The Carpenter’s Son

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading was a short poem by Alan Powers titled “Carpenter’s Son.” Copyright laws do not permit the reproduction of an entire poem, so it is not reproduced here.

The second reading is from the autobiography of Edward Emerson Simmons, the man who painted the picture that is reproduced on your order of service. He told this story about this painting:

“In the year 1888 I sent two pictures to the Royal Academy which were duly accepted and hung. Imagine my joy when a large and formidable communication found it way to my studio in Paris, asking the price of one of my canvases and signed by the Chantry Bequest. This was a well-known fund created to buy pictures for the government to place in its permanent galleries, and everyone knew that, once the price had been asked, it amounted to the same thing as a sale….

“The picture, which I called ‘The Carpenter’s Son,’ was a simple pose of one of my children in my studio. A blond boy with a light shining over his head sat dreaming, instead of sweeping out the shop, while his mother, in the back, told his father what a worthless son he had begotten. The shavings had accidentally fallen in the form of a cross [which you can see at the bottom right], and the light seemed to be a halo. The [Glasgow] Scotsman came out with a scathing denunciation of the work (not at the idea, mind you) but because, as they said, I had been sacrilegious enough to paint Christ in the costume of a French peasant boy! Of course, the Chantry bequest did not buy — for the first time — after asking the price.”

Sermon

The stories we tell about ourselves, about our beliefs, and about the world around us — these stories are vital to who we are. I believe that one of the most important tasks of religion is to shape the stories we tell about ourselves and about our lives, to the end that our stories affirm life and love; and to the end that the arc of our stories’ narratives bend towards justice.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. The opening hymn this morning was a wassail song, and without a story, it would be nothing more than a silly song sung at Yuletide. But instead, we tell two stories about this wassail song.

The first story we tell goes like this: Years ago in England, during the Yuletide season less wealthy people would walk around to the wealthy households in their village and sing wassail songs. The wealthy householders were required by anceint custom to give food, drink, and money to the wassailers. When we tell this story, we are saying that Yuletide is a time of year to remember ordinary people who may not have much money.

The second story goes like this: Some folklorists believe that these apple wassail songs grew out of ancient pre-Christian rituals meant to re-awaken the fertility of apple trees at the time of the winter solstice. We know that hard apple cider was an important drink in the days before everyone had guaranteed access to clean, drinkable water because the modest alcohol content helped reduce the number of pathogens present; thus cider apples were a vital crop to ensure health. This second story tells us that the Christmas season holds many remnants of the old earth-centered pagan religions, religions which contained superstitions we may no longer follow, but which contained some good hard common sense.

So you see, the stories we tell about ourselves and about our traditions help us to shape those traditions in meaningful ways. This morning, I’d like to tell some stories about a painting that was central to the life of our church, a painting that is relevant to the Christmas season. And I believe these stories reveal a great deal about who we are and what we stand for.

Let me begin at the beginning. In 1888, the American painter Edward Emerson Simmons painted a painting which he called “The Carpenter’s Son.” You’ll find a reproduction of the painting on the cover of your order of service. This large painting by Simmons — some four feet wide and five and a half feet tall — showed a boy in a carpenter’s shop, sitting on a saw horse, surrounded by wood shavings and saw dust; while in the background two adults, presumably the boy’s parents, seem to be talking about him. The boy, rather than working, is simply sitting and staring meditatively off into space.

Simmons showed “The Carpenter’s Son” at the 1888 Paris Salon, then later at the Royal Academy in England, and also in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1892 Simmons sold the painting to Amelia Jones of New Bedford. When Amelia Jones purchased it, Simmons wrote her a letter which said in part:

“Dear Miss Jones,

“There is little to tell you of the picture that you have greatly pleased me by wishing to own. The picture was painted in the season of 1888 and being unsatisfactory to me was scraped out, to a great extent and repainted, with my older boy as a model for the boy in the foreground.

“It was painted at St. Ives — of cat fame — in the extreme east of Cornwall, England. The result of the repainting was an unusual success at the Royal Academy — joined to an offer of purchase from the trustees of the Chantry fund — withdrawn — I suspect from the opposition of the English Church people.

“When sent to Scotland — Glasgow — it caused me to be the amused object of much fury and denunciation from the “Scotsman” — if I remember the paper….

“I know very little of how the details of Christ’s surroundings should be told. I imagined no one knows enough to be worth listening to. Therefore we younger men fall back upon our own time — believing that man has always been fundamentally the same….

“Faithfully, Edward E. Simmons.”

This was, in fact, a heretical painting. As it happens, Simmons was raised a Unitarian. His father, George Simmons, was a Unitarian minister who was also a fervent abolitionist. Not only was Edward raised a Unitarian, but he grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, in the day when several great Unitarian writers and thinkers lived there — Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcott family, the poet Ellery Channing, and others — and as a boy, Simmons met and conversed with many of these radical Unitarians. Edward Emerson Simmons had radical Unitarianism in his very bones, and for the rest of his life he called himself a Concord Unitarian.

When a Concord Unitarian goes to paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth, he does not paint an orthodox picture of Jesus. Instead of painting some saintly, unearthly, barely human figure, Simmons choose one of his own boys as a model — not because that was what Jesus would have looked like, but because, good Concord Transcendentalist that he was, he believed that Jesus was fully human, and that human beings have been pretty much the same down through the ages; you can be sure that if Simmons had been African American, the boy in the picture would have been African American; had Simmons been Native American, the boy would have been native American; you get the idea.

Well, I’m sure you get the idea, but the orthodox Christians of the day did not get the idea. They did not like the painting one bit, because Jesus looked too human — he looked just like an ordinary boy who could have been anyone’s son — which they thought sacrilegious. Indeed, there are people today who do not like this painting.

And who purchased this heretical painting from Edward Simmons? Amelia Jones, a member of First Unitarian in New Bedford, that’s who. She bought it, sent it off to be shown at the great 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and then it came to hang in her house in New Bedford, the house that is now the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum just down County Street from here.When Amelia Jones died, she gave the painting to First Unitarian Church. What better place for such a painting to hang?

This heretical painting hung for many years in our Parish House. If you talk to some of the people who grew up in this church, the painting was very much present in their consciousnesses. Here was a painting of a child who looked like an ordinary kid, yet this ordinary-looking kid grew up to be one of the great religious leaders of all time. Such a painting must have been an inspiration to at least some of the children in this church!

Older people might have seen something a little different in this painting: Here’s this boy just sitting there and staring off into space when he is clearly supposed to be sweeping out his father’s carpentry shop — if you look closely at the front of your order of service, you can see the broom on the floor that Jesus has abandoned. And there in the background are his parents, clearly talking about their son. His mother is pointing to Jesus as if to say, “Look, he’s dropped his broom again, he’s just sitting there staring off into space.” And we can imagine his father saying, “He’d make a good carpenter some day if he’d just pay attention to what he’s supposed to be doing!”

Or more generally we could say: What Edward Emerson Simmons has done in his painting of Jesus is to imagine what Jesus must have been like as a fully human boy. Being a Concord Unitarian, Simmons did not restrict himself to what might be found in the Bible. Unitarians like Edward Simmons feel comfortable telling new stories about the historical figure who was Jesus, whether or not those new stories might offend the orthodox.

In true Unitarian Universalist fashion, there are many more stories for us to tell about this painting. Alan Powers, a poet and member of this church, tells another story in his poem: he tells us of a Jesus who was the son of an ordinary working class family, a Jesus who began his life dealing with very concrete things and who went on to teach in very concrete metaphors and parables; a man who in the end was put to death for his radical religious and social views. There is more than one story to tell about this painting, just as there is more than one story to tell about Jesus.

Now let me finish the story of the painting itself. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., planned a centennial exhibit of works of art that had been exhibited in the great 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and they asked to borrow “The Carpenter’s Son.” So the painting was cleaned, and insured, and shipped off to Washington, where it hung from March through September, 1993, in the show “American Art from the 1893 World’s Fair.” After that show, the painting came back and hung once more in its accustomed place in our Parish House.

And then in 1996, disaster struck. A vandal broke into our church, tipped over one of the grandfather clocks in the Parish House, broke the nose off one of the statues here in the sanctuary, and slashed a huge piece out of the middle of “The Carpenter’s Son.” The clock and the statue could be repaired, but with the piece gone from the painting, it was worthless. It was a great tragedy in the life of the congregation, and if you ask someone who was here that Sunday morning when they discovered the damage, they can tell you what a horrible shock it was.

When I first arrived here at First Unitarian two and a half years ago, I heard the story of this painting. Whenever someone told me the story of the vandalism, they would add the fact that, horrendous as the destruction of the painting was, at least the insurance settlement made it possible for the church to install an elevator in improve handicapped accessibility. I liked this twist that the people of this church add to the story of the vandalism: this church took an act of vandalism, and turned it into an act of justice for persons with disabilities. How very like the Unitarian Universalist stories about Jesus! for we emphasize Jesus’s acts of social justice, we emphasize his deep humanity and his empathy with all persons.

Then came our own Unitarian Universalist mini-miracle. Just over a year ago, the Women’s Alliance of this church donated a new refrigerator for the kitchen. As the old refrigerator was being removed, the man who was moving it saw something had been thrown behind it. He called to Claudette Blake, our church administrator, and she immediately realized that what she was seeing was the missing piece of the painting: there was the face of the boy Jesus. And, something of a miracle, the vandal had not slashed through the boy’s face — I like to believe that the vandal’s essential humanity asserted itself and prevented him or her from being that destructive.

It turned out that the insurance company now owned the painting, and until we could buy it back we had to keep it safely locked up; we sent it up to an art restoration expert to hold for us. We also realized that we could not keep the painting any longer. We knew this building is not secure enough to house important works of art, nor do we have financial resources to restore the painting. Thanks to behind-the-scenes work on the part of many church members, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum agreed to purchase the painting from us, for the $20,000 that we had to pay the insurance company for it. What better place for the painting? The Rotch-Jones-Duff House used to be Amelia Jones’s house, and it was where the painting hung before it came here. Besides, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House could restore the painting and make it accessible to a wider public.

I particularly like to think that the painting will have a wider audience, once it is restored. It will take perhaps another year before the painting is finally restored that is, assuming that the Rotch-Jones-Duff House is able to complete their fundraising, for as of now they have only $18,000 of the $30,000 needed to pay for the restoration. Many good people are working on raising funds, including our own Nancy Crosby and Bob Piper, and needless to say many members and friends of First Unitarian have given or are planning to give money to help pay for the restoration. Perhaps by next Christmas, a wider public will once again be able to see Edwards Simmons’s Unitarian vision of a Jesus who was a great religious genius and whose birthday is worth celebrating, but a Jesus who is fully human.

I like the idea that in this way we are spreading one of our Unitarian stories about Christmas out to a world that needs to hear it. The world needs to hear our stories of a Jesus who cared more about creating a heaven here on earth, than getting people into some heaven in the sky. The world needs to hear our stories about a Christmas holiday that is not about spending more money, but is rather about remembering a religious prophet and sage who with his very humanity taught us about the essential humanity of all persons. The world needs to hear these stories, because it matters what stories we tell.

Greedy Guts

Due to a computer glitch, the last half of this sermon is missing. This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning comes from Robert Graves’s two volume Greek Myths.

“Midas, son of the Great Goddess of Ida, by a satyr whose name is not remembered, was a pleasure-loving King of Macedonian Bromium, where he ruled over the Brigians and planted his celebrated rose gardens. In his infancy, a procession of ants was observed carrying grains of wheat up the side of his cradle and placing them between his lips as he slept — a prodigy which the soothsayers read as an omen of the great wealth that would accrue to him….

“One day, the debauched old satyr Silenus, Dionysus’s former pedagogue, happened to straggle from the main body of the riotous Dionysian army as it marched out of Thrace into Boeotia, and was found sleeping off his drunken fit in [Midas’s] rose gardens. The gardeners bound him with garlands of flowers and led his before Midas, to whom he told wonderful tales of an immense continent lying beyond the Ocean stream — altogether separate from the conjoined mass of Europe, Asia, or Africa — where splendid cities abound, peopled by gigantic, happy, and long-lived inhabitants, and enjoying a remarkable legal system. A great expedition — at least ten million strong — once set out [from] thence across the Ocean in ships to visit the Hyperboreans; but on learning that theirs was the best land that the old world had to offer, retired in disgust…. Midas, enchanted by Silenus’s fictions, entertained him for five days and nights, and then ordered a guide to escort him [back] to Dionysus’s headquarters.

“Dionysus, who had been anxious on Silenus’s account, sent to ask how Midas wished to be rewarded. He replied without hesitation: ‘Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.’ However, not only stones, flowers, and the furnishing of his house turned to gold but, when he sat down to table, so did the food he ate and the water he drank. Midas soon begged to be released from his wish, because he was fast dying of hunger and thirst; whereupon Dionysus, highly entertained, told him to visit the source of the river Pactolus, near Mount Tmolus, and there wash himself. He obeyed, and was at once freed from the golden touch, but the sand of the river Pactolus are bright with gold to this day….”

[pp. 281-282]

The second reading is from the ancient Hebrew book known as Proverbs, chapter 8, verses 1-12.

“Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
‘To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
acquire intelligence, you who lack it.
Hear, for I will speak noble things,
and from my lips will come what is right;
for my mouth will utter truth;
wickedness is an abomination to my lips.
All the words of my mouth are righteous;
there is nothing twisted or crooked in them.
They are all straight to one who understands
and right to those who find knowledge.
Take my instruction instead of silver,
and knowledge rather than choice gold;
for wisdom is better than jewels,
and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.
I, wisdom, live with prudence,
and I attain knowledge and discretion.’  ”

Sermon

This is the second in a series of occasional sermons on the so-called seven deadly sins. I have to preface this sermon by saying that I most certainly do not accept the traditional understandings of sin nor do I accept the notion of original sin; that, as a Universalist, I cannot accept that an allegedly loving God would condemn anyone to hell for an eternity; and that therefore I do not accept the category of “deadly sins” which were, in traditional Christian theology, sins so horrible that to engage in them would be to risk eternal damnation. Yet having said that, the traditional listing of so-called seven deadly sins — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride — remains a pretty good catalog of bad behavior and egregious human error.

And on this, the biggest shopping weekend of the year, what better sin to talk about than the sin of greed? I always stay out of the shopping malls and stores on the days following Thanksgiving, but it’s not because I’m especially virtuous, it’s just that I am not fond of crowds. And what crowds turn out to go shopping on the days after Thanksgiving! You know those vast expanses of asphalt that surround malls, the ginormous parking lots that never ever seem full? On the Friday after Thanksgiving, those ginormous parking lots get so full that people wind up cruising around in their cars, unable to find a parking place; those huge parking lots are designed for the shopping excesses of one day a year.

Greed is such a fun activity to indulge in; what could be more fun than looking at all the enticing and wonderful objects available for us to purchase — video games and large-screen televisions and the latest Martha Stewart kitchen gadgets and those robotic vacuum cleaners that vacuum the house all by themselves and the latest digital cameras,, and hundreds of other fun gadgets and toys and objects — for greed is really more about the wanting and the desiring, than it is about the possessing. I’m especially fond of greed because I don’t necessarily have to own all those wonderful things — if I owned them, where would I put them all? how would I find the time to play with them all — because although greed requires that you accumulate lots of objects, the essence of greed (or so it seems to me) lies in always wanting more than you have now. Greed is a hunger deep inside our guts, a hunger that can never be satisfied.

The story of King Midas is the classic story of greed. Good old King Midas begins as a fairly ordinary king in Macedonia. Midas enjoyed the many pleasurable things that kings may enjoy; as one example we are told that he devoted a good deal of time and energy and money to cultivating roses, to the point where his rose gardens became celebrated far and wide.

As we heard in the first reading today, a drunken satyr named Silenus was one of the throng of followers of the god Dionysus. It should be noted that a satyr is a mythical being that is half-human and half-goat. Now Dionysus was the god of wine, and so his followers were not strangers to drinking and even to drunkenness; but it appears that Silenus was more prone to drunkenness than most of the others, for one day he got excessively drunk, and collapsed in King Midas’s rose gardens.

The next day, King Midas’s gardeners found old Silenus asleep under a rose bush. They didn’t want to anger whomever this satyr might owe allegiance to, but at the same time the sight of this drunken reprobate, half-human and half-goat, lying asleep in the garden alarmed them enough so that they symbolically tied Silenus up with garlands of flowers, and only then led him to King Midas. Silenus then proceeded to entertain King Midas with outrageous and delightful stories; Midas felt that the stories were enchanting, rather than excessively untruthful. In any case, at last Midas sent Silenus back to the god Dionysus.

Thus far, the story of King Midas is a story filled with excess — excessive drinking, excessively untruthful stories t old as entertainment, excessive attention to rose cultivation. Such excesses alone do not result in greed. But King Midas’s next action is greedy. For when the god Dionysus asks Midas what reward his would like for taking care of Silenus, Midas answers: Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.”

This request may safely be characterized as greed! Firstly, it is self-evident that Midas has no need for addit6ional gold: not only is he a king, but he appears to lead a comfortable, even lavish lifestyle. Secondly, even if Midas were to ask for gold, he could have asked for something more reasonable, such as: “Pray grant that I find four large bags filled with gold in my bed, beside me, when I awaken tomorrow”; but instead, Midas asks fro something that he hopes will bring him an unlimited supply of gold.

Thus Midas’s wish can only be characterized as greed, because he does not need more gold to begin with, and he certainly does not need an unlimited quantity of gold. No wonder the god Dionysus was so amused when Midas began to realize all the implications of his very unwise wish. When it turns out that even food and drink are turned to gold by Midas’s touch, suddenly Midas finds himself in the same position as people who are so poor that don’t have enough to eat, and so slowly starve to death; the irony being that Midas has plenty of money, money which is no essentially useless to him. And so Midas has to appeal to the god Dionysus, in order that he will not starve to death in the midst of plenty.

A Box for Thanksgiving

This intergenerational worship service was conducted by Rev. Dan Harper, with Marybeth Truran, DRE, at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon, prayer, and story copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Prayer

This is an intergenerational worship service, and there are some children present. Therefore, this seems like a good time to talk about how we Unitarian Universalists do prayer and meditation.

When it comes to prayer, there’s only one firm rule for us Unitarian Universalists: you don’t have to pray or meditate if you don’t want to, but you do have to stay calm and quiet so you don’t disturb other people.

As a Unitarian Universalist child, I learned that when you pray, you just sit comfortably and quietly, with your eyes open and your head up. I learned that the most important thing is to be quiet and peaceful inside yourself. As you get older, you may discover other ways to pray or meditate, but this is a good place to start. So now let’s begin our prayer and meditation time by sitting quietly. If you’re sitting next to someone you love, you can lean up against them, and even put your arm around them if you want.

Let us join our hearts and minds in the spirit of prayer and meditation; first we’ll listen to some spoken words, then we’ll sit in silence for a short time; and we’ll end by listening to music.

Let us begin by remembering the American servicemen and servicewomen who will find themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan this Thanksgiving. We hope for them that they may have a peaceful Thanksgiving; and we give thanks for the service they offer to their country. And we give thanks for all those who work to make this world a better place: firefighters and social activists and doctors and social workers and teachers and everyone who works for peace and justice.

In this Thanksgiving season, may we give thanks for who we are, exactly as we are. Maybe we could be better, or worse for that matter, but we give thanks: that we are still breathing; that there are people who love us; that the sun moves steadily in its course; that we are who we are.

Reading

The reading this morning is from “Mourt’s Relation,” a journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, written in 1622. This reading gives the story of the first Thanksgiving celebration in the words of one of the Pilgrims who was actually there.

“You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, so that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

[Taken from a printed version of this early document. The language and spelling have been modernized.]

Story

Instead of the usual second reading this morning, we’ll have a story instead: the old story of Thanksgiving. This is a story that you already know. But even though you’ve heard it about a million times, we tell it every year anyway, to remind ourselves why we celebrate Thanksgiving.

The story begins in England. In England in those days, every town had only one church, and it was called the Church of England. You had to belong to that church, like it or not. It’s not like it is here today, where families get to choose which church they want to go to — back then, there were no other churches to choose from! But a small group of people decided they could no longer believe the things that were said and believed in the Church of England.

When they tried to form their own church in England, they got in trouble. They moved to Holland, where they were free to practice their own religion, but they felt odd living in someone else’s country. Then they heard about a new land across the ocean called America, a place where they could have their own church, where they could live the way they wanted to. They found a ship called the Mayflower, and made plans to sail to America. These are the people we call the Pilgrims.

After a long, difficult trip across a stormy sea, the Pilgrims finally came to the new land, which they called New England. But the voyage took much longer than they had hoped, and by the time they got to New England, it was already December. Already December — it was already winter! — and they had to build houses, and find food, and try to make themselves comfortable for a long, cold winter.

It got very cold very soon. The Pilgrims had almost nothing to eat. The first winter that the Pilgrims spent here in New England was so long and cold and hard, that some of the Pilgrims began to sicken and die. Fortunately, the people who were already living in this new land — we call them the Indians — were very generous. When the Indians saw how badly the Pilgrims were faring, they shared their food so at least the Pilgrims wouldn’t starve to death. Half the Pilgrims died in that first winter, yet without the help of the Indians, many more would have died.

After that first winter, things went much better for the Pilgrims. Spring came, and the Pilgrims were able to build real houses for themselves. They planted crops, and most of the crops did pretty well. The Pilgrims went hunting and fishing, and they found lots of game and caught lots of fish.

By the time fall came around again, the Pilgrims found that they were living fairly comfortably. To celebrate their good fortune, they decided to have a harvest celebration. They went out hunting, and killed some turkeys to eat at their celebration. They grilled fish, and ate pumpkin pie, and we’re pretty sure they had lobster, wild grapes and maybe some dried fruit, and venison. However, they probably did not call their holiday “thanksgiving,” because for them a thanksgiving celebration was something you did in church. At that first celebration, they did not go to church.

Their harvest celebration lasted for several days, with all kinds of food, and games, and other recreation. The Indian king Massasoit and some of his followers heard the Pilgrims celebrating, and dropped by to see what was going on. In a spirit of generosity, the fifty Pilgrims invited all ninety Indians to stay for dinner. Imagine inviting ninety guests over to your house for Thanksgiving! More than that, in those days only the Pilgrim women prepared and cooked meals, but there were only four Pilgrim women old enough to help with the cooking — four women to cook food for a hundred and forty people!

The Indians appreciated the generosity of the Pilgrims, but they also realized that there probably wasn’t going to be quite enough food to go around. So the Indians went hunting for a few hours, and brought back lots more game to be roasted and shared at the harvest celebration. At last all the food was cooked, and everyone sat down to eat together: men and women, adults and children, Indians and Pilgrims.

That’s how the story of Thanksgiving goes. As you know, the Pilgrims called their first town “Plymouth,” and as you know, they also started a church in the town of Plymouth. But did you know that a hundred and eighty years later, that church became a Unitarian church? That church in Plymouth is now a Unitarian Universalist church. So it is that we Unitarian Universalists have a very important connection with the Pilgrims, and a special connection with Thanksgiving.

Sermon

The Universalist poet Edwin Markham wrote a famous little poem that goes like this:

    They drew a circle that shut me out —
    Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
    But Love and I had the wit to win:
    We drew a circle that took them in.

If you had grown up in a Universalist church 50 or 60 years ago, chances are good that you would have learned that poem by heart. It’s still a good little poem to think about. And this week, I’ve been thinking about how we keep drawing larger and larger circles in our lives, drawing more and more people into the circle of Love.

When you walked into the service this morning, you received a small box with some objects inside it. You may be wondering what that box is for, and why there are some things inside it. I hope you opened your box and thought, as you looked inside, Why on earth have Dan and Marybeth given us such an odd collection of things? What on earth to a cranberry, a sticker, and a penny have in common?

The objects in that box are there so I can talk to you about five circles of love — five concentric, and widening, circles of love. Since it’s Thanksgiving time — and the whole purpose of Thanksgiving is to remember what we are thankful for — I’ll also talk to you about how you might feel thankful for these five circles of love.

First, pick up your box and hold it in your hands. OK, now stop looking at the box, and look at your hands instead, because the first thing I’d ask you to think about is your self. You are a sacred and special person. That is one of our fundamental religious beliefs: that each person is worthy of dignity and respect; that each person has infinite value. You are you, and that is a good thing to be!

When you look at your hands, I hope you will remember to love yourself. And I hope you’ll remember to be thankful for being you — thankful for being alive, for being human in all your imperfect and glorious being.

Now, if you have not already done so, open your box. Inside you will find a sticker with a flaming chalice, which is a symbol of our Unitarian Universalist faith. There’s a story about how the flaming chalice came to be the symbol of our faith community. Back around 1940, as the Second World War was spreading throughout Europe, the Unitarian Service Committee was hard at work in Europe. The Unitarian Service Committee got Unitarians here in the United States to donate clothing and food to send overseas to Europe, to give to refugees who were cold and hungry — our own church, First Unitarian, filled up a huge truckload of clothing to send overseas.

When they got to Europe, people from the Unitarian Service Committee discovered that almost no one over there had heard of them — even though there were Unitarians in Europe, the people they had to deal with had no idea what a Unitarian was. The head of the Unitarian Service Committee, a man named Charles Joy, had an idea. He got an artist to draw a very official-looking logo for the Unitarian Service Committee — a logo with a flaming chalice inside a circle. They stamped this logo on all the boxes of clothing, and on all the paperwork, so that everything looked more official, which made it easier to get things past suspicious soldiers and across borders. That is the origin of the flaming chalice: it was a logo that helped us Unitarians to help people in need.

That’s why you have a flaming chalice in your box: to remind you to be thankful for your church, to be thankful for a religious community that doesn’t care what you believe but does care that we all work to make this world a better place. And that is the second concentric circle of love: the love and care that can come from our religious community.

Next, take out the penny. On the penny, you will find the words: “United States of America.” The penny is there to remind us to be thankful for our country. Not that we have to be thankful for everything about our country — in fact, some of us are not at all thankful about the fact that our country is at war right now, nor are we thankful for the fact that we can’t seem to provide decent health care for many of our citizens, nor are we thankful that there is a lot of injustice in our country.

But we are thankful for the highest ideals of our country. Look at the front of the penny, and you will see a picture of Abraham Lincoln, who was perhaps our greatest president. Abraham Lincoln lived in a time when there were still slaves in this country, but he finally realized that if we really followed the highest ideals of our country, we could not allow slavery to continue — and so Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made slavery illegal.

We are thankful for the highest and best ideals of this country — the ideal that states that every person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — or the ideal that states that the government shall not tell us what religion to practice. And the third circle of love, in our widening circles of love, is the love of true democracy, a democracy that will affirms the inherent worth and dignity of all persons.

Now, if you haven’t already taken it out, take out the cranberry. If you are brave, you might even want to eat it — although I have to warn you, cranberries are tart and sour. I happen to like tart, sour, crunchy fruit, so I eat cranberries raw all the time — but I admit that I am unusual and not many people like to eat them raw. Most people cook cranberries with lots of sugar, and make cranberry sauce — a bright red sauce that’s sweet yet tart, soft and yummy.

Why is there a cranberry in your box? The cranberry is in the box to remind us to be thankful for the food we eat. When the Pilgrims first came to this part of the world in 1620, they did not have enough food to eat, and many of them sickened and died. There is an old story that the Indians who were their neighbors showed the Pilgrims cranberries (which they may have called “sassamanash”), and told them that these tiny bright red fruit were good to eat. In the first month or two, when they had so little food, the Pilgrims went out and found cranberries growing in the wild, and they dried some of the fruit to last all winter. Cranberries are full of vitamin C and other good vitamins, and eating cranberries probably helped to save the lives of some of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were thankful for cranberries, and they were thankful for whatever food they could get, and they were especially thankful for the generous Indians who helped keep all of them from starving to death.

The cranberry reminds us to be thankful for all the people who help us to get the food we need. The Pilgrims were thankful for Indians, who first showed them the cranberries, and said they were good to eat. Today, we are thankful for the farmers and farm workers that grow the food we eat. And that is the fourth circle of love: the love that comes from all those who help us meet our daily needs; the love that grows out the interdependent web of all existence.

Now there’s one last thing that I would like you to look at, and that is the box. This box comes to us from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. You will see pictures on the box, pictures of people from several different countries. These pictures are there to remind us that we are part of a world community. There are pictures of people from Louisiana, from Sudan, from Latin America, from all around the world. These pictures remind us that we are part of a world community; and that is our fifth, and widest, circle of love: the love we extend to all persons everywhere in the world.

If you want to, you can take on a little social justice project with this box. If you want to, you can put this box on your dining room table, or your kitchen table, or wherever you eat most of your meals. Every time you sit down to eat between now and Christmas, you can put some money into the box. If you eat three meals a day, you’ll eat about a hundred meals between now and Christmas. If you put a dime in the box every time you sit down to eat, you’ll have ten dollars by Christmas time. (If you put a dollar in, you’ll have a hundred dollars!) If you decide to take on this little social justice project in your home, we will collect these boxes on the Sunday before Christmas — and we will send the money that we have collected to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. And the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee will take that money and send it around the world — to help people in South America have access to clean and safe water supplies — to help people who have survived natural disasters, including those who are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana — to help people in Africa to ensure a safe food supply — and to help many more people around the world. The only thing that I would ask is that if you put lots of change in this Guest at Your Table box, could you please take the time to go down to the bank and convert that change either to bills or to a check? — otherwise, we’ll have a hard time counting all those coins!

Of course, you may have your little social justice project that you do at this time of year — so don’t feel that you have to take on the Guest at Your Table box, unless you really want to! The real point is to find a way to remember all these widening circles of love, and to give thanks for each one of them. Look at yourself in the mirror and give thanks for your self, for you are a person of infinite value. When you walk in to this church on a Sunday, give thanks for the love we all receive from this community of faith. Even when you are frustrated and outraged by our country, give thanks for the ideals of our country, ideals which, if we would but live up to them, would extend dignity and respect to all persons. When you sit down to eat, give thanks for the earth and the food that comes from the earth and all the workers who grow our food, and know that this is yet a wider circle of love. And finally, may we give thanks for the whole world and all the people in the world, and may we work towards a world community that truly does extend love everywhere.

    They drew a circle that shut me out —
    Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
    But Love and I had the wit to win:
    We drew a circle that took them in.