Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr. Randall Bush

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. RANDALL BUSH SENIOR PASTER, EAST LIBERTY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AT CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA ON THANKSGIVING DAY 23 NOVEMBER 2006



In the six hundred first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, "Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh-birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth-so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth." So Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." (Genesis 8:13-22)



Deep in the sub-basement of the Cathedral of Learning, a musty box was recently opened that contained a six-pack of Iron City beer, two tickets to the 1975 Super Bowl, and a heretofore unknown manuscript by Charles Dickens called "A Thanksgiving Hymn." It was a story about a miserly old man named Ebenezer Scrooge who despised roast turkey, cranberries and anything involving sweet potatoes, until he is visited by the Ghost of Thanksgiving Past and has a sudden change of heart. There is even a young turkey on crutches who's missing a drumstick and named, yes, that's right, Tiny Tom. But at some point Dickens abandoned the project, scribbled in the margin, "Pick a different holiday", and the rest is history.

I'm not sure that Dickens should have abandoned his Thanksgiving tale. Few days in the year are as laden with memories as Thanksgiving. There are construction paper turkeys made from traced handprints; pilgrim figures hung on refrigerator doors; shopping lists and last-minute house cleaning before guests arrive. There are memories of meals shared, faces around a crowded table, moments of prayer, of laughter, of breaking the routine of work and busyness long enough to just be together as family and friends. It is by definition a holiday built on hindsight and retrospection. The Ghosts of Thanksgiving Past not only shape every celebration of Thanksgiving Present, they also intrude upon our secular lives with an annual reminder that we are to pause for one day in November to reflect and to give thanks. In schoolyard parlance, it's a time to count our blessings. In church sanctuary terms, it's a time to admit that we've come this far by grace and grace alone. Thanks be to God.

The problem, though, is that we are especially prone to consider Thanksgivings Past through rose-colored glasses. A pleasant meal of turkey and fixings and pumpkin pie is supposedly the model for this holiday going back to the pilgrim ancestors, continuing up through our own family gathering, and likely to extend unaltered far into the future. But we are seldom well-served by rose-colored remembrances.

A few days ago, I attended a Community Breakfast sponsored by the Wilkinsburg Chamber of Commerce at which the Honorable Livingston Johnson was the guest speaker. Born a few blocks from the banquet hall, I anticipated an upbeat talk about Wilkinsburg's past glory and bright future possibilities. Judge Johnson told how he was born in 1927 in the upstairs bedroom of a house on nearby Ross Avenue. He went on to say that he was born there because when his mother had been in the hospital a few years before delivering Livingston's elder brother, as an African American she had experienced such racist and prejudicial treatment that she'd vowed never to deliver another child in the Wilkinsburg Hospital. I was startled; it wasn't the typical start to a community meal of cafeteria style scrambled eggs, institutional coffee, and anticipated platitudes from the guest speaker.

Judge Johnson went on. He spoke about good times, of college degrees and successful children and happiness. But he also mentioned how his parents had to find a surrogate buyer for their first home because people wouldn't sell homes to blacks; about friends taking turns staying awake at night on the first floor with loaded rifles in case the Ku Klux Klan made a visit; and about how his own son, when his family wished to buy a home in northern Allegheny County, was told by a realtor that the desired home had been sold. But when he visited the site, a kind neighbor pointed out that the For Sale was still out, took him over to meet the owner, who was quite pleasant and showed him around. And despite what Judge Johnson identified as the racist, oppressive behavior of the realtor, his son did manage recently to purchase that home. The judge didn't tell these stories angrily. He wasn't venting or settling a score. He was telling the truth and giving thanks for kind people, like the friends guarding his childhood home or the neighbor who helped his son find a home, while not being afraid to name the ugly side of those same memories.

I'm not sure how well his talk was received overall. But I appreciated his candor. I appreciated his courage not to settle for the polite pablum of most public speaking, but to share his memories in all their frayed and imperfect reality. How better to celebrate Thanksgiving then by acknowledging those things in life that have been overcome and thereby allowing us to say clearly why, on this day, we are truly thankful.

Our collective memory of the first Thanksgiving long ago could benefit from a healthy dose of that type of honest hindsight. We picture cheerful pilgrims stepping off the Mayflower in sunny weather, planting their crops and then celebrating with friendly Indians the first Thanksgiving banquet. We forget that they landed in December 1620. That they were terrified of being ambushed by Indians but extremely anxious to get off the cramped quarters of the Mayflower. That they began their settlement work in earnest on December 25, since the Puritans among the crowd scorned Christmas as a human invention and not a sacred holiday. That the lack of adequate shelter meant a "general sickness" almost wiped out the entire pilgrim company, a virulent combination of scurvy, pneumonia and tuberculosis, brought on by months of poor diet, unsanitary living quarters, exposure and over-exertion that carried off entire families at once. At one point, only six or seven persons in the company were strong enough to work and tend to the others. Only five out of the eighteen wives survived. And at their lowest point, then the Indians appeared on the outskirts of their camp. But they were themselves quite afraid of these foreigners because four years earlier a literal plague had swept down from fishing outposts in Maine and almost wiped out the entire local tribe. But thanks to an English speaking Indian named Squanto, the two groups came to peaceful terms with one another.

By the time harvest season rolled around in 1621, there was reason to be thankful. Thanks to Squanto's help, the pilgrims corn crop had succeeded, even if their English wheat, barley and peas had not. There had been no sickness for months. Eleven houses now lined their town's single street. And some hunters recently returned with enough waterfowl for a veritable feast. Venison, duck, goose, clams and shellfish were the main dishes that first Thanksgiving. Probably no turkey; certainly no pumpkin pie. But in honesty, it was a time for thanksgiving largely because the memories of the deaths of so many comrades were still so fresh in their minds, and they knew that by God's grace and good fortune, they alone were left to see another season in that new land.

We call that event the first Thanksgiving. But I'd suggest that the story described in Genesis 8 is a better candidate for the title of "first Thanksgiving." The flood waters had receded. A weary Noah and his family stepped out of the ark onto dry land, to begin life in a world that had barely survived an act of tremendous judgment. Everything that had been taken for granted before, from the gift of life itself to the belief that every rainstorm eventually subsides, all that had been called into question by God's great flood. As Noah stepped out into the light, he looked back for a moment, remembering the call to build an ark, how the animals came, and how the floodwaters relentlessly rose. Noah looked around for a moment, watching animals stretch their wings and test their legs as they returned to dry land once more. If he could have spoken to a gathered crowd on that day, he would have likely offered his words of thanks for the blessing of life and the grace that has brought him safe thus far, while not being afraid to name the ugly side of those same memories. His hindsight would have been honest, yet ultimately grateful.

We're told Noah lit a fire and made a thank offering, whose aroma rose high into a now cloudless, unthreatening blue sky. As it burnt, a promise came down from on high: Never again will I curse the ground because of humankind; never again will I destroy every living creature. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. The very thing we most often grumble about, the inevitable cycles of life, the routines and ruts that shape our days and seasons, that is what God promised to Noah. And to a man who had seen everything routine and dependable washed away in one ferocious storm, that was an incredibly precious gift to receive.

The Ghosts of Thanksgiving Past shape our celebrations, even our worship, today. We are to be stewards of the entire Thanksgiving tradition that, as Jaroslav Pelikan said, is the living faith given us by the dead, as opposed to being stewards of traditionalism, the dead faith of the living. Even when polite conversation and rules of social etiquette for perfunctory community breakfasts might encourage us to review all our memories through rose-colored glasses, we are better served to speak the truth in love about what has gone before. To name racism's scars, war's insanity, the death toll from disease that touched so many families going back to the pilgrim community, even the waywardness of so much of human life that has stymied parts of God's plans back to the days of Noah.

Part of this holiday is the reminder that despite it all, by grace we are here now. And that is something worth giving thanks for. We step out of the ark and there are seasons promised to unfold before us ad infinitum. We step to the Thanksgiving table, and in all our human frailty and diversity, we find good food there to eat. We silence the insidious noise of the secular world's soundtrack to gather this day to pray and to share another meal, mindful that God is still with us, Christ's victory is still true for all, and the Spirit will sustain us whatever the future brings. And so we are honestly thankful. A story like that, even Dickens himself couldn't have written better.

AMEN