Abundance In Our World

November 27, 1983
Lakeland
Thanksgiving Sunday

When the colonists gathered at Plymouth on an autumn day in 1621 to give thanks to the God they worshiped and to feast with their families and Indian friends, a colonial tradition was born which both renewed and re-shaped a harvest festival which is older than recorded history .... We owe much to the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

When the historic compact was signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, new vitality was added to emerging dreams of government by free persons disciplined by self-imposed laws. A climax, but not the conclusion or achievement that goal was reached in the American Revolution when the grandest human goals were stated plainly: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Much remained to be accomplished when the Revolution was won – slavery, the right of all to vote, free public education. ... There are many important goals still before us.

There is much to be done, but we should not fail to return thanks for the many ways the Pilgrim tradition has enriched our public morality, freed us and put on us the pressure of Pilgrim example to discipline ourselves.

Celebrating harvest home is an ancient festival of abundance. I would like to remind you of abundance, as it is in our world. Furthermore, the Mayflower Compact signers agreed to a mutual covenant of law and order before they settled on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. Even as the Pilgrims faced an abundant future to be purchased at great price, and undertook their daring adventure supported by a mutual compact, so we in this world face a great potential which can be achieved only by daring involvements and more universal compacts.

“Theology of Abundance” is intended to indicate the ... manner the peoples of the earth have celebrated harvest with reverence. The wonders of growing things that nourish our bodies and are pleasant to our tastes have always gripped human imagination. The events of pre-history which we can infer from tribal memories, folk songs and remnants of ancient ritual, not to speak of the clearer records of history, all confirm the intensity of feeling that human beings sense about seedtime, growth, and harvest. We survive because of growing things that are the bounty of the good earth. Root, vegetable, grain, fruit sustain us.

But the origins of celebration of harvest home are not only in our Judeo-Christian cultural roots, but also in the heritage of the American Indians who were so cruelly despoiled and deceived by the European invaders. The late A. Hyatt Verrill, scholar of the culture of American Indians, observed in his book THE REAL AMERICANS, “In the eastern states, the Algonquin tribes, such as Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, Mohicans, Massachusetts and others held a great autumnal feast. [CJW note: hundreds of years before the Pilgrims landed.] The Indians gathered to give thanks to the Great Spirit and lesser deities for abundant crops, good hunting, and fishing. Dances were held .... Drums of a special form were thumped ... a new fire symbolic of a fresh start in life was kindled and there was a great feast with venison, roasted ears, wild turkeys, squash, pumpkin, pudding.”

Thus, Earth’s abundance might echo the Indian prayer, too -

“We give thanks for the corn and beans and squashes that give us life; ... we give thanks to the Great Spirit, who is all goodness and who directs all things for the good of his children.”

Addendum
[Editor’s note: the following addendum is printed on paper that appears to have come from a much earlier sermon, probably dating to the 1950s]

Let me conclude with a brief poem that appeared a couple years ago in the New York Herald Tribune, written up by Sam Bradley, entitled “Pilgrims, Pilgrims Yet.”

“They came as strangers, pilgrims of the earth,
to a wilderness of untried strengths, a West
for bolder covenants. And their unrest
is still in us. Each humbled line of birth,
rebel or not, yet far-ventures worth
of everyman. And our God-speeds attest
a perpetuity of trust, a quest
not halted by a dowsing at the hearth.

“A stranger’s hand? A promised world at hand?
Draconian rules to pass? If we undo
old mistimed power, tradition misapplied,
ours, fasces of new power! But to command
our sheaf of stars, we must somehow subdue
Our waylost fear and our waylaying pride.”