November 20, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Thanksgiving

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
Luke 17:11–19

“Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving.”

Psalm 167:7 (NRSV)

I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a true blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

e.e. cummings

Our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letters and Papers from Prison

In this season of gratitude, open our eyes to the gifts, unmerited, all around us, the gift of this new day, of family and friends and people to love; the gift of this quiet time together. And as we return thanks, startle us again with your truth and your love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It’s the week of Thanksgiving, and there is a family Thanksgiving tradition I wish to share this morning. It is about a dish, a garnish to accompany roast turkey, so delightful that everyone should know about it. It is called cranberry apple ice. You boil a bag of cranberries and two cups of sugar in three cups of water, then pour it into a food mill and process. Grate four apples, uncooked, into the mix, and freeze, and after the turkey has been carved and is ready to serve, you retrieve the cranberry apple ice from the freezer, cut it into cubes, and serve it between the turkey and mashed potatoes. Now you know. It has been a part of Thanksgiving dinner all my life, and we have passed it on to our children and their children.

There is also a story, the mythology of cranberry apple ice. My mother’s father’s father, my great-grandfather, was a man of some wealth. He owned profitable coal mines in the Pennsylvania mountains. Unfortunately he had some very bad investment advice and sold the coal mines to buy gold mines in Colorado that turned out to have no gold in them. He lost everything. But before he did, he and his family were wealthy enough to have an English cook. I loved knowing that, and every now and then a dish would appear at our table that my mother said came from her grandfather’s English cook. Somehow I deduced that cranberry apple ice came from her. That’s what I told my children every Thanksgiving. In fact, they remember my saying that the recipe came over on the Mayflower (children exaggerate, you know). So one time when my mother was spending Thanksgiving with us, they asked about cranberry apple ice and the English cook. Was that true? “Dad tells us this story every year.” “Why, no,” she said, “that’s not true at all.” “Where did cranberry apple ice come from?” they asked. “I clipped the recipe out of the food section of the New York Times,” she said. There went the myth. Cranberry apple ice remains, thanks be to God. (The recipe is available at the end of this sermon.)

Why am I telling you this? Well, for one thing, if you try cranberry apple ice, your Thanksgiving dinner will be enhanced, and you will be grateful for sure. For another thing, the source of the recipe taught me the very important lesson of gratitude. I suspect I’m not the only one whose mother taught the habit of gratitude before the feeling of gratitude arrived. I’m not sure that children come with thankful hearts. I didn’t. A source of constant irritation in my home was my procrastination when it came to saying thank you. The occasion was usually a birthday card with a few dollars tucked inside from my grandmother. “Have you called and thanked her yet?” “No, not yet, but I will.” It went on for days. “Have you thanked her yet?” “No, but I will. I promise.” Finally I was firmly escorted to the telephone and she stood over me as I called my grandmother, who was a real sweetheart herself, and told her how grateful I was for the five-dollar bill. My mother kept at it, well into adulthood, until I finally got it, until the feeling of gratitude caught up with the habit, and for her tenacity, I am deeply grateful.

I love Thanksgiving, because it is the institutionalization of the habit and practice of gratitude. For many people, Thanksgiving is the favorite holiday, precisely because our market economy has not yet learned how to exploit it. No Thanksgiving gifts, a few cards, but not many Thanksgiving parties to attend, just a quiet day—except for those people already camped out in front of Target, to be the first in the store on Black Friday—and a great meal to remind us of simple, but important truths: the goodness of the fertile earth, the delight of good food, the gift of family and friends, and the reality of gratitude.

I love Thanksgiving around here because while Advent is still a week away, in our neighborhood the weekend before Thanksgiving is the time for Christmas to come: the lights to come on down Michigan Avenue and the parade, last night, with bands and floats and crowds of people come to watch Mickey and Minnie Mouse and, of course, Santa Claus at the end. I have to say that the parade, which first began after I arrived in Chicago, began very modestly. Santa, I recall, arrived in the back of a pickup truck, which has been considerably upgraded. What I love best is that our choir, and whoever wants to join them, stands on the front steps of the church singing Christmas carols while all this is going on around them. I have, in the past, joined them and did so last evening, and I always feel that it is the closest thing in my life to Isaiah’s wonderful image of a voice crying in the wilderness. And then, even better, in an amazing feat of high technology, Leszek Pytka and Richard Zurek and staff throw the switch, and Fourth Church’s electric sheep are illuminated at precisely the moment all the tiny lights on the block come on, as Mickey Mouse goes by. Now I don’t know if anyone actually notices this dramatic flourish. But I do—and I love it. I love those sheep quietly grazing all during December while the Christmas crowds bustle by.

So Christmas comes the week before Thanksgiving, and Advent is just around the corner, and it is a great time around here.

Thanksgiving and praising God are at the heart of biblical religion. Israel’s hymn book, the book of Psalms, is full of exuberant praise and thanksgiving for the creator and the creation: “Praise the Lord!” we read together this morning. “How good it is to sing praises to our God, for he is gracious and a song of praise is fitting. . . . Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving.”

Biblical scholars suggest that “giving praise is almost the most natural thing human beings can do.” The psalmist is, say Mark Douglas and Wallace Buhar, “so effusive in praise, so over the top in declaration of God’s goodness that it sounds like a love letter from someone newly smitten” (Mark Douglas and Wallace Buhar, Feasting on the Word, p.145).

The ancient Hebrews’ unique idea was that the creation, the world around us, created by God, is essentially good and that its obvious abundance, the fertility of the earth, rain, sun, trees, and flowers, the amazing creatures, cattle and sheep, lions, mountain goats on the hills, eagles soaring—all of it is a sign of God’s goodness and providence. When you look at the world, the Bible says, you see something of God. Faith begins with an awareness of God’s good and beautiful creation and one’s place in it. And the human response to all of that is first awe and, second, gratitude.

The great Karl Barth said that when you look around and behold all the gifts that have been given you, all you can do is “stammer praise.”

Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown said, “The distinctive word in the Christian vocabulary is ‘grace.’” God as revealed in Jesus Christ is a gracious God. And if grace is the distinctive word to describe God’s attitude toward us, there is also a word to describe the response we are called to make. That word is “gratitude” (Robert McAfee Brown, The Pseudonym of God).

Brown said the best hymn of all, suitable for every occasion—birth, baptism, wedding, ordination, funeral (he planned for it to be sung at his memorial service)—is the great Thanksgiving hymn “Now thank we all our God, with heart and hand and voices . . . who from our mother’s arms hath blessed us on our way.”

It’s not only obligation; it is delight, pleasure, satisfaction. C. S. Lewis once famously observed that the healthiest people he knew were the grateful ones, the ones always thanking. “Praise,” he said, “is almost inner health made audible” (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms).

And Walter Brueggemann: “Praise is not only a human requirement and a human need; it is also a human delight. We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and our worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy” (Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise, p.1).

As I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that I have voiced my praise and thanksgiving, nearly every Sunday of my life: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise God all creatures here below.”

The earth, our home, is God’s creation, God’s gift. And we aren’t doing a very good job of appreciating it, caring for it. For decades, while we should have been paying attention, we have persistently polluted, cluttered, used up, and poisoned the earth, water, and air. Ever since Ronald Reagan removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof, the environment has become a political football, a hot-button issue, and an ideological divide. Instead of attending to pollution and the global warming an overwhelming percentage of scientists know is a fact, we are still listening to a few, a tiny minority, paid by the companies who do the polluting, who try to deny the reality of human culpability in climate change. We just had the hottest summer on record; parts of our country are still experiencing the worst drought in history with attendant larger forest fires. And the issue is not even currently mentioned in political debates and speeches by both parties. For people of faith, it is a theological and moral issue, an issue finally of gratitude or, more accurately, ingratitude for God’s gift of creation designed to sustain us and those who come after us.

There is a great New Testament story about gratitude and health and wholeness. I have found it virtually impossible to think about gratitude without the story of Jesus and the ten lepers. Leprosy was the scourge of life in first-century Palestine. The word referred to any kind of skin disease, some of which was serious, contagious, and fatal. A priest made the diagnosis and the decision that a person with leprosy had to be separated from the community totally, separated even from family, spouse, children. So people with leprosy lived on the margins, literally, usually in small bands, subsisting on begging from a distance and on whatever food their families left for them. Ten lepers approach Jesus. From a distance they call out “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” “Go see the priest,” he tells them, and on the way their leprosy, whatever it was, disappears, so that the priest, when he sees them, declares that they are clean, fit, and safe for life in the community once again. Clearly it is a momentous occasion. One of the ten returns to find Jesus, falls at his feet in profound gratitude. Jesus’ response is interesting: “Were not ten made clean? The other nine, where are they? None of them, except this one, a foreigner in fact, returned to give thanks to God.” To the man himself who did return to express gratitude, he says, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” The nine are healed. This man, who expressed his gratitude is more than healed. His gratitude has made him whole.

From the givers’ point of view, gratitude completes the act of giving. You don’t give a gift in order to receive gratitude, but if you don’t receive it, the act feels empty, incomplete. How foolish it feels to have to ask. “Did you receive my gift? I hadn’t heard, so I wasn’t sure it arrived.”

When you cultivate and practice the habit of gratitude, the experience of gratitude deepens over the years. The late John Updike wrote a personal memoir, Self-Consciousness, in which he remembered his father-in-law exclaiming while driving, “What a view!” about a view no one else in the car appreciated or much noticed. Later, older, Updike wrote, “Like my late father-in-law, am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery the old make that every day and every season has its beauty . . . that even a walk to the mail box is a precious experience. We come again to love the plain world, stones and wood, air and water. The act of seeing itself is glorious and of hearing and feeling and tasting” (John Updike, Self-Consciousness, p. 246).

The years do teach us gratitude, what University of Chicago theologian Langdon Gilkey used to call “the exultation of our own being that surfaces in the thought ‘My God, it’s good to be alive.’”

Poets remind us to pay attention. It’s one of the reasons to read poetry. I discovered this week that Mary Oliver, a favorite of mine, who lives on the tip of Cape Cod, named her cottage “Gratitude.” Her poems are about seeing, noticing, awe, wonder and gratitude.

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers. . . .
Such gifts, bestowed
can’t be rejected.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the
house near the corner, which I have named Gratitude.
(“The Place I Want to Get Back To, “Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver, p. 35)

Question: can you thank and praise God when things are not well with you, when you are not feeling particularly grateful, when you have lost your job or lost a loved one, when a long-held hope just shattered, when a dream died? We must be cautious. Nothing is more unkind than insisting that someone be happy who is not happy, to force a smile when your heart is breaking. But gratitude is deeper and, in a real sense, more profound in difficulty and tragedy. It is precisely in the valley of the shadow when words of thanks are drawn out of us. “Yes, even now thank you, God, thank you for him, thank you for her, thank you for your presence, thank you for your love in Jesus Christ that is with us even in our darkest valley; thank you for you.”

I like to remember how it was for the ones who started the tradition. One hundred and two of them started out from Plymouth Harbor on September 6, 1620. Sixty-five days later they sighted land. Half of them died during that long, cold New England winter. Every family lost someone: infants died; the elderly died; husbands lost wives; wives lost husbands; parents lost children; children lost parents to hunger, disease, and the cold.

Thanks to friendly natives, crops were planted, fertilized, and somehow grew, and so at the very edge of disaster, with every heart broken at the loss of a dear one, they set aside a day for thanksgiving.

Mother still enhances my Thanksgiving with the gift of cranberry apple ice. More importantly, she taught me gratitude. One of the ways she did it was by insisting that we attend Wednesday night Thanksgiving eve worship services, over my strenuous protestations—usually community services, because no one church could generate very many people to attend, so several churches would get together. They were consistently poorly attended, not very well put on, and utterly boring. “Why do we have to go to church?” I asked. “The sermon won’t be any good; the combined choir isn’t really into it; and there won’t be many people there.”

“We’re going,” she said, “because of the hymns. They’re the best, the Thanksgiving hymns, so if we don’t do anything else, we’re going to sing, ‘Come, Ye Thankful People, Come’ and ‘Now Thank We All Our God.’”

So we did, and I’m grateful.

She sent me her favorite poem once, at Thanksgiving, and I asked the minister to read it at her graveside, which he did. I have included it in most of the Thanksgiving sermons I’ve preached over the years. It’s by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day . . .
I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Cranberry Apple Ice

1 bag cranberries
2 cups sugar
3 cups water

Bring all three to a boil until cranberries pop.
Pour into food mill with liquid and process.

4 apples, grated, do not cook

Add apples.
Mix and freeze in 3" deep casserole.

Cut and serve.