Good and Bad Thanks (US Thanksgiving Day)

 

“Good and Bad Thanks”

25 November 2021

U.S. Thanksgiving Day Year B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

5 p.m Anticipatory Mass

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D  

Joel 2:21-27; Psalm 126; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Matthew 6:25-33

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

How in the world did we, good Anglicans that we are, end up celebrating a secular holiday whose core mythos is about God’s blessings to the pilgrims, come to North America seeking religious freedom?  They were not at all for religious freedom, and that was the problem.  Radical puritans seeking separation from the Church of England, they were fleeing from what they saw as wicked persecution by King James I of England, but only so they could enforce their religion on others.   

 

 

In fact, it was their extremism in foisting their religion on others that caused the problems with James.  After the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, he had rejected all but one of the demands of the puritans’ “Millennial Petition” to reform the Church and bring everyone in line with their views—he had learned in Scotland that “no bishops” meant “no kings,” and seen the need for a uniform Prayer Book to guard the comprehensive unity of the Church. The puritans’ extremism and sectarian tribalism was to him a great threat to the peace of the realm, and to the practice of true Christian faith.  

 

 

James and the Stuart Kings who followed him saw the puritans and their more radical separatist comrades “the pilgrims” in the same way that modern moderate Muslims see the Taliban, ISIS, or al-Qaeda:  fanatics bound to do wicked deeds because of their profound lack of compassion for anyone not sharing their exact beliefs.  James did grant them one concession after Hampton Court: a new Bible translation, but he assigned scholars to the project who were averse to Calvinist fanaticism, and he forbade any marginal commentary to avoid the very Calvinist understanding of the Bible they wanted when they asked for a new translation.  Initially, the “King James Bible” was seen as an abomination by the radical protestants, who within two generations, once marginalia were allowed, granted to it the sanctity of the words of God in their original language. 

 

James’ threat to nonconformists rejecting the bishops and prayer book that he would “harry them out of the land, or worse,” was what lead the non-conforming separatists first to Calvinist Holland, which they found far too earthy and pleasure-driven for their tastes, and finally to the wilds of what they were soon calling “New England” on the other side of the world.  This root of radical rejection of moderate traditional Christianity, and bitterness toward any head that wore a miter or a crown, would lead in 50 years to the English Civil wars in which the puritans beheaded Blessed Charles I, and then in 150 years to the New England terrorism of tarring and feathering, torturing and maiming, and sometimes outright murdering, agents of the British crown that provoked such a ham-fisted response by George III that the 3% fire-eating supporters of Sam Adams and the “sons of Liberty” turned into 40% of the colonial population, enough to start a revolution that eventually severed the colonies from the crown.  And those new states, seeking a national mythos, found it in the tale of poor persecuted pilgrims, chosen and blessed by God, coming to an almost uninhabited wilderness and reclaiming it for God and Jesus, and in the process finding prosperity and liberty too.   And, like the Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa 200 years later, they even fulfilled God’s plan, as they saw it, by subjugating people predestined, as they thought, to a subservient status where they could find God and Jesus in their servitude.     

 

The myth was a lie from the first, as most first nations people and enslaved persons and their descendants saw all along.

 

Is it a sin to give thanks for the privilege you enjoy, even when that privilege was obtained through the oppression or extermination of others? 

 

It most definitely is if your thanksgiving is specifically because you are on the winning side and not the losing one.  Like a Jewish male in the 1^st century CE who prayed every morning “Thank God I was not born a woman! Thank God I was not born a goy!” this kind of thanks is actually an act of oppression in itself, and alienates us from God and from our fellow beings. 

 

But if it is an honest expression of gratitude even while acknowledging the sins we have done or that have been done on our behalf, it is a holy act that brings us closer to God and to those we have hurt, intentionally of otherwise.  It is a prophetic and saintly act if the gratitude thus expressed leads us to make amends for our misdoings, make reparations for wrongs of the past, and gives us courage to stand beside those upon whose backs our privilege is based.

 

Thanksgiving as a partisan or tribal shibboleth is poison, and kills the soul. 

 

But Thanksgiving when felt and expressed in solidarity with all our fellow creatures is a great healing medicine.  It drives out fear, resentment, and a sense of shortage and zero-sums.  

 

I am so thankful for all the blessings I enjoy. I hope you are too.  But in the words of Jesus, we must treat others as we would ourselves be treated. 

 

Thanks be to God.