Interfaith Thanksgiving Service at the Holy Name Cathedral
November 20, 2007
Sermon Delivered by Rabbi Evan Moffic
"This is the day that the Lord has chosen: Let us exalt and rejoice in it." Psalm 109
What a beautiful sentiment for this evening. This is a day of rejoicing and of thanksgiving. It is a day to celebrate our coming together as people and congregations of faith. Yet, sometimes the rejoicing is not easy. Our world is not what it should or could be. The protracted war in Iraq exacts a burdensome toll on human lives and the American psyche. “The horizon looms” as one rabbi has eloquently written, “with the hazy uncertainty of climate change.” (Rabbi Jonathan Blake) The housing market has left many families in dire straits. It can be difficult to give thanks and rejoice in such a time.
Our situation, in fact, is not unlike that of our Puritan ancestors who gathered for the first Thanksgiving feast in 1641. They too faced challenging times. They had lost half of their 101 settlers to disease and malnutrition. They were far away from their families and accustomed way of life. They faced an uncertain future. Yet, amidst these challenges, they too found cause to rejoice and to give thanks. They gave thanks for having survived the harrowing journey to the New World. They gave thanks for the promise of freedom. They gave thanks for the bounty and possibilities that beckoned before them. Gathering with 90 members of the Wampanoag Native American tribe, the pilgrims expressed this feeling of gratitude during the first Thanksgiving Feast in November 1641.
It is time for each of us to reclaim this spirit of gratitude. It is time for us, who enjoy blessings far beyond what our pilgrim ancestors imagined, to feel that same sense of thanksgiving. Unfortunately, rather than encourage this spirit of thanksgiving, much in our American culture reinforces a sense of entitlement. I think, for example, of a scene from an episode of the Simpsons. When asked to say grace at the family dinner table, Bart Simpson offers the following words: "Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing." How awful a feeling, yet how frequently if more subtly expressed.
Thanksgiving can help us counter this feeling and recover that sense of gratitude embodied by our Pilgrim forebearers. It can help us understand the wisdom of the minister who was approached by a member of his church. She said, "Pastor, can you spare me thirty minutes to listen to my troubles?" He replied, "Yes, of course, I'll spare you thirty minutes to listen to your troubles, if you will spare me five minutes to listen to your blessings."
To listen to our blessings: that's what we people of faith can help teach our world. We can exemplify and teach an ethic of gratitude. The truth is that we have a unique responsibility to do so. I recently came across an article by a well-known professor of humanities that pointed out that gratitude is essentially, and uniquely, a religious imperative. As he writes, “Gratitude, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is virtually absent from our secular culture, except in relation to the “oughts” of individual interactions.” In other words, in our secular culture, we are taught to say thank you in order to be polite. But we do not learn to live our lives with a constant feeling of how lucky we are to have what we have, to be who we are.
In contrast to our secular culture, our Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions abound in teachings of gratitude. I think, for example, of the passage in the Gospel of Mark, 10:52, where Jesus says, "Your faith has made you well. Your grateful faith, your gratitude, has healed you and saved you." And an ethic of gratitude inheres within the very core of Jewish tradition. The word Jew is derived from the word Judah. And in Hebrew the word Judah is derived from hebrew root, Yud, halet, hey, which means "to praise and give thanks."
Of course, in Judaism, the notion of gratitude is often taught, as are many other values, through story. There is an old Yiddish story about a man who lived in a one-room hut with his mother, his wife, and six children. The hut, as we can imagine, was filled with crying and quarreling. It was noisy and hard to live. One day, when he felt he couldn’t take it any more, the man went to his rabbi. “Rabbi,” he said, “things are bad and getting worse. I live in a one-room house with my mother, wife and six children. It is too crowded and noisy. Help me find some peace, Rabbi, I’ll do whatever you say.” The rabbi thought for a moment. “Do you have a chicken? he asked.” “Yes, of course I do,” the man replied. “Good,” said the Rabbi, “take the chicken and bring it into your home.” “Well, okay,” said the man, though he was a bit surprised.
Imagine what the house sounded like now. In addition to the man, his mother, his wife and six children, there was a chicken clucking incessantly. Frustrated, the man returned to the Rabbi. “Rabbi, I did what you said, and it’s much worse than before. Help me please.” “Tell me,” the rabbi asked, “do have a goat?” “Yes, I do,” the man replied. “Excellent,” said the rabbi. “Go home and bring him in to live with you.” A couple of days later, life in the hut was even worse. There was crying, quarreling, clucking, and a goat pushing and butting everyone with its horns. The man returned to the rabbi. To his shock, the rabbi then instructed him to bring his cow into the hut. This Rabbi must be crazy, the man thought. But he did as he was instructed. The house became an utter chaos. When he returned to the rabbi for the fourth time, the man screamed, “Help me rabbi, the end of the world has come. There is no room in my house even to breathe.” The rabbi listened and said, “Go home now, my friend, and let the animals out of your hut.” The man rushed home and did so. That night was the sweetest and most relaxing night he ever had. Every member of the family slept comfortably and peacefully. When he returned to the rabbi, the man said “Rabbi, you have made life sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful…What a blessing.” What a blessing. As people of faith, we can recover the spirit of thanksgiving by counting the blessings we enjoy each and every day. Thanksgiving, said Rabbi Louis Mann, leads to thanksliving.
And if we do it well, thanksliving can ennoble and renew our world. A sense of entitlement can make us harsh and ungiving. But a sense of gratitude can help us become more giving and compassionate. A sense of gratitude can help us see every day as a blessing and an opportunity for service. A sense of gratitude can help us appreciate the wisdom and the challenge that Abraham Lincoln offered in the inaugural Thanksgiving proclamation of 1863:
"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we ahve grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand that preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own."
In this Thanksgiving season, let us regain that sense of gratitude to God. Let us look closely at ourselves to assure that we do not forget the gracious hand that has preserved and strengthened us. Let us count carefully the blessings in our lives and find the compassion to bring greater blessings into the lives of others. Let each of us challenge ourselves to make this Thanksgiving the beginning of a new year of Thanksliving.