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Around the Thanksgiving table growing up, family stories were often told. It’s a great tradition. Of course part of that tradition is that there are some groans because everyone has heard them so many times. This is one that I often heard and now tell to groans. And I know it’s true story because it is in a book. In 1805 my great-great-great Grandfather, Amos Todhunter and his family moved to what would become the Quaker Village of New Martinsburg, Ohio. His parents had left Leesburg, Virginia because of their opposition to slavery. My great-great grandfather, Abner Todhunter, figured in a family story of when he was sixteen. Shortly after Ohio became a state in 1803, there were a series of violent confrontations with native-Americans. When Isaac and Eleanor Todhunter settled there, Highland County was a dangerous place.

One day, after Isaac’s cabin was built, Isaac and Eleanor and the older boys went to neighboring Greenfield for winter supplies. Abner was alone at the cabin with his (four younger siblings), when he saw six Indians in war paint, bearing down on them on horseback. The Indians sprang from their horses, strode to the cabin, and entered as the thin muster of gaping children shrank back. With Quaker calm, Abner invited the warriors to sit down. Then he put before them the best that the Todhunter larder held and stood aside, leaving them to enjoy their meal without distraction. When the Indians were done eating, one of them got up and came toward him. He tapped Abner’s shoulder with solemn insistence. "White man good," he said. "Feed Indian." The Indians thereupon mounted their horses and rode away into the woodlands. In after years the story was retold as one of the finest moments in Todhunter history.

Now of course that story is true. In fact every time I tell the story, I am more and more convinced of it. What are your "our family at its best" stories? Obviously it is such an enduring family tale because it so resonates with the story of that first Thanksgiving. Those early Pilgrims were motivated by gratitude to the Native-Americans for helping them survive their catastrophic first winter at Plymouth Colony, while young Abner was motivated out of fear, but still their meal brought forth gratitude from Indians who, had the situation been different, would have been a threat.

That first Thanksgiving is a story about gratitude in a unique context. The Pilgrims thought themselves to be special. They came to America not really because of religious persecution. That is why they left England for the Netherlands. But because they had settled so comfortably in Holland, their leaders feared that their distinctiveness would, in a generation or two, be lost. So the Mayflower set forth in search of a new land where their uniqueness could be preserved, even if that meant dire hardship. They saw themselves as people of the Covenant and identified with the Hebrews as God’s Chosen People. America would be their land of Canaan, their Promised Land. They were not, by the way, what we would today call Fundamentalists. They believed God’s revelation was a continuing one. Their leader John Robinson had said that God has more light and truth to break forth from his holy word. For them God was always still speaking.

This self-image has informed the American identity ever since. Sadly, the strand of the story that sees America as a Promised Land to be conquered by God’s Chosen and its inhabitants subdued and exterminated, became a part of the American reality. Perhaps it is unfair to blame the pilgrims or other Christians entirely for this. Invaders regularly devise self-serving and convincing rationales for their conquests. But consider that first Thanksgiving as a kind of picture of what might have been, a glimpse of one brief moment in which people of vastly different cultures and language and race bridged those differences. How different from the brutal conquest of the continent that soon began. How different from the story of the horrors of slavery and the brutality of whites against blacks. No American of Caucasian descent can feel anything but shame for our race’s treatment of the native-Americans we found and the Africans we brought to these shores. It is an ineradicable ugliness at the very center of our story. Yet it is profoundly interesting that Thanksgiving is our most popular, beloved and inclusive national holiday - and our most religious one.

The holiday has infused itself into every culture in our multicultural country, with each culture giving the meal that day a special twist. I think I’ve told you about my first Thanksgiving in Harlem as a theological student – turkey, of course, but with collard greens and grits and macaroni and cheese, too. Or my first Thanksgiving with Italian-Americans as a pastor on Staten Island, with turkey, of course, but also mortadello, and spezzatino di vitello, and calamari. Or with my Swedish in-laws - Turkey with lutefisk, and Swedish rye bread, and glogg.

I think the magic of Thanksgiving must have to do with momentarily turning our back on American Empire, militarism, the Protestant ethic, and all that, and just observing what a wonderful day that first Thanksgiving must have been! Coming through the horrors of a desperate winter with the help of people they could hardly have known well, they had survived. God was with them! Though each family had faced loss that winter, they had made it. How had they survived – thanks to God and thanks to people they must surely have believed to be savages. These pilgrims, these chosen people, had truly been brought low, humbled, almost obliterated. Yet because of God and because of these heathen, they survived. And they sat down and ate together.

To me, the last thing that Thanksgiving is about is the arrogant notion that we come together to celebrate how pleased God is with us, how wonderful it is that God is on our side, how proud we are that we are so good and righteous that other people in the world hate us simply because of it, yet God is so happy with us that God says, here, have some more! That is not my idea of Thanksgiving. For me Thanksgiving is about being humbled and brought low; it is about being broken and put back together again; it is about being rescued by the improbable – the savage, the foreigner, the aborigine, the one who never heard of my God and yet knows how to be kind, welcoming, and generous.

I think Thanksgiving is really about America at its best. Why else would everyone want to be in all those school pageants? You know – the ones re-enacting the first Thanksgiving. Go to one of our local schools and you will see African-American and Latino children in pilgrim costumes, and Vietnamese and Cambodians in Indian war-paint, and Ethiopians dressed as turkeys. You get the idea. And why not? It’s their story, too. It’s every American’s story. In spite of all the horrors that came after it, the story doesn’t die because we don’t want it to die. Is it simply a romantic tale we tell to paper over our guilty feelings about what came later? I don’t know. I think we cling to Thanksgiving because, in our hearts, we know what is truly best in our history. Those moments when we got it right. Moments we hold up against those times when we have gotten it terribly wrong.

The story I began with was about my family at its best. At Thanksgiving we tell that story. We save the stories about the Todhunters at their worst for another time. The story of the first Thanksgiving is a story about America at its best. Let it be. Amen.

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