Sermon November 23, 2014
Deuteronomy 8:7–18
Psalm 65
2 Corinthians 9:6–15
Luke 17:11–19
“Treasuring, Confessing, Reconciling”
God, who brings slaves into freedom, water to dry lands, bounty to scarcity, blessing to the poor, generosity to the needy, food for the hungry, and health to the ailing, we approach you in humility and gratitude in this season of harvest. Though we may not be as close to the fields as we once were, we celebrate all you give and all we already have. May our fullness be shared abundantly with those in lean times, may our hearts be opened to all. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.Through an exploration of his own family’s history my husband, Carl, has discovered that his great-grandmother was Otoe with tribal roots in what is now western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. She gave up that identity to become a part of the dominant culture. Her identity, as often happens, was covered up because of the shame attached to being Indian by white Americans. In our dialogue, his voice represents the indigenous voice. Mine represents most of our voices, the voice of the immigrant.
One: (immigrants) This is the promised land. What are you doing here?
Two: (indigenous) This is the good land, our sacred home.
One: You are but Canaanites in the land.
Two: We are custodians of the land.
One: You are uncivilized natives.
Two: We are the indigenous owners.
One: God promised us this land.
Two: God entrusted this land to us.
One: You have not developed this land. You don’t deserve it.
Two: We have sustained this land, its life and its soul.
One: What do you know of soul?
Two: We know the spirit of this land; do you?
One: We know the Creator who promised us this land.
Two: We know the Creator’s spirit deep within this land.
One: Anyway, we claim the right to remove you from this land.
Two: A right to poison our land, our water, and our children?
One: You are in the way of progress for a superior people.
Two: We have a close kinship with the land and its animal life.
One: You are living here wild anyway.
Two: That’s the kind of racism that poisoned our lives – and yours.
One: This is the promised land; it’s ours now.
Two: This is a sacred land; we are still its custodians. (Seasons of the Spirit, Thanksgiving Service 2014)
We come together this morning in worship carrying within us the conflicts of history. We come bringing with us the varying cultures and traditions of our celebrations, rituals, and worship. Even within Christianity, we bring various hopes and dreams, different memories, and diverse backgrounds. These differences reveal within us the need we have as people of faith to be thankful everyday, to confess not only our participation in systemic racism and violence, but our continuing benefits from it, and how we are going to walk the road that leads to reconciliation and reparation.
Many, if not most, cultures in history have celebrated some kind of harvest festival where they lifted up with joy, the time of gathering in the fruits, grains, and other produce when they were ready. Of course this kind of gathering and appreciating shifts season as geography shifts, but most of the time the harvest celebrations began as some kind of dormancy, like winter, a dry season, or a very wet season, like monsoon, were about to begin.
People celebrate the gathering up and storing of abundance, giving thanks to God—sharing through parties and other festivities. And in this nation, because we are a society with many cultures, there are lots of stories about how, when, and who started our celebration, but all of the stories are about giving thanks for what we have.
Our stories and traditions are about seeing the wealth we have for what it is, as well as seeing it for what it can do. Unless we appreciate that the resources we have are from God, they will rust and fade, rot and corrupt, they will, unless they are shared out to those who need to be nurtured and encouraged. Because in the end, nothing we have is our own. All that we have belongs to God, the source of all, the source of our very lives.
And yet, it often seems as if we have often forgotten whose creation it is and whose people we are. We may have spoken the right words and talked a good game, but have often behaved without regard to the God who made us, the God who made everything.
In our text from Deuteronomy we heard the promises God made through Moses, the promises God made about the Promised Land. When we pray with thanksgiving, we remember God and all that God has made and all that God has done. We remember the land beneath our feet. The soil itself and all that it provides through its particular fertility. We remember the water we must drink to stay alive, as it flows from below the ground and rains down from above, watering us and the food sources we need. We remember the precious, at least costly, minerals buried in the ground that we mine to create material comforts and possessions. And we remember the ingredients of the food we rely on for nourishment. We are to remember in all of these components of our lives that God is the source—that it is God who has provided, not the power of our own hands—but it is God.
When we idolize economic independence in our culture, we disregard God and say, “I own my house because I worked hard to earn it.” But any claim about attaining what we possess exclusively through our own efforts is a God-denying act that forgets about God.
While we are certainly created to work for what we need, what we do to satisfy our material desires call us to confess the effects our actions have had upon many of God’s children in this world. When we thank God for all that we have, we cannot forget that much of what we have was gained less expensively by us through unjust labor and inhumane work environments. The land itself that we live on was acquired by the deaths by war and disease of the peoples, tribes, and nations who lived here before most of our ancestors came and claimed to have discovered it.
When we give thanks to God for what we have and how we live, we can’t forget those who work to provide it and those who have lived in these lands, enjoying its riches for thousands of years before most of our ancestors left their native lands.
We are called upon to confess, to repentantly name the heinous acts that have often followed when we take possession of the natural resources we thank God for. We have to remember that the destruction of a lands or a people are not acts of gratitude, but fly in the face of the God we worship. Everything we have comes with a price, not just the labor of our hands, but the labor and sometimes the lives of others.
On Thanksgiving Day we do celebrate all that we have and the creation that God made. We celebrate with gratitude, and yet we are also called to realize that much of what we have was taken from others. As the immigrants to this land moved west, people were forced from their homes and villages by force of arms and by misunderstood or deceptive sale or trade. Many people disappeared through diseases for which the first residents had no immunity.
So we stand in this place in history, expressing gratitude for what we have while realizing that much of what we have was gained at many points in history by false, violent, or apathetic actions. In other words, people lied and cheated, killed and tortured, and usually didn’t really care that the other human beings who had lived and thrived here before.
Here, in these lands, the peoples who lived here went by many names. Some of those names are Weas and Piankashaws, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, Miami, Wiandot, Kaskaskia, the Cahokia, the Peoria, the Tamaroa, Moingwena . . . and so many others. Some finally took a stand here at the Wabash because they were tired of forced removal, losing family and identity again and again. The violence escalated until some tribes disappeared and others turned into residents of reservation lands in what would become Oklahoma. That land was also taken as when immigrant people moved into it in the land-runs of 1889 and 1893.
We can be grateful for all that God has created, but not without confessing and once we have confessed, we have to act on our contrition.
Apologies would be a good first start. Christianity carries with it the shame of conquest as well. Though our faith and the work of Jesus arose from a movement against the empire of Rome, Christianity has become the faith of those in power. We have to acknowledge our part and our subsequent benefit.
Christianity—through Rome and into the European kingdoms and empires, flowing right into the growth of the United States as a world power—was distorted into the religion of conquest. There are lots of historical events that show us this shift from what Jesus taught to how we live, and we need to know those events. So we need to apologize, to God, to the people who were tortured and killed by our ancestors and to the people who continue to suffer because of those actions.
And then we need to do something about it. We need to do something for children in the Little Singer Community School near Winslow, Arizona who attend school in buildings built during the depression. They have less than a 25% proficiency in reading and math. In addition to 81 students, Little Singer Community School is also home to asbestos, mold and scores of mice. Students have to carry their seats from class to class, presumably because the school can't afford chairs for each classroom.
We need to address why and how 1 in 4 Native Americans live in poverty and continually face double-digit unemployment rates. They also lack access to healthcare and have a lower life expectancy than average.
We need a systemic way of addressing this racism with regard to native peoples all over our country and around the world. We need to begin by righting our attitude toward the land we have gained, doing more than using it up as if it were not sacred by virtue of its Creator. We need to remember God and be grateful. We can look at the people who were entrusted with this land before and realize that our subsequent ownership and use has been greedy and wasteful.
We need our consciences raised, building relationships, and begin a process of reconciliation the victims past actions. We need to hear what the other has to say.
One: Let us talk.
Two: Let us talk.
One: Let us listen to each other.
Two: Let us listen to each other.
Both: And let us find ways to share. (Seasons of the Spirit, Thanksgiving Service 2014)
To the glory of God. Amen.
