Thanksgiving

Dinner Table Conversations

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from the long poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay:

…And thank you to the quick and gentle flocking
of men to the old lady falling down
on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently
with the softest parts of their hands
her cane and purple hat,
gathering for her the contents of her purse
and touching her shoulder and elbow;
thank you the cockeyed court
on which in a half-court 3 vs. 3 we oldheads
made of some runny-nosed kids
a shambles, and the 61-year-old
after flipping a reverse layup off a back door cut
from my no-look pass to seal the game
ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods
and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar
grinning across his chest; thank you
the glad accordion’s wheeze
in the chest; thank you the bagpipes….

The second reading this morning is from Mourt’s Relation, 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. (The language has been modernized.)

“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, that so we might after have 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.”

Sermon: “Dinner Table Conversations”

Remember back in 2019, before the pandemic? It’s so easy to put on our rose-colored glasses, and think — those were the good times, the easy times. We sat down together at Thanksgiving, never knowing that the very next year we wouldn’t be able to have Thanksgiving dinner with all our relatives. And in 2019, we didn’t have to worry about the war in Ukraine, or the war in Gaza and Israel. Ah yes, those were the good times.

Except, of course, they weren’t. Maybe there wasn’t a war in Ukraine nor a war in Gaza and Israel. But I remember some of my friends coming back from Thanksgiving with reports of combative dinner table conversations between the opposing sides of the culture wars. And I remember talking to a non-binary teen who felt exhausted at having to accept that their relatives were just going to refuse to use their preferred pronouns. No, we should not look at 2019 through rose-colored glasses and think: Those were the last good times.

Ah, but if I think back to my childhood…. That was a long time ago. Surely those must have been the last good times. Well, no. I remember Thanksgiving dinner conversations that got onto the subject of the Vietnam War. An uncle would say something about Vietnam, that would provoke a cousin into challenging him, and then my grandmother would have to say in a firm voice, “Do you think it will rain this week?” That was her hint for everybody to drop the subject, and talk about something less controversial. Or actually it wasn’t a hint so much as a command to change the subject; my grandmother was a bit of a Tartar. No, I cannot look back at those childhood Thanksgiving dinners through rose-colored glasses and think: those were the good old days.

Well, then, surely we can think back to the very first Thanksgiving, back in 1621…. That was a really long time ago. Surely those must have been the good old days. In the second reading, we heard an excerpt from “Mourt’s Relation,” a contemporary account of the first celebration of what we now call Thanksgiving. It sounds pretty wonderful, doesn’t it? They had had a pretty good harvest that year, then they went hunting and got even more food, enough to have a big celebration. And when King Massaoit and ninety of his warriors stopped by, together they came up with enough food to go around, and they all shared a big meal together.

And in many ways, that first Thanksgiving really was the good old days. But we also have to remember what happened the previous winter. Less than a year before that first Thanksgiving, something like half of the Pilgrims had died of cold and exposure and starvation. Many of the Pilgrims must have felt sad on that first Thanksgiving; I imagine that more than one of the Pilgrims shed a tear or two for the people who didn’t live long enough to see that first Thanksgiving. And then when we remember that as recently as 1619, King Massasoit and his followers had been subject to a plague that killed off as many as ninety percent of their people, they too must have some sadness on that first Thanksgiving.

So when I imagine the dinner table conversations at the first Thanksgiving (not that they were seated at a table, there’s no way the Pilgrims had tables enough to seat a hundred and forty people) — when I imagine the conversations at that first Thanksgiving, it seems to me that there were many things people didn’t want to talk about. On the Pilgrim side, I can imagine that when the conversation started getting too close to the too-many deaths they had experienced in the previous ten months, one of the elders would firmly say whatever the Pilgrim version was of, “Do you think it will rain this week?” Similarly, on the Wampanoag Indian side, I can imagine that when their conversations started heading towards the aftermath of the plague, and the probability that the Naragansett to the west were going to try to invade, one of the elders would say, quite firmly, the Wampanoag version of, “Do you think it will rain?”

More to the point, the story as told in Mourt’s Relation shows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags knew the value of doing things together. The Pilgrims, you may remember, “among other recreations, exercised [their] arms” — meaning that the men played games together, winding up with some sort of shooting contest. And when the Wampanoags showed up, they didn’t just hang around talking — they went out hunting so there would be enough food for everyone. As for the Pilgrim women, with only four of them to cook for a hundred and forty people, their focus had to be on working together. Communal events seem to go most smoothly when we’re working together or doing something together.

All this may sound like the usual holiday platitudes that you’d expect from a New Englander: if we all just work together and not talk so much, we’ll be fine. Maybe it’s a platitude, but sometimes platitudes represent wisdom. And I found confirmation for this kind of wisdom from a surprising source: from Seth Kaplan, a professorial lecturer at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and internationally-known expert on fragile states. Fragile states are those countries that have such a weak governmental infrastructure that their citizens are exceptionally vulnerable to a variety of shocks. While the United States is not a fragile state, Seth Kaplan realized that some places within the United States function exactly like fragile states — he calls these “fragile neighborhoods.” He contrasts these fragile American neighborhoods with his own neighborhood, which is the opposite of fragile. Kaplan lives in a tight-knit community where neighbors look out for each other, where nearly everyone belongs to several community organizations, including religious congregations and secular groups. Neighbors also help each other out in informal ways, buying groceries for an elderly neighbor, chaperoning at school events, and volunteering in many small ways to help each other out. Kaplan writes:

“As a result of all this, we know all sorts of details about just about every family for many blocks around us — how many kids they have, which schools and camps their kids attend, and what leisure activities they enjoy. However, we spend surprisingly little time talking about politics, and thus know little about many of our neighbors’ political leanings and preferences.” (Seth Kaplan, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One ZIP Code at a Time [New York: Little, Brown, 2023], p. 184.)

When we change our perspective and focus on local community, there simply isn’t much time to spend in highly partisan arguments about national politics. This is not to imply that national politics are unimportant. They are important. But in America today, when it comes to national politics, it feels like our highest priority lies in expressing our individual political opinions. As much as I value free speech and free expression, I don’t think we want to be our highest value. Instead, our highest values are, or should be, hope and courage and love. As the Pilgrims knew deep in their hearts, we humans are meant to be together and to work together; we are communal beings before anything else. My grandmother knew the value of conflict avoidance when she would say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?” Then after dinner, she got us all to avoid conflict by playing cards: sometimes a vicious highly competitive game called “Pounce,” other times poker played for matchsticks.

I’d like to propose that at Thanksgiving, there’s no need to talk about national politics or international politics at all. There will always be people who really do want to talk about partisan politics, or international topics, at Thanksgiving dinner; you may be one of those people. If this is something you want to do at Thanksgiving, and if you can find someone else who wants to express their individual opinions, go ahead and find a corner somewhere where you can go at it hammer and tongs. The rest of us will be doing something like helping in the kitchen, or setting the table, or washing the dishes, or playing cards. The rest of us need not get involved in conversational conflict at Thanksgiving. And even if everyone who comes to your Thanksgiving celebration is in complete agreement — even if you agree completely on every aspect of domestic and foreign policy — you still don’t have to talk about anything to do with the culture wars. In fact, that might be a good way to keep everyone’s blood pressure down.

To put this another way: There are many strategies for managing conflict. Conflict avoidance is one valid conflict management strategy. And there are times — Thanksgiving is one of those times — when conflict avoidance is the best conflict management strategy. Now that I say this, I’m sure that you can think of lots of conflict avoidance strategies. In my childhood, we asked if it was going to rain, or we played vicious card games. Watching football games also works, or playing video games, or — well, you get the idea.

May our Thanksgiving dinner conversation avoid the culture wars. Instead, may our Thanksgiving dinner conversation center on what’s really important: the people you love and care about. May our conversations revolve around questions like these: Who is doing well, and who could use some support? Who would benefit from getting a phone call or a handwritten card? How are the young people doing, and how can we support them? Has anyone visited this or that distant relative, and should we reach out?

May your Thanksgiving conversations center on hope. May they center on courage in daily life. May they be filled with love for neighbors and family and friends.

[This homily followed a play, which showed how many myths of Thanksgiving simply aren’t true.]

For many of us, Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. It hasn’t gotten too commercial. You don’t have to do anything except eat. And it’s all about giving thanks. What’s not to like? — Which means it can be hard to hear that some of the things we thought we knew about Thanksgiving aren’t exactly true.

I think the most depressing thing for me is that after that first harvest celebration in the autumn of 1621, that one day when the Native people and the European colonists sat together in peace, the European colonists went back to treating the Native peoples badly. Just two years later, European colonists who had settled on the Fore River in Weymouth, not too far from here, carried out the massacre of Wessagusset, killing seven native people for no good reason. And in the years to follow, people of European descent went on to sell Native men into slavery, break treaties, steal Native land — a centuries-long litany of abuse that continues to this day. It’s fine for us to remember that moment of racial harmony on an autumn day in 1621, but we must also remember the other four centuries of history of the Native people of Massachusetts.

And I find it disconcerting to learn that our modern celebration of Thanksgiving is really just a fictional invention of Sarah Hale in the mid-nineteenth century. A big dinner with a roast turkey wasn’t central to Thanksgiving until Sarah Hale made it so. In fact, Thanksgiving wasn’t even a national holiday until Sarah Hale started petitioning the president of the United States to make it a holiday. Thanksgiving as we know it today really has no historical connection to the Pilgrims.

While all this may sounds depressing and disorienting, I feel this actually frees us Unitarian Universalists to reinterpret Thanksgiving in some positive ways. Here are some of my ideas:

First, turkey becomes optional. If you like turkey, go ahead and have turkey. But if you’re vegan or vegetarian, or if you’re cutting down on eating meat to lower your carbon footprint, then there’s no reason to serve turkey. Or if you just don’t like turkey all that much, then don’t cook something you don’t like.

Second, we can be more realistic about what happened to Native peoples in southeastern Massachusetts. At some level, we all knew that the old myth of Thanksgiving whitewashed Native history. We all knew that old myth was at least misguided, at worst an outright lie. It’s a relief to be able to let go of a myth that really isn’t true. After all, isn’t that what Unitarian Universalism is all about? We try to find the truth, and not remain mired in misleading myths.

Third, all this means we can start creating a new kind of Thanksgiving. Instead of following the lead of Sarah Hale, we can create a Thanksgiving that’s more in tune with our hopes and dreams and values. We can keep those Thanksgiving rituals that work well for us, and let go of whatever doesn’t work well for us. For myself, I’d like to keep gathering together with family and friends to share a meal, but I don’t feel a need to cook a turkey any more.

Going beyond the Thanksgiving rituals, we might also reconsider the purpose of Thanksgiving. Which means it’s OK to revise the old myth of Thanksgiving, and tell what really happened to the Native peoples. And as we revise that old myth, we can put the emphasis back where it belongs: on giving thanks. We can give thanks in spite of everything that’s going wrong in the world. Last Thanksgiving, I did that for myself by rereading the poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay. I’m going to do that again this year, but this time in public — at this afternoon’s community Thanksgiving celebration, I’ll be reading an excerpt from Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” I especially like Ross Gay’s approach to gratitude, because he gives thanks in spite of his father’s death, in spite of his friend’s drug addiction, in spite of all that can go wrong in this world. Just as I’ll be giving thanks this year in spite of serious health problems in my extended family.

All this makes Thanksgiving simple. We gather together, with friends or family or chosen family — and if prefer your alone time, you can even gather together with just yourself. We gather together, and we give thanks. We give thanks in spite of all that’s wrong with the world. We give thanks for those little moments of joy that burst into our lives, often when we least expect them. We give thanks for whatever is good, for whatever is true.

And that’s all we have to do. Gather together. Give thanks. Anything else we choose to do is icing on the cake. So go ahead and cook that elaborate turkey dinner, with five different kinds of pie, and thirteen side dishes. Go ahead and set up a table that will seat twenty-three, and bring out the fancy dishes and flatware, and create elaborate centerpieces. Go ahead, just so long as you remember to gather together and give thanks. In my household, we might just opt for a Thanksgiving picnic at the beach; that’s what we did for the last thirteen years in California, and it might be warm enough here in Massachusetts this year. It doesn’t matter where you gather, as long as you gather together and give thanks.

May your Thanksgiving be what you want it to be. May your Thanksgiving be as elaborate as you want, as long as you remember the two simple things at its core: to gather together, and to give thanks.

Five Kernels of Corn, Then and Now

Readings

The first reading was done by Director of Religious Education EB Baptista

Instead of the usual first 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.

Homily

You should now have in your hands an envelope. If you haven’t already opened the envelope, why don’t you do so right now. What you should find in the envelope are five kernels of corn. I hope you are wondering why on earth you got five kernels of corn during a worship service (and yes, it is organic corn). To tell you why you just received five kernels of corn, I have to tell you a little story about the Pilgrims’ first winter here in southeastern Massachusetts.

As you know, the Pilgrims and the other English settlers left England on September 6, 1620, because they wanted a place where they could freely practice their religion. After a long voyage they came to anchor off Cape Cod on November 11. The settlers did not immediately find a place suitable for building their houses, so they spent a month exploring Cape Cod Bay. They wanted a good deep harbor where they could anchor their ship, the Mayflower, close to shore. They wanted good land where they could plant their crops in the spring. And they were worried that the people who were already living here, the Wampanoags, might attack them, so they wanted a place that they could defend in case of attack. Finally they found a place that looked good, and they named it Plymouth. They landed in Plymouth on December 23, 1620, and immediately started cutting down trees to build houses for themselves.

That’s right — they didn’t start building their houses until December 23. Remember that the climate in Massachusetts was colder back then than it is now. Remember that in late December, there isn’t much daylight here, and they didn’t have electric lights, so they could only work during the short daylight hours. There was snow, and ice, and it was cold, and every once in a while a storm would blow in so that they couldn’t work at all, but just had to huddle together on their ship. They did not have an easy time of it.

Can you imagine arriving in Massachusetts at this time of year after a hard two-month voyage on a tiny ship? Can you imagine spending another month desperately trying to find a good place to build a house, while the weather got colder and colder? Can you imagine that while you’re trying to find a place to live, you had to row small boats to shore, and wade in frigid water, and explore an unknown land that was sometimes frightening? Can you imagine doing all that hard outdoor work, and not having enough to eat because the food you had brought on the ship was beginning to run out? At last the Pilgrims decided to build their village in the place they called Plymouth. Can you imagine trying to build houses in the middle of a really hard Massachusetts winter?

There were only about a hundred of them. Some of them were already sick, or so exhausted that they were getting sick. They divided themselves up into nineteen families, telling all the single men to find a family that they could live with, so that they’d have fewer houses to build. Only a hundred people, some of them already starting to die from exposure and illness, with their food running out, trying to build nineteen houses in the middle of a New England winter.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, on January 14 one of their new houses caught fire and burned down. Even though no one was hurt, they had lost one of their precious houses, that cost them so much labor to build. As if a fire wasn’t bad enough, wolves came out of the woods and chased after their dogs — there were still wolves living around here in those days. As if wolves weren’t bad enough, they heard mountain lions roaring in the forest — there were still mountain lions living around here in those days. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, they had to deal with all the nasty weather that southeastern Massachusetts can dish out — freezing rain, and bitter cold, and snow, and high winds.

They didn’t have much food, and they didn’t have adequate shelter, and because of that many of them became ill. Once someone was ill, they really didn’t have a way to take care of the ill person. No nice warm beds to lie in; very little food to give someone who was ill. The real problem was the lack of food. Some of them came down with scurvy, a disease you get when you don’t have enough fresh food. Others became ill because they were simply weak from lack of food. By this time, they had eaten all the food they had brought with them, and they depended on hunting birds and animals in order to have something to eat; but they did not get nearly enough food by hunting.

More than half of the English settlers died in that first winter. Many years later, some people said that they had so little food that each person only had five kernels of corn to eat per day. Only five kernels of corn to eat per day.

You might want to look at the five kernels of corn you have in your hand. Imagine if that’s all you had to eat for a entire day: just those five kernels of corn. That’s not enough food for anyone. No wonder so many of them died that first winter in Plymouth.

They made it through that first winter. By March, they had made friends with some of the people who were already living here, the Wampanoag Indians. In the early spring, the Indians came down to the sea near Plymouth to catch lobsters and shad fish, which is what they did every year in early spring. The Indians shared some of their food, and showed the English settlers how to catch lobsters and shad. The Indians gave the Pilgrims some of their seed corn, and showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn in this new world.

As spring turned into summer, the Pilgrims borrowed food from the Indians, and began to find sufficient food on their own. When October came around, they had enough food that they felt they should have a real celebration, a harvest celebration. As we heard in the story of Thanksgiving, some of the men went off hunting, and came back with wildfowl and deer. The four women who were still alive did all the cooking. Ninety Indians, all men, dropped in at the last minute, and were invited to stay for the celebration. At last the food was ready and everyone sat down to eat. We don’t know exactly what they had to eat, but they might have had corn and pumpkins and squash and venison and wild duck and goose and baked beans and codfish and mussels and lobster and parsnips and carrots and cabbage and lots of other kinds of food. And the story goes that, in addition to all the wonderful food that had been cooked by those four women, each person at that meal also got five uncooked kernels of corn — five kernels of corn, as a reminder of how bad it had been that previous winter.

The story of those five kernels of corn probably isn’t true, but it’s a pretty good story. Sometimes we need tangible reminders, to help us remember what we’re thankful for — and now you have five little reminders, five kernels of corn to help you remember what we can be thankful for.

That was back then. What might those five kernels of corn help us to remember today? Those five kernels of corn help remind us to give thanks that we are better off than the Pilgrims during that first winter. But they might also remind us that we can give thanks by giving to others. Because one of the most important parts of the story of Thanksgiving is that the Wampanoag Indians deserve a lot of the credit for saving the Pilgrims. Let me tell you a little bit of the story of the Wampanoag Indians.

Several years before the Pilgrims arrived, Europeans were already coming regularly to the coast of New England to take advantage of the huge numbers of fish that were then in oceans around here. In Nova Scotia, there were already some permanent European settlements. Those Europeans brought diseases with them, diseases for which the Indians had no immunity whatsoever. About four years before the Pilgrims arrived, some kind of epidemic — maybe it was smallpox, or it might have been measles — an epidemic swept through the Indians in Nova Scotia and continued down into New England. Throughout that whole area, nine out of ten Indians died. Nine out of ten people! Entire villages died off. Ninety percent of the Indians — dead! This was far worse than what happened to the Pilgrims — only half the Pilgrims died in that first winter.

And yet, when the Pilgrims showed up in 1620, the Wampanoag Indians helped them out.

That brings us back to the five kernels of corn. If the Pilgrims had only five kernels of corn to eat on some days during that first winter, there’s a good chance that they would have had even less to eat if the Indians hadn’t helped them out. If the story about the five kernels of corn is true, then when the Pilgrims put out five kernels of corn at everyone’s place on that very first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, it must have been more thann a reminder of the hard times they had seen. They must have recognized that without the Indians, more of them would have died. Today, those five kernels of corn thus remind us to give thanks for all the help we have received in our lives — remind us that one way we give thanks is to reach out in our turn, and help someone else.

That’s why some of us choose to put these Guest at Your Table boxes on our tables during the holiday season, because one way to give thanks for what we have, is by giving generously to others who have needs greater than our own. That’s why some of us bring canned goods and non-perishables to place in the food pantry boxes here at church — we’re giving thanks by helping others.

This Thanksgiving, some of us will put five kernels of corn at each person’s place oat the table as a reminder to give thanks. Perhaps those five kernels of corn can also serve to remind us that one way to give thanks is to give help to others — to contribute some money to your Guest at Your Table box at each meal between now and Christmas — or to remember to bring food each week to place in the food pantry box here at church. These are things that both children and adults can do — two tangible ways to give thanks by being generous to others.

There is one last thing those five kernels of corn can help us remember. I’ve already said those five kernels of corn can remind us to give thanks that we are better off than the Pilgrims during that first winter; and those five kernels of corn can also remind us that we can give thanks by giving to others. But those five kernels of corn also can remind us to give thanks for what we already have without worrying so much about what we don’t have.

I know the economy is in terrible shape right now. I know that many of us in this congregation are feeling the effects of the economic downturn — probably all of us are, to some extent. And that means that most of us are facing losses of one kind or another. Those of us with 401k retirement plans are watching those plans diminish daily. Those who are already retired may be watching retirement investments shrink. People are losing jobs, people are losing income. Many of us don’t have as much money, so we’re cutting back on spending. So it is easy to focus on what we no longer have.

But I suggest that the story about the five kernels of corn can help us to remember what we do have. First of all, we’re alive — whereas the Pilgrims watched half their number die in one year, and the Wampanoags watched ninety percent of their number die in one year. So we’re alive, and that’s worth something. Second, we generally have access to much better health care than did the Pilgrims or the Wampanoags. Even though health insurance is hopelessly expensive, even though the health care system is close to being broken, we’re not dying from scurvy, as did the Pilgrims, or from measles, as did Wampanoags. Third, even though we are seeing a growing divide between the super-rich and the rest of us, even though the rest of us may even be seeing our standard of living decline recently, even so we have a much higher standard of living than much of the world. Fourth, I enjoy a high degree of religious freedom, which is after all why the Pilgrims came to southeastern Massachusetts — for religious freedom.

I could go on, but you get the idea. We’re alive, we probably live twice as long as the Pilgrims did on average, we have a generally high standard of living, we have religious freedom. Yes, we should continue to improve the quality of our lives, but let’s also remember to give thanks for that which we already have.

Here’s what I’m going to do with my five kernels of corn. When I sit down to eat on Thanksgiving day, I’m going to take my five kernels of corn and put them beside my plate, and look at them for just a moment before I start eating. I have five kernels of corn, and I have four things to remember:

— Even though it might not be completely true, I’m going to remember the Pilgrim story of the five kernels of corn.

— I’m going to remember to give thanks that I am better off than the Pilgrims were during that first winter.

— I’m going to remember that I can give thanks by giving to others (and in the spirit of the Wampanoag Indians giving food to the Pilgrims, I’m also going put my Guest at Your Table box next to my plate, and remember to bring canned goods next Sunday for the food pantry box here in church).

— I’m going to remember to stop worrying so much about what I don’t have, and to give thanks for my religious freedom, my relatively high standard of living, and for just being alive.

That’s four things. What about that fifth and last kernel of corn? Do I even need to tell you that it will remind me to give thanks for the people around me? Just as the Pilgrims gave thanks for each other, and they gave thanks for the Wampanoag Indians — I want to remember to give thanks for all the people in my life who have helped me.

If you only remember one thing when you look at your five kernels of corn, remember this last thing — to give thanks for all the people in your life — to give thanks for the love each of us gives and receives.