Praise and Thanksgiving

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

www.secondparish.org

November 19, 2006

Roger Williams was one of the early dissenters against the theocrats who established the colony at Boston.  He had also been a dissenter in England and had hoped by sailing with his wife to Boston in 1630 to find an opportunity to serve as a minister while being true to his own conscience.  He quickly found himself at odds with the Puritan leaders because of his convictions, among them these:

[T]hat the magistrate should not punish religious infractions — [which] meant that the civil authority should not be the same as the ecclesiastical authority. [His] second idea — that people should have freedom of opinion on religious matters — he called "soul-liberty."[1]

While the particulars of his theological convictions differed from ours—for example, he believed in adult baptism and was one of the founders of the first Baptist church in the United States—his support for freedom of conscience puts him on the side of heretics and religious liberals like Unitarians and Universalists throughout our history. 

It was undoubtedly deeply disappointing to the leaders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that in only six short years their “City on a Hill” planted in the wilderness as a place to nurture religious truth had become the scene of dissention and dispute such as might have been expected at home in England but hardly among the like-minded saints who had risked so much to find freedom to be together.  Williams himself, one of the major sources of friction, wondered whether their success and prosperity was not itself in part the source of their disharmony.  He put the question in the context of the scripture and asked “[Why] is the heart of a David himself (Psalm 30) more apt to decline from God upon the mountain of joy, deliverance, victory, prosperity, than in the dark vale of the shadow of death, persecution, sickness, adversity, etc.?”[2]  In that Psalm, David remembers that “I said in my prosperity, "I shall never be moved." By your favor, O LORD, you had established me as a strong mountain; [and then] you hid your face; I was dismayed.”  [Psalm 30:6-7]

Let me broaden the question.  Why is it that we seem less grateful the more we have?  Roger Williams’ language is a little obscure to us now after 400 years, but the question is simple:  Why do we often find those who are poor more grateful for what they have than those who are rich?  Why do we find those who have recovered from serious illness more grateful for the life they have than those who have enjoyed year after year of robust health?  Why do you almost never hear in middle class churches what you will always hear in inner city Black churches:  “I give thanks to God that he allowed me to wake up this morning for another day”?  How do lose the impulse to say “Thank you”?

One obvious and easy answer is that we begin to have theological issues—who or what is it that we are thanking, after all?  What does it mean to give thanks to God for the food each day when it’s clear that we had to earn the money to buy it and someone else planted, harvested, prepared and transported it?  We set the table ourselves, didn’t we?  Even in Channing’s time only two hundred years ago, the direct link between our food and nature was far clearer.  We plant the seed, he reminds us, but

How many suns must rise and set, how many dews and rains distil!  And what part in all these processes is due to our puny selves?  Can our voice reach the clouds, and command one drop to fall on the parched earth?  Is it through our direction that the root projects its tendrils through the soil, that the light stalk springs up, and the flower unfolds its beauty to the sun and sheds its fragrance through the air?[3]

As we become more remote from nature and more dependent on layer after layer of human action between ourselves and the creation from which all things ultimately derive, it is easy for us to lose sight of our absolute dependence on the reality around us which we did not create and which we cannot ultimately control, on the earth, on the universe, on the source of all that is, on God if you will.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, provides a meditation to remind us of our inter-dependence with all that is.  Take a sheet of paper, he suggests, and look deeply into it; there you will find a cloud, for the tree from which the paper was made cannot grow without rain from the clouds.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore, the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.[4]

All of the myriad things, as the Chinese wisdom tradition calls them, are interrelated.  All ultimately depend upon a source.  We too are part of that dependency, giving and receiving, depending and being depended upon.  Whatever we want to call that on which we ultimately depend—whether we call it the Unnamable, the Mystery, the Spirit of Life, or God, we need to remember that we are dependent and to give thanks for our being.  Finding rituals to give thanks is part of what we do here in our worship.

We lose sight of our dependency in the hustle and bustle of everyday living and we need to remember to take the time each day to call ourselves back to mindfulness of our selves, of the reality which surrounds us and makes our lives possible, and of the source of that reality to which we give thanks.  But beyond that there’s an arrogance which leads us imagine that we have somehow “made it” and made it on our own.  King David in the Psalm that Roger Williams cited says, “I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall never be moved.’”  When we become prosperous, when we have quite a bit of money, some resources, a good 401(k) plan and health coverage, we say in our prosperity, “I’ve got it made.”  Jesus tells a parable about a man who believed he was all set in Luke.  He says: 

12:15 … "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."  

16 Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly.  17 And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?'  18 Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  19 And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'  20 But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'  21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."   22 He said to his disciples, "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.

Living in the midst of plenty here in a prosperous town it’s easy to lose sight of where we come from and where we’re going.  Besides, we have to work pretty hard just to stay ahead.  We have high standards for ourselves; we want to be independent, we want to take care of our own needs.  All of that is to the good and is what makes us prosperous and productive.  As Channing said, we are put in circumstances where we must work hard to survive and prosper, and hard work usually is and ought to be rewarded.  But let us not in succeeding imagine we have done it all on our own, that we are (if such were possible), “self-made.”  As Channing warns,

“Surrounded by a visible creation, on which we act with success, we call ourselves its lords, and forget its creator and upholder.  Our own will seems to work out our welfare.  And selfishness magnifies our agency, until self-idolatry creeps in to poison all life’s blessings.”[5]

In the front of the sanctuary are 111 bags which represent 111 families here in Hingham who have not been able to prosper sufficiently to have a good Thanksgiving meal without the help of the Food Pantry which we host here.  They stand witness that we are not our own and that we cannot always make it on our own.  We believe there are more bags this year than in any previous year, during a period which is being touted as a time of unprecedented national prosperity.  The work of the members of this parish and of the entire interfaith community symbolize a commitment to sharing and caring, to doing for others as we would have others do for us, to helping provide daily bread.  That commitment is part of creating a beloved community which we can depend upon for provisions, for counsel, for comfort, for visits and friendship when things go well for us and when things go badly.  Being part of this blessed community, befriending and thanking, giving and receiving, reminds us of what we owe each other and how much more we owe to the source of all things.

Many of our Thanksgiving dinners offer the opportunity to meditate on the concept of “enough.”  Too often the temptations of the table leave us unpleasantly full with more than enough.  The rich man in the parable was not content with enough grain to fill the barns he had—he wanted bigger barns to handle the grain he got.  Is the growing size of houses in our nation necessary to accommodate our real needs?  Does the replacement of one of the beautiful old houses of this town with a much larger new house represent real needs or does it serve vanity and pride?  Is there any relationship between there being more large houses and there being many homeless people?  Is there any correlation between the number of large houses and the number of bags at the front of our sanctuary? 

We give thanks for the blessings we have received, for being well fed and housed.  We give thanks for our lives.  We give thanks that we were able to wake up this morning to enjoy another day.  We give thanks for each breath we take.  We give thanks that we have enough.

I find that on Thanksgiving it is also necessary to consider the Native Americans who occupied this land before the Europeans came here starting in 1620 in Plymouth, in 1630 to Boston, and here in Hingham in 1635.  A recent visit Deedee and I took to Plimouth Plantation included an interesting conversation with one of the Indians in a re-creation of a 1620 Wampanoag village who reminded us that many of the travelers on the Mayflower had come with the intention of profiting from the fur trade and the extraction of minerals.  The result was that the careful balance with nature in which the Indians had lived was disrupted by the newcomers, who were not interested merely in having enough to live on but were instead intent on gaining as much profit as could be found in this new land.  This was very much the European attitude toward nature in general at that time—especially nature in the New World, which they hoped would reward them with sufficient riches to claim a higher position in the Old World. 

Have we changed our attitudes toward nature so much from those days?  Or do we still see nature as an infinite resource from which we may extract whatever profits us regardless of consequences?  The Northern Banks have been fished for cod so intensively that the codfish population off our coasts collapsed long since.  Our fishing fleets have only grown larger and more aggressive in the meantime, and now we find fishing factories which are literally cleaning out all of the fish down to the bottom of the ocean.  Recent predictions that all of the fish in the ocean could be essentially extinct within the next fifty years may be overly pessimistic, but natural resources are not infinite.  Can we humans learn to say “enough” before we have put Mother Nature herself into an irreversible decline?  Can we as individuals, as families, as towns, as nations, as citizens of the world, find ways of saying “enough,” of trusting that we will receive our daily bread, of being grateful for what we have rather than believing that we need constantly yet more?

I’m glad to say that Roger Williams was a dissenter from his contemporaries in his attitude toward the Indians as well.  He showed his respect for their human dignity, worked very hard to learn their languages, and insisted on dealing with them on a basis of equality at all times.  He did his best to ensure that any land settled by Europeans should be fairly purchased from the Indians.  Who could have imagined what has become of this part of the world since 1620?  The reversal of fortune which has occurred since that first Thanksgiving in which the Pilgrims were hosted by their generous neighbors gives testimony in part to the failure of the newcomers to observe traditions of hospitality deep in the roots of their own Judeo-Christian belief which call upon us to welcome the stranger and to do to our neighbor as we would have done to us.

Gratitude is an important part of learning to say “enough.”  Gratitude allows us to bring our focus around to what we have rather than what we don’t have.  It relieves us of worry because it helps us to enjoy things as they are.  It relieves us of stress because we come to understand that our lives are not solely dependent on our own efforts.  I’m glad I decided to say “enough” to the monetary rewards offered by working on Wall Street and find more lasting rewards working here.  I know some of you have made similar choices to orient your lives around quality rather than quantity, time rather than money.  Praise and thanksgiving give us freedom; they prolong our lives by allowing us to enjoy our days and to draw from our living the strength to face each passing moment and to benefit from it, whatever that moment may bring.  The Guest at Your Table boxes the children distributed offer an opportunity to pause each day and give thanks—and to share from our bounty with others.  The Psalms give us many examples of this sort of praise from our tradition.  Here’s the shortest Psalm, number 117: 

“Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!  For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Praise the LORD!”

I’d like to close with Stephen Mitchell’s adaptation of Psalm 150:

Praise God in the depths of the universe;
praise him in the human heart.

Praise him for his power and beauty,
for his all-feeling, fathomless love.

Praise him with drums and trumpets,
with string quartets and guitars.

Praise him in market and workplace,
with computer, with hammer and nails.

Praise him in bedroom and kitchen;
praise him with pots and pans.

Praise him in the temple of the present;
let every breath be his praise.

 

Amen


[2] Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism, Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 13.

[3] William Ellery Channing, “Life a Divine Gift,” The Works of William E. Channing, D.D., Boston:  American Unitarian Association, 1896, p. 967.

[4] Thich Nhat Hanh:  Essential Writings, Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001, p. 55.

[5] Channing, p. 966.