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Thanksgiving Day Nov 27 2003
H
o m i l y G r i t s
Thanksgiving Day - Nov 27, 2003
Copyright Grant Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair
use or quotation )
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the
earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make
us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty, for the provision of
our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of
your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever . Amen.
Deuteronomy 8:1-3, 6-10 (17-20) Remember the long way that the Lord your
God has led you
Psalm 65 or 65: 9-14 Te decet hymnus, You are to be praised O God
James 1: 17-18, 21-27 Every generous act of giving is from above
Matthew 6: 25-33 Look at the birds of the air
I remember as a child being surprised to learn that Canadians had a
Thanksgiving Day and it was not on the same last Thursday in November as
we celebrated it. It was like learning that the Eastern Orthodox had
Christmas in January. How odd, I thought, and how did they get so mixed
up? It was a while before I learned that in every civilization, at
least every one till now,
at least every one based on food sources coming from agricultural cycles
and not only from microwave cycles, there have been harvest festivals to
give thanks to the gods and goddesses for their gifts, the abundance of
the fruits of the earth. It has been a part of our national
self-centeredness in Gringolandia that we haven't cared to learn much
about when or how the rest of the world made eucharist, or even if they
did so. All of Europe kept harvest home long before our Puritan Pilgrim
fathers and mothers had their three day Thanksgiving in 1621 in New
England. The Bible's elaborate rules governing the offering of
firstfruits, and harvest sacrifices, reflect the universal practice of
ancient religion, which acknowledged where the community's life came
> from. The fulfillment of the promise of the land was not to be taken
for granted, any more than the land of promise was to be lightly
assumed. "You shall remember" is the commandment. What is to be
remembered today? All our blessings, surely. The Deuteronomy reading
lists them: good land and pure water: brooks and fountains, springs
and streams, valleys and hills-- an abundance of grains: wheat and
barley, and fruits: vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive trees,
and hives of honey: a homeland where bread is not scarce, where there
is no lack of any good thing. There were no fig trees in my childhood,
nor pomegranates nor olive trees. Those I had to travel far from the
Upper Peninsula to encounter, but I didn't have to travel far to find
abundance: the homelands of all of north America have been blessed not
only with their own abundance but with the "wealth of nations". We
thanked God that we were allowed by capitalism to harvest it all into our
own Harvest Home.
It did not occur to us to ask forgiveness for the wealth we had bought
cheap or pirated from abroad, and we did not give it so much as a burp
of indigestion or a blip on the memory screen to thank the children of
Latin American campesinos that their sacrifices had put turkey on our
table while they had tortilla and salt for breakfast, that their Accion
de Gracias was the misa campesina.
The point of the reading from Deuteronomy is mostly to remember "all the
way the Lord God has led" through the years of hardship, deprivation, and
humbling, as well. Maybe we actually have little of this to recall at
our own family tables. James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice",
now in the Hymnal 1982, emphasizes this more than our white folks'
holiday songs of Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother's
House We Go" or "We plow the fields and scatter".
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us!
And
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.
And
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
thou who hast brought us thus far on the way.
The testing and humbling that God also has given, the hunger that is the
gift of God, and the memory of manna, for which there are no recipes in
our holiday cookbooks, tucked in with the family secrets for oyster
dressing or cranberry-orange relish. What deprivation can our families
recite over the big bosomed bird of Norman Rockwell abundance on this
festive day? What of the desert is to be named in our own pilgrimages?
Dessert we look forward to, but desert we cannot remember. "All good
things around us" we are certain "are sent from heaven above." And this
rubric would include our SUV and our VCR, our fast cars, fast foods, fast
clothes, fast fossil fuels, fast first responders, fast First World
educational opportunities, fast Me First World laid back leisure time and
fast luxury living. As I was deciding today what side dishes to shop
for early in the week to go with the little Butterball I shall get from
the frozen food section at the aptly named La Colonia supermercado on
Wednesday, a poor man who is losing his vision was brought to the door
by one of our English teachers. Would it be possible for us to help with
the cost of the surgery needed to take the tumor from his eye, and then
to buy him a pair of spectacles? None of these things can be expected
now from the neo-liberal government that the U.S. taxpayers so eagerly
installed here to replace the Sandinista socialists, who once had
universal health care and universal free education in their own brief
shining Camelot that time forgot. "You shall remember." In our
Scriptures this means more than nostalgic longing. As in the Eucharist
itself, our supreme thanksgiving, this is a command to call up into the
present by anamnesis, the opposite of amnesia, the re-enlivening of
the great events of our liberation. It means to place upon the table
the stuff of our struggle, not only the stuffed carcass of a fowl but
the memories of the dark past, the stony road, the unborn and still born
hopes. Ironically, Father George Washington proclaimed November 26 in
1789 as a day of thanksgiving not for turkey and trimmings but for the
newly adopted Constitution of the Republic, but most of what it stands
for is not remembered this year, nor will its Bill of Rights, adopted in
1791, be placed alongside the menu to compare with the bill of fare.
There ought to be a firecracker lit at the bosom of every Thanksgiving
turkey for each of the amendments to the constitution. That would liven
things up, like a rocket launcher in Baghdad. The Constitution of the
United States is a continuing struggle, and Amendments to it are a
continuing revolutionary battle ground. The "land" we are now entering
into in the era of Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and their gang is a land
that is as chilly and cold as ever was a New England Thanksgiving. It
will take more than feathered fowls to warm us now. It is a land
forgetful of the way we have trod, and most of the time we do not now
know what we had here once upon a time; indeed, most of the populace--one
hesitates to call them citizens--do not think the Bill of Rights to be
necessary, or even know what they amount to.
On this day and at every Anamnesis of his own offering, Jesus calls us
to the human project of justice in the earth, to a Bill of Righteousness
for all God's children, and for the "Good" and not just for "goodies" or
"goods" to be central in our vision. Human beings everywhere on the
planet ought to be able to take food and shelter, clothing and medicine,
for granted, as freely shared in the human community, just as birds take
feathers for granted, and flowers their fancy faces. They are God's
good gifts to all, not God's gifts to Gringo privilege. What we
cannot take for granted is that God has chosen any body for privilege--or
any nation to grind the faces of the poor, the way the U.S. continues to
do so in its wild rampage through its postponed adolescence. For the
vocation of God's people is always to service and to struggle: service
to the poorest and devotion to the struggle for human liberation, the
struggle for promised land, the struggle for a universe of sharing.
Thanksgiving is a day when we each of us can canonize our own saints into
our own calendar: it is a national holy day, but who it is we remember
before God that day with thanks depends upon where we are coming from and
where we are going. I will gladly remember my Puritan ancestors as
having undone them somewhat, along with Garrison Keillor who said of his
that they left England for the colonies in search of more restrictions
than were legal for them to live under at home. Not so my German
grandparents, whom I also remember with gladness, who fled hunger in East
Prussia to raise cucumber pickles in northern Wisconsin, and dottily
joined the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans in search for the liberty of the
gospel. I give thanks that God has led me to an emancipated Anglicanism
in gay friendly Chicago and gay happy Managua. My many friends who are
African Americans will not remember the Mayflower since their ancestors
came as supercargo on crowded slave ships before it weighed anchor, as
Lerone Bennett, the Black historian, chronicled for us. They will make
eucharist on Thursday in spite of, and not because of their ancestral
voyage. They are lucky to have survived the trip in the loins of their
ancestors. Who are the watchers and the holy ones we will all call up
at the groaning board? John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr? We
each of us ought name the ones who blazed the trail, and were blazed away
at upon the trail. Robinson Jeffers, prescient in 1925, wrote a swan
song for the turkey: Perhaps you will want to read it as a blessing over
the Bird:
Shine, Perishing Republic.
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily
thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and
the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit
rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and
decadence, and home to the mother.
You making haste on decay; not blameworthy; life is good, be it
stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine,
perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet
there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap tha catches noblest spirits, that caught--they
say--God, when he walked on earth. (1)
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 3rd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
(1) Robinson Jeffers (1887-1963). Copyright by Robinson Jeffers renewed
1953, from the Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Chief Modern Poets of
Britain and America. Selected and edited by Gerald DeWitt Sanders , John
Herbert Nelson, M.L.Rosenthal. New York and London: Macmillan and
Collier Macmillan. copyright 1970.
Appeal for Your charity in solidarity with the ministry of Casa Ave
Maria. Budget cuts amongst donors who have long generously paid the small
salaries of the teachers in our Escuelita, our "little school" next door
to the guest house, have now compelled me to ask for the financial help
of those who receive Homily Grits or benefit from someone else having
read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested them. Many of you know the
work of the Casa in this poor barrio, and the classes we offer free to
neighborhood youth, in English, computers, piano, guitar, singing, and
dancing. And the ministry of healing we offer in helping people with the
costs of medicine and dentistry. And the hospitality we offer to
pilgrims and solidarity workers, along with the opportunity to enter into
the life of the plain people of Nicaragua, our solidarity with
Nicaraguan artists, artisans, poets, musicians.
Some of you know also of my own devotion to the struggles of the
Palestinian and Arab peoples, and of my pilgrimage with Chritian
Peacemaker Teams to Hebron, and to the ancient holy land of Abraham and
Sarah, in Iraq, a year ago. I would like very much to continue these
various ministries, and as I enter my 72nd year in January I want to go
back to Cuba with the usual suspects, who are old friends. So this foot
note is a blatant appeal for dollar charity in solidarity with these
requests. I put all of my begs in this one askit. Checks by the usual
routes, or to me directly: Casa Ave Maria, Box # (Apartado) RP-10,
Managua, Nicaragua, C.A. Hasta la victoria siempre. GRANT IN
MANAGUA. And thanks to those of you who have already sent your
solidarity.