A Reflection by James (Jim) Boswell II

 

A Happy Lincoln-Lady-Lamb-Turkey-“Indian”-Jesus-Weeping Woman

Thanksgiving to Us All! 

A Reflection by James (Jim) Boswell II, 

retired Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Pastor   

Hear the words of Isaiah 25:6-8

  On this mountain the Lord of hosts will prepare

for all peoples a feast of rich food,

a banquet of fine wine—

                       the richest of foods and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy   

                 the shroud that enfolds all peoples,

                   the pall that covers all nations: 

                                 he will swallow up death forever!

         The Lord God will wipe away the tears

                from all faces, 

                                  and he will remove the shame of his people

                     from all the earth.

                                                             For the Lord has spoken.

                                                                                    

I HAVE prepared for you a special Thanksgiving table. You see it there? Goodness, what a strange-looking table this is!

     There’s a turkey on the table. Well that’s normal, but why is a roasted lamb lying there? And why does Abraham Lincoln have his feet beneath this table? And Jesus of Nazareth? And that dreadful weeping woman – how did she get in here?

      Everything about my Thanksgiving table seems all askew and out of place –  except for the turkey. So what about that turkey?

     Well, we always like to think of turkeys at Thanksgiving time, remembering our Plymouth pilgrim forebears – how, after a severe winter when they had enjoyed an abundant harvest, they gladly celebrated. Governor Bradford declared three full days of celebration during which the pilgrims feasted, and although they were a somber people, they knew how to feast. They invited their misnamed “Indian” friends to eat with them, and they all ate, among other things, venison and wild turkey, much of it supplied by their native neighbors. And that’s why many of us still eat turkey at Thanksgiving time.

     What a beautiful thought – sitting there at table with their Native American friends. And yet, I cannot think of that without experiencing strong pangs of conscience, remembering what came later – how those who were native to this land were steadily driven back and back by broken treaties along many trails of tears onto undesirable lands – mistreated and mistreated – and many are mistreated still.

BUT I just heard Old Abe clear his throat, so what’s he doing at this Thanksgiving table?

     Well now, you see, our pilgrim forebears celebrated many times on many different occasions – when the crops were good, when a ship arrived from England – but those thanksgiving celebrations were never annual holidays. It was not until the Civil War that a lady named Sarah Josepha Hale brought about the first official Thanksgiving Day. She was the editor of a prominent women’s magazine, and she wrote letter after letter to President Lincoln begging him for such a day, until finally Lincoln consented, and proclaimed the third Thursday of November,1863, to be a Day of National Thanksgiving – for even though the nation was at war, the Union did have reasons to give thanks. 

     And yet, to tell the truth there really wasn’t very much to give thanks for at that particular time. The cannons of war were booming, soldiers were dying in great numbers North and South, and the Union had gone without a significant victory for a long, discouraging time. Fort Sumter, where the war had started, was again under bombardment, this time from the Union navy seeking to recapture the fort, and down near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Ulysses S. Grant, the newly appointed, untried, untested Commander of the Army of the West, did not seem to be accomplishing very much. Some people had even begun saying that Lincoln had better get busy and order up a victory for his Thanksgiving Day.

     Oh, how Abraham Lincoln would have liked to have been able to do that, for he well knew that if the next presidential election were to be held just then, he could not possibly be reelected. Indeed, the committee in charge of dedicating a national cemetery at Gettysburg had been reluctant even to invite the unpopular president to speak there, and when they realized they must, they specifically instructed him to contribute only “a few appropriate remarks.” (Keep it short, Mr. President!)

     When Lincoln left Washington to go by train to Gettysburg, someone made the quip that he was like “the dead going to eulogize the dead,” for as everyone knew, at that time Lincoln was a dead card in the political deck.

     After the tiring train ride north, Lincoln dined alone is his hotel room. Not feeling well, he looked over his short speech for the following day and went to bed early. The next day he was driven out to the cemetery where he sat on a platform listening while Edward Everett, the great orator of the time, pontificated for two long hours. When Lincoln’s moment finally arrived, he stood up and in his high-pitched voice read from just two sheets of paper: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

     He went on to say that although the world would not long remember his words, it could never forget what those who had struggled here had done. He went on to say that it was not enough to dedicate this land as a hallowed resting place, but far more important that “we the living, rather…be dedicated here to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

     The speech ended so quickly that many in the crowd were surprised and there was only a confused scattering of applause at the end. Lincoln himself told a friend that his speech was “a flat failure and the people are disappointed.” 

     During the train ride back to Washington, Lincoln felt ill, laid down and had a wet towel placed across his forehead. Later at the White House it was determined that the president had small pox. Lincoln took to his bed.

     And the days wore on, and the guns boomed, and the earth trembled as men died on battlefields North and South. And then, just before Lincoln’s Day of National Thanksgiving arrived, the newspapers in the North filled up with nervous, uncertain headlines. Something was going on near Chattanooga, nobody knew what. Something was happening – Grant was moving. And then, just as 

Thanksgiving Day arrived, the newspapers of the North sang out the jubilant message: There had been a major victory at Chattanooga. Grant had taken the city.

     So all across the North that first Thanksgiving day, families did have reason to give thanks, though many gave thanks through tears, having lost loved ones – sons, brothers, fathers, uncles, husbands – lost, swallowed up in that great war that swallowed up so many, that swallowed up so much.

     And the fighting went on, and the earth shuddered, and men died on battlefields, North and South, as the divided nation struggled on toward the day when at last the war would end. And as the war was drawing to its close, Abraham Lincoln, again elected President of the United States, stood before the nation and ended his Second Inaugural Address by saying, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

     Six weeks later, Lincoln was dead, assassinated, his death a tragedy for the  nation, for the South as well as for the North.

     So, Mr. Lincoln, goodbye. We are glad to have had you with us at our Thanksgiving table, for even though you presided over a nation at war, you were a man of peace, a man whose heart yearned for peace – yearned for the biblical vision of swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, when nation would never again lift up sword against nation, or ever again learn war.

BUT why is that lamb lying there on the table? And that weeping woman, I can hear her still.

     The lamb is there because I cannot think of any significant gathering at any significant table without remembering the table where Jesus and his disciples gathered on the last night of his life, that Passover table on which lay a roasted lamb, reminiscent of the redemptive blood smeared on their doorways by the Children of Israel on that dark night when, as tradition had it, God struck with plague broad Egypt and set them free, sent them streaming out of slavery, out of the House of Bondage into freedom – free! free! free!

     And centuries later, Jesus and his disciples gathered at a table in Jerusalem to observe that ancient Passover tradition, the lamb lying there before them along with bread and wine and bitter herbs to remind them of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, and also to remind them of their own bitter slavery beneath the Roman Empire, and their undiminished hope for freedom still.

     But Jesus gave them something more to think about that night, for he used the Passover bread and wine to tell them that he was himself about to become a redemptive sacrifice intended to bestow on all the world another kind of freedom from all bondage – bondage to sin, fear, death, and all the old alienations, shames, and despairs that have long plagued the human family.

     What a significant table that was! Yet every table fellowship with Jesus had been significant, for he made sitting at table with him a joy – a feast of joy in anticipation of that even greater feast the prophets said was coming, the old prophetic dream that God would one day spread a table for all peoples, all nations, and all would come to sit together at a banquet of the greatest love, joy, and fellowship, with universal peace – all the world one family, sisters and brothers all of us together, with no more shame or sin, no more crying, every face wiped clean of tears.

     Jesus must especially have loved that old prophetic dream, that Isaian vision, for once he sang out gladly, “Many will come from east and west and north and south to dine at table in the kingdom of God.” 

     We too yearn for such a promised table, and would like to think that all Native Americans will be there with us, every tear they wept on their many trails of tears wiped dry, along with all the victims of all the forms of slavery, every scar from every sort of lash, before or since, removed and healed, made whole.

     Oh, if only that day could quickly come! For our swords have grown so huge, so powerful. Our swords have turned to rockets, our spears to missiles, our chariots to tanks and submarines and weapons of such mass destruction, they can destroy whole cities – and have. 

     And what about the destruction of our world, our earth with its “natural” rights –  the right of rivers to flow unpolluted to the sea, the right of oceans to maintain their health, the right of our atmosphere to cleanse itself, the right of all of us to drink clean water and breathe fresh air, the right of animals to flourish in their natural habitats.

     Surely those are dreams we all must dream! 

BUT now I want us to let that table fade away and be replaced by another table, a table from the time of Jesus where all of us are sitting, and all of us are Pharisees.

–Now, don’t get too upset; there were good Pharisees in Jesus’ time – and one of them is a friend of ours named Simon, and Simon has invited all of us his Pharisaic friends to his big banquet table in order for us to meet and eat and speak with Jesus. Yes, with Jesus! And we have all agreed to gather here only because Simon keeps on insisting to us that he thinks – he really thinks that this man Jesus might just actually be a prophet! Really! A prophet!

     So here we are, all of us reclining on couches around Simon’s big banquet table with our bare feet stretched out behind us, waiting to hear whatever it is that this man Jesus, now reclining here among us, is going to say to us – when suddenly we all gasp!

     We gasp because an obviously disreputable woman has just come barging into Simon’s righteous house weeping and looking for Jesus, and when she sees him, she goes right up to him and stands behind him weeping. and when she notices that her tears are wetting his feet, she bends over and shamelessly unbinds her hair and uses it to wipe his feet, and then she begins anointing his feet with fragrant oil and even kissing them!

     And we are absolutely appalled, for now it’s clear to every one of us, including even Simon, this man can be no prophet, for if he were a prophet he would know what sort of woman this is now touching him and snatch his feet away from her! He is no prophet!       

     That’s what all of us are thinking.    

     And Jesus turns and says, “Simon, I have something I want to say to you, to all of you.”

     “Speak, teacher,” Simon says.

     “Let us suppose that there were two men who owed another man money. One of them owed him only a little, but the other owed him a very large amount. When neither of them could pay, he forgave them both. Now, Simon, which of those two men will love him more?”

     “…I suppose…” Simon says “…I suppose the one – the one who was forgiven more will love him more.”

     “That’s right. You see this woman? I came into your house. You gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet them with her tears and dried them with her hair. You offered me no ointment for my head, but she anoints my feet with scented oil. You gave me no special kiss of greeting, but she seems unable to stop herself from weeping and kissing my feet. And so I tell you this: Even before she came in here, this woman already knew she was forgiven. Yes, I tell you, for even then her tears were tears of grateful joy because she knew – despite her many sins, she already knew I would accept and love her. And all of you can have a joy like hers if only you will put aside your vaunted righteousness and humbly, joyfully share with her a gratitude as large and strong as hers.” 

      [To the woman:] “Shalom. You may go in peace. Your loving faith has set you free.” 

__________

Gracious God, we give you thanks as we remember our pilgrim forebears, and remember also that time of terrible war watched over by a venerated president who helped us keep the democracy we so cherish and so need –   but most of all we gratefully remember that inestimably precious table where bread and wine and a sacrificial Lamb invite us strongly to desire that greater promised feast where all may sit in loving fellowship with no more war or sin or shame and every tear wiped dry from every face, for death will be no more. We fervently want to sit at that dear table, Lord, so help us all, we pray, to know and share the mercy of your love the way that woman did – with humble, loving, joyful gratitude. Amen.