Gratitude is the Language of the Heart

Sermon delivered at All Souls Community Church

In Grand Rapids Michigan

Thanksgiving Sunday, November 23, 2003

Copyright ©

The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

They are our country’s forbears and our Unitarian spiritual ancestors.

It’s not that we misunderstand them all that much.  The Pilgrims were much more religiously severe than we are today.  But, in their day the Pilgrims were not unique in their religious devotion.  Their religious community did not contain what we would call tolerance, as every Pilgrim thought him or herself to possess the true form of Christianity.  So, how could they be our ancestors, we who are so liberal in our religiosity that there are in this congregation all kinds of different beliefs and in the homes of our people all kinds of rituals and customs practiced?  How could the religious devout and severe be our ancestors?

They are our spiritual ancestors because they sought the same thing for the human spirit as we do: freedom.  Their desire for it was so strong as to take them on a perilous journey, risking life, fortune, and sacred honor!  They ventured after a spirit alive in the world that is framed by freedom, and they agreed together, covenanted together, that they would walk alongside one another wherever the free search for that spirit would take them.  They promised to be with each other in that spirit, to be faithful to and with each other through all that life would bring, as a form of the spiritual life that would elicit and expand the spirit of freedom, the spirit of the holy, of the highest, of God.  That promise to one another took them away from the life they had known and into the unknown and uncertain.  In some instances this promise to one another divided families when the covenant they made with one another took them away from adherence to the doctrines of the Church of England and into the open waters of a voyage of the spirit.

They thought that living together in this way would yield justice, and they were so convinced of this that they left the security of their homes to find and create it in a new one.  They are our country’s forbears because their search for how to live in freedom, liberty, and justice eventually became our experiment in democracy.  Their search has become the form our common life has taken ever since, like so many others who through the years have sought freedom and liberty and justice in human affairs: slaves, abolitionists, women, immigrants, Protestants, Jews, Catholics, practitioners of the world’s faiths, Civil Rights marchers, gays, lesbians, the disenfranchised, the advocates of voters’ rights, the world’s tired and poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  A Pilgrims’ voyage is humanity search for the spirit of God through freedom, liberty, and justice in human affairs.

Their brutal voyage of discovery was a pilgrimage of the spirit.  For this freedom, they were displaced from their homes in England by their expulsion from the Church of England.  For this freedom, they moved to Amsterdam and were largely shunned by a Dutch culture that considered them outsiders.  For this freedom they bargained with an English venture capitalist company to become that company’s workers in a New World in exchange for passage across the ocean.  For this freedom they packed 102 men and women and children, all their belongings, all their livestock, on a boat smaller than this building’s foyer, with a crew hostile to their aims and to them.  For this freedom they took a treacherous voyage across a fierce ocean that most had never experienced before.  For this freedom they were blown off course and settled far north of the warm Virginia coastline they were seeking.  For this freedom they arrived on November 21, 1620 to a rocky soil unfit for cultivation, which made little difference since the Pilgrims knew so little about farming.  For this freedom they endured the death of half of them in the first three months!  It was either a supreme act of faith or a ridiculously stupid undertaking, or a bit of both!  In other words, it was a voyage of discovery and a pilgrimage of the spirit.  And that glorious and foolish aspiration for freedom was re-enacted by this church and its members when this community was first gathered together!

We berate the Pilgrims for their narrow-mindedness.  We rebuke them for their religious severity.  We criticize them for holding archaic customs and smothering social roles.  We scold and scorn them for their unrepentant and uncritical imperialism, the audacity to think they could just come to a new continent and claim its land as theirs.  And we disregard them because we have heard their story so many times over the years that we long to hear a new and different one to relieve tired ears and exhausted imaginations.  All of this is understandable and warranted.  But they achieved and exhibited a spirit that insured their survival.  And absent a similar spirit today, we surely perish.  They were not afraid, and without fear, a faith possessed them that made them grateful for the gift of human difference!  Sitting down with the Native American Wampanoag tribe to share in the fellowship of a common meal, becomes, four centuries later, the event of God’s presence.  They “got” what so many of the religious folk of our time don’t “get.”  Humanity needs a new and wider communion, a communion of the free spirit.

When the English, Protestant Christian, white, stiffly dressed Pilgrim sat down to share a meal with the North American, indigenous, earth-religious, dark skinned, loosely clad Wampanoag, there emerged a portrait of human fellowship that is profoundly religious and holy because it uncovers the deepest human bond.  We are all children of God.  All souls spring from a unitary spirit, from a creative impulse in existence that issues forth in multiple ways every moment; a oneness that transcends our separation.  There is a single unity from which all the vast and innumerable variations of this creativity flow.  The faith both the Pilgrims and Indians had, regardless even of whether they grasped it or not, was that underneath all, however you say it or by whatever name you call it, the spirit of God is one.  And every member of the human family, all souls are united in that common origin and source.  As numerous and different as we are, we are, paradoxically, one family in and by virtue of this spirit.

In that act of eating and drinking with others unlike them, in the gratitude for their survival that graced that table, the freedom of the spirit was again made real.  They didn’t need the destruction of the world for that spirit to come alive again.  They just needed a gratitude for the gift of the human family and the bonds that unite it as from a common source, for that spirit to come alive again over which death has no dominion.

Let us pray:

O God, we gather this day in the spirit of thanks and in the spirit of giving.  Surrounded by life in the form of faces foreign and familiar, we would be reminded that our gratitude is not in proportion to what we’ve been given, nor is our sharing to be done in hopes of a reward.  Gratitude elicits the spirit of freedom, the evidence of our origin in the creative oneness that is God.  And sharing is the fullest and most complete expression of what human life is.  We lift up our hearts in gratitude for our lives and for the blessings of the good earth that sustain us.  For we have been formed for a noble purpose and did not make ourselves.  May gratitude be in our hearts, the gift of sharing in our hands, and the spirit of freedom always our life’s destination.

AMEN.