successful harvest and, let me tell you, these people whom today we call Pilgrims were ready to celebrate.
Joining the Pilgrims were ninety First Nations people, who had not come over by boat but had always been here, and they were very much aware of the risks of consorting with the Pilgrims. They had already experienced a hundred years of European slave traders raiding their villages. They knew that Europeans could be dangerous.
But the Pilgrims had little and the Native Americans had much, and it was their glory to give. “Among many of our peoples,” says Jacqueline Keeler, “Showing you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father’s people, they say, when asked to give, ‘Are we not Dakota and alive?’”
That’s the First Thanksgiving, and it has set the tone for innumerable other stories of Thanksgiving down the years, like today’s story, How Many Days to America. Refugees who leave home to escape injustice and violence, and the journey is dangerous, you have to move along secret streets, you have to sell your jewelry, you’ve got to risk the open ocean, you do all this and more, but all the while you never let go of the vision of
tomorrow comes, tomorrow comes,
and we shall all be free
and you sing it and you whisper it and you write it upon your heart. The journey continues on, and sometimes you are afraid and sometimes you are comforted, and sometimes you meet enemies but you also meet friends, friends whose glory is in giving, and hopefully it one day happens, you get to the other side, you find a new home, you find a new life.
America is supposed to be all about this. Daring greatly. A risky journey. The help of friends. Achieving new life. Gratitude for freedom.
But side-by-side with this vision are stories of theft, and indignity, and tremendous pain and sorrow. Losses that have yet been redeemed. A future that remains uncertain. If you’re looking at Thanksgiving through this lens, you’re not going to be feeling much gratitude.
I think of the Cherokee nation centered around where I used to live in Georgia. In 1829, gold was discovered in nearby Dahlonega, and what followed was the nation’s first Gold Rush. Only problem was, the lands were Cherokee, so the Cherokee had to go. They were forcibly removed in 1838 by American soldiers, enforcing American law passed by Congress and the President. Thousands died on the Trail of Tears, which took a broken-hearted people all the way west to Oklahoma.
What many people call Thanksgiving is a day of mourning for First Nations people. Their glory was in giving, but what they got back was disease and treachery over and over again. A Georgian soldier who participated in the removal would later say, “I fought through the War Between the States and have seen many men shot, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”
This Thanksgiving time is a time of disturbing tensions. Gratitude and grief.
How grateful we are to call this land we live upon our home, but it once was another’s. This land we live upon was the traditional homeland of several Great Lakes tribes: the Wyandotte, the Mingo, the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Miami, the Ottawa. Perhaps others. They are First Nations and this is their land. Our white ancestors got the land through some questionable treaty in 1796.
The wound has festered ever since.
Thanksgiving is a time of disturbing tensions.
You may find yourself feeling this most directly if you are celebrating with extended family, and the table in the house will groan under the weight of all the amazing food, and the spaces in the house will buzz with the sounds of football on TV, and you’ll sit around the table with your extended family members, and some of them may have voted for the Presidential candidate who spun visions of a nation overrun with “bad hombres” crossing American borders and infiltrating communities to rob and kill. There are nearly 60 million refugees around the world—we’ve never seen numbers as large as these, and no wonder, given the 15 or so wars being fought right now, in addition to everything else—and American could follow the lead of the Dakota to say, “Are we not Americans and alive?” America could live up to the words on the Statue of Liberty. But we do not. The candidate they voted for, who won, whom they may still support, is all about “Build a wall!” He is all about ICE.
When you hear that phrase, “Build a wall!,” does it make you feel, in some sense, that we are losing America? That the America of our ideals and hopes is being spoiled?
The father from today’s story says, “We must leave right now.” “We do not think the way they think.”
But where is there for us to go? Where is there for us to leave to?
Come Thursday, you might find yourself sitting at a family table, and you might find yourself wondering how these members of your extended family who truly do love you and you truly love them voted they way they did and continue to feel the way they do. All the turkey, all the stuffing, all the pumpkin pie—drenched with disappointment and confusion and more.
What do we do?
I say, let’s listen to what Jon Stewart says. He’s the American comedian who used to anchor the Daily Show, and he’s one of the wisest and savviest thinkers around.
The thing he said was during an interview with Charlie Rose some years ago. It’s just right after he points out the penchant that liberals have for making Trump voters monolithic in nature, denying them complexity, denying them humanity (vice-versa, by the way, in our politically super-polarized world). Jon Stewart says that, and then he says, “This is the fight we wage against ourselves and each other because America is not natural. America is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands of years of human behavior and history to create something that no one’s ever created before. That’s what’s exceptional about America and it ain’t easy.”
Listen to that. America is not natural. It ain’t easy. I personally don’t agree with “Let’s Make America Great Again” but I’ll tell you what I think about “Let’s Make America Great”: It’s a greatness where the most vulnerable among us are lifted up. It’s a greatness of a multicultural, multiethnic democracy. It’s a greatness where we acknowledge how the screw ups of our ancestors have directly benefited us, and, as best as we know how, we make amends to First Nations people and to the descendants of Slaves. It’s a greatness that says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
It’s the greatness of the Dakota tribe’s generosity, rooted in strength.
“Are we not Dakota and alive?”
Or more to the point: “Are we not West Shore and alive?”
That’s why we dream, and dream, and never stop dreaming. We, who are already here in America, dreaming with people like the father in today’s story and with the 60 million refugees worldwide, saying
tomorrow comes, tomorrow comes,
and we shall all be free…
and we sing it and we whisper it and we write it upon the heart. Never giving the dream up, no matter how unnatural it really is and no matter how it flies in the face of tribal instincts which are right now erupting in countries all across the world, Brexit and beyond….
Perhaps one way we might keep this vision repeatedly before us is to acknowledge it in every Sunday service.
I have an idea I would like to propose to you, West Shore.
Because we are West Shore and alive, we say these words of Covenant every time we gather:
Love is the spirit of this church,
And service is its law.
This is our great covenant:
to dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love,
and to help one another.
We say these words, and then we say them again in Spanish to acknowledge how it is the second most spoken language in the United States by far, and also this: simply to symbolize how openness to cultural diversity is an important value for us.
But here is what I’m proposing: a short preface to the words of covenant. Words that remind us of the dream of freedom and the long journey we’ve been on and are on and will invest our tomorrows in.
A preface that goes like this:
We come to this good morning
remembering the long journey of freedom.
The land we are on was once another’s.
Legacies of oppression harm us all.
Healing is our way forward.
Joy is the birthright of everyone.
And so we say:
Love is the spirit of this church,
And service is its law.
And so on….
Can we try this and see how it goes?
Can we do this, and in this way give clearer context to exactly how love is the spirit of this church, and what the service is that is its law?
Our love is love of freedom for all.
Our service is service to liberation for all.
Our great covenant is about the healing of all, or it is nothing.
To dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love,
and to help one another
is about one thing: joy, which is everyone’s birthright!
Let’s try this out in our worship, starting next week, see how it goes.
Thanksgiving is a time of disturbing tensions. Good food and family and football for some. For others, loneliness, loss, perhaps a whole history of loss and oppression. For still others: they are right now in transit. They are refugees braving the journey to a better life, and they are saying
Tomorrow comes, tomorrow comes,
and we shall all be free…
And they are staking their lives on that
And let us join them in that, however we can
I don’t know how many days it will take to get to America
I don’t know how the fight against our tribal instincts will turn out
I don’t know how long the fulfillment of the dream will take
But are we not Americans and alive?
Are we not West Shore and alive?
Long yesterdays ago the First Nations people who owned the land we live upon lost freedom.
But tomorrow comes, tomorrow comes,
and we shall all be free…
Say these names upon the earth with me:
the Wyandotte,
the Mingo,
the Shawnee,
the Delaware,
the Miami,
the Ottawa.
Let us be worthy of them.
We come to this good morning
remembering the long journey of freedom.
The land we are on was once another’s.
Legacies of oppression harm us all.
Healing is our way forward.
Joy is the birthright of everyone.
And so we say:
Love is the spirit of this church,
And service is its law.
This is our great covenant:
to dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love,
and to help one another.
Amen.
Spiritflow 