Thanksgiving and Truth
A Reading from History
The Mayflower Compact, 1620
The Mayflower Compact, 1620
In the name of God, Amen.
We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, king, defender of the faith etc.:
Having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia;
Do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord, King James of England, France and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth.
Anno Domini 1620.
A Reading from Scripture
1 Timothy 2:1-7
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all--this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
Word of God, Word of Life. Thanks be to God.
We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, king, defender of the faith etc.:
Having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia;
Do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord, King James of England, France and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth.
Anno Domini 1620.
A Reading from Scripture
1 Timothy 2:1-7
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all--this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
Word of God, Word of Life. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I am here to do the Thanksgiving dance.
What I mean by this, is that I enjoy Thanksgiving—I really do—but we have to admit it’s a weird a holiday. It’s neither quite history nor myth, not religious nor secular.
On the one hand it holds up wonderful things: faith and family, hearth and home, thankfulness for all that we have been given, the bounty we are called to share. On the other hand, it can be rather tone deaf, celebrating a specifically Protestant, Anglo-Saxon national origin, while ignoring the people who had already been here for thousands of years, and all of the people who were brought here against their will.
But the good news is that Thanksgiving has proven itself to be flexible. It has undergone many iterations, many evolutions, in just the last few centuries. And so I think it has the potential to undergo another: to return to its roots, not as a triumphalist, nationalist narrative; but as a day of humility and brotherhood and thanks.
The Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas. If you knew anything about them, you probably knew that. They thought that most holy days on the Church calendar were papist inventions, which to them meant pagan. Our holidays aren’t pagan, of course. They’re mostly reinterpretations of Jewish feasts. But the Puritans didn’t get that, and frustratingly the accusation has stuck.
What they did have were days of Thanksgiving, declared in response to specific events: a good harvest, surviving the winter, success in battle. And these days of Thanksgiving usually involved fasting, repentance, and a full day in church. As New England grew and prospered, however, the children and grandchildren of the Pilgrim founders got into a sort of rhythm with this. They came to expect regular days of Thanksgiving announced in the autumn and the spring.
And eventually, to be quite honest, that annual autumn Thanksgiving—now less penitential and more a harvest feast—became the way for descendants of Puritans to celebrate Christmas while still claiming that they didn’t celebrate Christmas. Kind of like how Guy Fawkes is Halloween for people who hate Halloween. And this largely remained a regional New England observance, though it spread to parts of the Midwest settled primarily by Yankees.
You probably know that in the wake of the Civil War Thanksgiving gained prominence as a national holiday: an attempt at healing the divide between North and South, by giving us a common celebration of thanks that the war had ended and the nation was once again whole. That’s nice, right? Kind of sweet. But then things start to get messy.
See, following the Civil War, the United States, both North and South, engaged in scores of Indian Wars as the nation pushed West under the banner of Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile, back East, floods of new immigrants were pouring into port: Irish, Italians, Slavs, Jews. And then there were all those newly emancipated Black folk who had been enslaved for generations, and the Mexicans in newly conquered territories.
The face of America was changing. And this frightened reactionaries who didn’t want to lose their privilege and their power.
So a national myth was popularized, based on an obscure feast at Plymouth in 1621—a supposed First Thanksgiving that wasn’t any sort of Thanksgiving at all. Here were Protestant, Anglo-Saxon peoples being welcomed by friendly Natives. The English Puritans became the “real” Americans, pious and hardy, fulfilling divine decree by going forth into a new Promised Land, driving out the Canaanites.
It was a reassertion of who’s on top in the racial and ethnic hierarchy of the United States. And throughout the twentieth century, generations of school children have literally acted out and internalized this story of our national origins. This was beautifully lampooned, by the way, in the 1993 film Addams Family Values, in which those Americans who did not fit neatly into the play—those who were not able-bodied yuppie WASPs—stage a Thanksgiving revolution of their own.
My own family history has bizarre connections to all this. The first Stout in America was hired to be an Indian fighter, yet his family was saved by a compassionate Native tribe. We also had an ancestor on the Mayflower—a Pilgrim but not a Puritan—who drank and fought and in whose household Squanto lived at Plymouth. This is part of my heritage, part of my history. And I’ve got to square with that like everyone else.
It’s true that the Pilgrims were faithful, brave, and intrepid. They built a city and a civilization, not so much in the midst of a wilderness as in the midst of a ghost town that had been devastated by the Plague. But their arrival and unlikely success are seen, in retrospect, as tragedies by those people whom the colonies of New England would eventually displace or destroy.
And now here’s where I get preachy, for of course I am a preacher. God was not the God of the Puritans alone. The Creator was well known to Native tribes, African Muslims, Mexican Catholics. Many Natives, including a surprising number of the great war chiefs, were Christians by their own choice. They wanted the Good News of Jesus Christ our Lord. They just didn’t want to give up who they were in order to know Him. They saw that being Christian was distinct from being English, a lesson that the Puritans never really understood.
It seems to me that if we truly want to have a Day of Thanksgiving, then we need to return to what Thanksgiving originally was: a time of humility, of repentance, of confessing the truth of our sins; of loving our neighbor as Christ has first loved us. We must reject the notion, so deeply ingrained in our culture, that a “real” American is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And we must also reject the twin conviction that a “real” Christian is a White middle-class American Evangelical.
Look—we can’t change how we got here. But we can change where we’re going. I don’t want Thanksgiving to become just one more politicized piece in the culture wars of Red vs Blue. If we desire a Day of Thanksgiving, then let’s do it right. Let’s be honest of our faults, confessing our sins, listening to the voices of the marginalized and oppressed, and loving our neighbor as Jesus commands.
In Christ there is new birth and the forgiveness of our sins. And this forgiveness subsists in perfect mercy and perfect justice, which in God are both alike perfect truth.
To be Christian and to be American are not the same things. Blending them together as we have in the past is an affront both to the Church and to the State. Only when we understand that all are equal in the grace and love of God, and that all ought to be equal under the laws and ideals of this nation, will we all together truly know what it is, as one people, to give thanks.
May God have mercy on our nation, teach us to share the bounty of all we have been given by His grace, and to repent of all that we have taken from His children.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I am here to do the Thanksgiving dance.
What I mean by this, is that I enjoy Thanksgiving—I really do—but we have to admit it’s a weird a holiday. It’s neither quite history nor myth, not religious nor secular.
On the one hand it holds up wonderful things: faith and family, hearth and home, thankfulness for all that we have been given, the bounty we are called to share. On the other hand, it can be rather tone deaf, celebrating a specifically Protestant, Anglo-Saxon national origin, while ignoring the people who had already been here for thousands of years, and all of the people who were brought here against their will.
But the good news is that Thanksgiving has proven itself to be flexible. It has undergone many iterations, many evolutions, in just the last few centuries. And so I think it has the potential to undergo another: to return to its roots, not as a triumphalist, nationalist narrative; but as a day of humility and brotherhood and thanks.
The Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas. If you knew anything about them, you probably knew that. They thought that most holy days on the Church calendar were papist inventions, which to them meant pagan. Our holidays aren’t pagan, of course. They’re mostly reinterpretations of Jewish feasts. But the Puritans didn’t get that, and frustratingly the accusation has stuck.
What they did have were days of Thanksgiving, declared in response to specific events: a good harvest, surviving the winter, success in battle. And these days of Thanksgiving usually involved fasting, repentance, and a full day in church. As New England grew and prospered, however, the children and grandchildren of the Pilgrim founders got into a sort of rhythm with this. They came to expect regular days of Thanksgiving announced in the autumn and the spring.
And eventually, to be quite honest, that annual autumn Thanksgiving—now less penitential and more a harvest feast—became the way for descendants of Puritans to celebrate Christmas while still claiming that they didn’t celebrate Christmas. Kind of like how Guy Fawkes is Halloween for people who hate Halloween. And this largely remained a regional New England observance, though it spread to parts of the Midwest settled primarily by Yankees.
You probably know that in the wake of the Civil War Thanksgiving gained prominence as a national holiday: an attempt at healing the divide between North and South, by giving us a common celebration of thanks that the war had ended and the nation was once again whole. That’s nice, right? Kind of sweet. But then things start to get messy.
See, following the Civil War, the United States, both North and South, engaged in scores of Indian Wars as the nation pushed West under the banner of Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile, back East, floods of new immigrants were pouring into port: Irish, Italians, Slavs, Jews. And then there were all those newly emancipated Black folk who had been enslaved for generations, and the Mexicans in newly conquered territories.
The face of America was changing. And this frightened reactionaries who didn’t want to lose their privilege and their power.
So a national myth was popularized, based on an obscure feast at Plymouth in 1621—a supposed First Thanksgiving that wasn’t any sort of Thanksgiving at all. Here were Protestant, Anglo-Saxon peoples being welcomed by friendly Natives. The English Puritans became the “real” Americans, pious and hardy, fulfilling divine decree by going forth into a new Promised Land, driving out the Canaanites.
It was a reassertion of who’s on top in the racial and ethnic hierarchy of the United States. And throughout the twentieth century, generations of school children have literally acted out and internalized this story of our national origins. This was beautifully lampooned, by the way, in the 1993 film Addams Family Values, in which those Americans who did not fit neatly into the play—those who were not able-bodied yuppie WASPs—stage a Thanksgiving revolution of their own.
My own family history has bizarre connections to all this. The first Stout in America was hired to be an Indian fighter, yet his family was saved by a compassionate Native tribe. We also had an ancestor on the Mayflower—a Pilgrim but not a Puritan—who drank and fought and in whose household Squanto lived at Plymouth. This is part of my heritage, part of my history. And I’ve got to square with that like everyone else.
It’s true that the Pilgrims were faithful, brave, and intrepid. They built a city and a civilization, not so much in the midst of a wilderness as in the midst of a ghost town that had been devastated by the Plague. But their arrival and unlikely success are seen, in retrospect, as tragedies by those people whom the colonies of New England would eventually displace or destroy.
And now here’s where I get preachy, for of course I am a preacher. God was not the God of the Puritans alone. The Creator was well known to Native tribes, African Muslims, Mexican Catholics. Many Natives, including a surprising number of the great war chiefs, were Christians by their own choice. They wanted the Good News of Jesus Christ our Lord. They just didn’t want to give up who they were in order to know Him. They saw that being Christian was distinct from being English, a lesson that the Puritans never really understood.
It seems to me that if we truly want to have a Day of Thanksgiving, then we need to return to what Thanksgiving originally was: a time of humility, of repentance, of confessing the truth of our sins; of loving our neighbor as Christ has first loved us. We must reject the notion, so deeply ingrained in our culture, that a “real” American is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And we must also reject the twin conviction that a “real” Christian is a White middle-class American Evangelical.
Look—we can’t change how we got here. But we can change where we’re going. I don’t want Thanksgiving to become just one more politicized piece in the culture wars of Red vs Blue. If we desire a Day of Thanksgiving, then let’s do it right. Let’s be honest of our faults, confessing our sins, listening to the voices of the marginalized and oppressed, and loving our neighbor as Jesus commands.
In Christ there is new birth and the forgiveness of our sins. And this forgiveness subsists in perfect mercy and perfect justice, which in God are both alike perfect truth.
To be Christian and to be American are not the same things. Blending them together as we have in the past is an affront both to the Church and to the State. Only when we understand that all are equal in the grace and love of God, and that all ought to be equal under the laws and ideals of this nation, will we all together truly know what it is, as one people, to give thanks.
May God have mercy on our nation, teach us to share the bounty of all we have been given by His grace, and to repent of all that we have taken from His children.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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