THANKSGIVING RESPONSIBLY

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, noVEmber 18, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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Usually, it begins when I think about the turkey.

I mean, come on, how is it a Happy Thanksgiving for the turkey?

There he is, eating his grain, growing plump, wiggling his waddle and snood (for those don’t know, the wattle is the fleshy growth under the chin and the snood is the fleshy growth on top of the bill which hangs down the side of the face).  So, there the turkey is—with wattle and snood—gobbling with his buds, shaking his tail feathers at all the lady turkeys (or perhaps, if he is so inclined, at the other Tom Turkeys) and the next moment his head has been separated from his neck, he is plucked naked as a jay-bird, and a few days later someone’s hands are shoving chunks of celery, chestnuts, spicy sausage, and stale bread up his behind. Happy Thanksgiving indeed!

I guess it goes to show that one person’s Thanksgiving dinner can be the beginning of someone else’s misfortune.

I think back to that first mythic Thanksgiving Day in the Plymouth Colony, a meal that most likely took place in early October 1621, eleven months after the Mayflower had first landed in Provincetown.  According to the first-hand accounts of Edward Winslow and William Bradford, that first Thanksgiving feast lasted several days, and consisted of waterfowl and venison, along with corn, barley, turkey, cod and bass.  About ninety members of the Wampanoag Confederation of Tribes were present, including Massasoit, the chief, and Tisquantum, the translator.  It had been a rough eleven months for those Pilgrims.  By that October meal, over half the original 102 brave Christian fundamentalists had succumbed to illness, exhaustion, exposure, or starved to death.  Those few surviving Puritans were thankful simply to be alive.

But, according to author Nathaniel Philbrick, it is so easy for us to forget that the uneasy truce between the Natives and the Pilgrims was a forced peace, forced by Pilgrim threats to unleash a deadly plague on Massasoit and his warriors, a plague the Pilgrims claimed was kept in a jar they had hidden in a hole in the ground.  It is so easy for us to forget that within fifty-three short years after that Thanksgiving meal, the Plymouth Colonies and the Massachusetts Bay Colonies would be engaged in one of the proportionally bloodiest and costliest wars fought on North American soil, a war which nearly wiped out the English colonists and natives.  In this bloodbath, six hundred Puritans would be killed and three thousand Indians would be slaughtered.  Hundreds of other Native Americans would be captured and shipped into slavery to Bermuda, while many other Native women and children would be forced to become servants in the homes of New England, in such towns as Andover, Weymouth, Plymouth, and Sudbury.  Happy Thanksgiving indeed!

All this reminds me that things aren’t always as they appear.  There is always a larger context to our abundance.  There is always a larger context to any thanks and gratitude. 

I believe that people of faith, people who are seeking a spiritual perspective, people hoping to cultivate a life of religious, moral, and ethical integrity need to look at the larger context.  We need to look at our history in a larger context.  We need to look at our present choices in a larger context.  We need to look at our lives in a larger context. We are connected to much more than we imagine.  We are responsible for much more than we like to admit. 

What does it mean for us to sit down to a Thanksgiving Dinner that commemorates the beginning of a genocide against Native America, a systematic slaughter of an entire race, religion and society of indigenous people? 

What does it means for us to sit down to a Thanksgiving Dinner when we, the benefactors and descendants of those who perpetrated that genocide, still confine the few remaining indigenous people to poverty-ridden reservations, where alcoholism, unemployment, and third-world living conditions continue to strip away humanity and hope?

What does it mean for us to sit down to a turkey dinner when many of the birds we’ve stuffed and roasted will have been raised in horrific conditions, confined to small cages, pumped full of feed and growth hormones?  What does it mean that our Tom Turkeys are now genetically engineered to create more of the coveted breast meat, so that now turkeys literally cannot walk and simply lay listless and grow meatier until they are slaughtered for our supper?

What does it mean for us to give thanks in our warm homes in a country that allows thousands to languish in the still reeking wreckage of hurricane Katrina?

What does it mean to gather our families together for feasting, fun and football, when we, as a nation, have decimated the families, infrastructure, and future of Iraq?

What does it mean for us to gather in church to count up the blessings of our lives, when we, as a nation, have sent thousands of our young men and women to their death in the streets of Baghdad? 

What does it mean for us to give thanks for health and happiness in a country that has allowed over twenty-nine thousand soldiers, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, Moms and Dads, brothers, sisters, boyfriends, girlfriends, nieces, nephews, and fiancés to be severally injured or left disabled by improvised explosive devices and other attacks?

What does it mean to spend money to broadcast football games and parades, when there will be children and women and men in the same cities as those football stadiums who won’t have the means to heat their homes that night?

What does it mean to give thanks for the Red Sox World Series win, a team that paid $100 million to gain the winning pitching talent of Dice-K, when there are women and men in this city who work two and three jobs and still cannot earn a living wage and support their families?

What does it means that we collect food items so that people in this town will have a meal on Thanksgiving Thursday, but we never truly challenge the economic and social framework that allows those same people to go hungry on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday?

These are questions without easy answers.  These are questions, perhaps, without any answers.  But that doesn’t mean we should not ask them.

I’m not suggesting we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.  I’m not suggesting we don’t feast with family and friends.  I’m not suggesting we don’t watch the games.  I’m not suggesting we should not be grateful for our past, present, and future.  But I am suggesting that we should approach this Thanksgiving with awareness.  I’m suggesting that we celebrate this holiday responsibly.

Unitarian Univeralist minister A. Powell Davies wrote:

When we give thanks for what is given to us and not to others, let us remember to pray softly, for there will be many who will overhear.

Let conscience search our gratitude!  This bounty did not come to us because, more than others, we are deserving.

O Spirit of Truth, rebuke us—until the needy multitudes press in upon our prayers.

These are our sisters and brothers!  We are one family.

O Life, for whom we are grateful, help us to remember the many who will overhear!

On Thursday, as our bellies become full, I pray that our hearts, conscience and commitment will not become empty. 

May it be so.  Blessed Be.  Amen.

©Copyright 2007 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.