Sermon- November 23, 2025

“Gathering and Feasting”

When I was growing up, in our family, there were two holidays that were holy – no holy isn’t a strong enough word! They were transcendent, untouchable. The first would be Christmas Eve, or Wigilia or Veligia, depending on what part of Poland your family was from. Very much like the Italian feast of seven fishes – meatless, traditional and family oriented. The second most untouchable day would be Thanksgiving. And when I say untouchable, I mean that it was only – ONLY – family, blood family around the table, and attendance at these two meals was unquestioned. Not being at either of these meals was unthinkable.

And I have such vivid memories of my mom, up at 4am, with the gigantic turkey in the kitchen sink. She’d be washing that bird inside and out, boiling the organs to add to the stuffing, and packing that cavity chock full of bread stuffing. Once the turkey was in the oven, the smells emanating throughout the house were heavenly. To this day, when I smell celery sautéing in butter, it reminds me of my mom.

Such wonderful, wonderful memories, that I’m sure many of us share. 

But there is a much deeper and darker story around Thanksgiving, a story many of us in my generation were never told.

In the autumn of 1621, the Wampanoag people and the English colonists shared a harvest feast in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, to celebrate a successful harvest after a difficult year. The Wampanoag, including Massasoit, brought food like venison, and their knowledge of local agriculture was crucial for the colonists' survival.

The gathering was a diplomatic one, intended to strengthen the alliance between the two groups. The traditional images of pilgrims in black with buckle shoes and Native Americans in feathered headdresses are historically inaccurate. 

Days of thanksgiving were celebrated in the colonies for various reasons, such as safe passage or bountiful harvests. George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation on behalf of the new nation in 1789, and Abraham Lincoln later declared it a national holiday in 1863 during the Civil War, hoping to unify a divided country.

The modern, fourth Thursday in November date was established by Congress in 1941. 

For many Native Americans, however, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning because of the violence, broken treaties, and loss of life that followed the initial peace. Some Native Americans view the holiday as a time to celebrate their heritage and give thanks, but they also call for remembering the difficult history that is often overlooked.

Since 1970, many Native Americans have gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day for the National Day of Mourning to remember their ancestors and the suffering they endured. 

So something that started out so peaceful, so full of thanksgiving, turned into land grabbing, killing, intentional disease spread and centuries of false narratives. It strikes me that so much of who we are as a society, and what our culture says about us, isn’t much different today.

Yet through it all, we continue to give thanks. We continue to set aside this one day to name and celebrate our bounties. Sitting next to your weird uncle, the in-law that you can’t or are forbidden to talk politics with, or the annoying niece or nephew that hasn’t stopped talking for two hours, we still give thanks. We still take this moment to be together, present with each other, with all of our stories, with all of our own disappointments, with all of our own personal wars. For me, that says something about the human spirit.

In her poem “Thank You” Sarah Ruth Wekoye Davis writes: 

I wake today, tired and heavy, I wake today, seeking the Spirit of Life, I wake today, curious for all that will be, in this time between when I open my eyes, and when I close them again. 

And I say thank you, for this breath of life connecting me to all that is, to the Grandparents who stand with me, to the Children I nurture in home and hearth, to the bud of the rose growing tall in the early morning sun outside my window. 

I give my thanks, bowing in gratitude for this new day, this month, this year, gratitude for the community of love that surrounds me, in the singing birds, in the early morning dew beneath bare feet, in the meetings I will share today, with beloved kin of our Mother Earth, to which we all belong. 

Thank you. May my gift of breath, offered back in exhale, be worthy of Your gift of life, lived fully in this my today.

I will continue to struggle with a brother and other relatives who supported our current national leadership. I will continue to struggle with the cruelty and meanness towards each other we’re seeing on TV every day. And I will continue to struggle with unjust treatment of people because of where they’re from, what they look like or whom they love.

But I will also give thanks for these struggles – because they force me to look deep into my own heart, my own soul. It forces me to articulate who I am, who I want to be as a Unitarian Universalist and as a minister. These struggles allow me to see who I do not want to be, what I will not support. And I am grateful for that insight.

So as you’re sitting around the table with those you love, and perhaps those you’re not sure you love, remember why we do this. Remember why we celebrate this holiday. Be mindful of what this meant and continues to mean to our indigenous neighbors. Give thanks for your family, your friends, this community. Hold your ancestors close and your memories even closer – even if it’s your mother, in her bathrobe and slippers at the kitchen sink. These are what makes this holiday so special.

I’ll end this morning with The Stubborn Gifts of Breath and Life 

by Maureen Killoran:

It felt like being on the moon, walking on Mount St. Helens. Just a few years previous, that mountain had blown her top,

destroying human and animal life, flattening vegetation and

buildings for miles and sharing its ash with the world. As we

stepped from our car, we felt that ash drift like talcum around

our ankles, rise in the air, enter with our breath. Other than

occasional blacked memories of trees, all was grey, grey as far you could see.

Silence seized us for the longest time as we stood there, two

irrelevant humans and this huge, mutilated world. Only

gradually did our eyes slow and our hearts focus. Only gradually did we begin to see what was really before us.

How had we overlooked the fireweed, that perennial volunteer, its brilliant buds proclaiming, “Hey, world, we’re back!” What blocked us from celebrating the eager insect conversations around us? It was right there before us, and we nearly walked away. Overwhelmed by the devastation, we almost missed the tiny pond, its surface literally dancing with more tadpoles than I had ever seen.

We do this, you see – we ensnare ourselves with the magnitude of what the poet called the mutilated world. We get busy, and troubled, and frightened, and then, incongruously, it’s time for Thanksgiving. I, at least, need this season to remind myself to be grateful for intermittent beauty and the stubborn gifts of breath and life. I—maybe you too?—need this season, even if just quietly to say, “praise be.”

May you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving

Amen