This is one of two “sermonettes” delivered on Sunday, November 27.  The other was by Allison Palm, Student Minister at The First Church In Belmont.

Last week I preached on Gratitude and Giving, the theme being that my gratitude inspires acts of giving.

This week, the service is about celebration of the things we are grateful for.  I will not speak about what I or we ought to do with our gratitude; today is just a celebration of Thanksgiving and a giving of thanks for the things we have. 

There was an article in the New York Times this past week in which it was stated that people who feel grateful are not only happier, but are also healthier. That does not mean that if I am ill it is because I am not grateful enough; but it does mean that if I am grateful there is a greater chance that I will be healthy.

I want to acknowledge that sometimes people come to a service and they are carrying heavy burdens.  To then hear that life is wonderful and we should all be grateful can cause them to feel less grateful than grating.  We all have bur4dens all through our lives, and sometimes they are heavier on our shoulders or our hearts than at other times.  I invite you to try, with me, to take your burdens and set them to the aside, not chasing them away or suppressing them—because then they have a way of insisting that we pay attention to them—but pay attention to them and set them where you can still see them out of the corner of your eye.  Now tell them that you are not abandoning them, that you still see them, but that you are now going to pay attention to their brothers and sisters, to joy and happiness and celebration, because they too often do not receive the attention they should.

I hope everyone here has had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend full of family, friends and happiness.  It is not always the case that happiness is what the holidays are about.  Some have no one to be with, and there is sadness in that fact.  Some have family that they sit down at table with but find that it is a chore to be with them.   I noticed that the on-line Boston Globe has a section called “Your Thanksgiving Disaster Stories”.  That seems to be more about cats and candles than about family disharmony, but both are possible.

I want to list the things that I am grateful for; you will have your own list that comes to mind as I speak, but perhaps some of our thoughts will overlap.

I want to start with some simple luxuries and move on to more fundamental gifts from life.

First is food.  If Thanksgiving Day is about anything it is about celebrating food.

I celebrate abundance.

I celebrate the land that grows our food, a land of rich soil.

I am grateful for the fertilizer that makes possible the amounts we have,

The people who have cross pollinated different species to breed new stocks that overflow bins and silos with the treasures of the earth;

the people who grow our food; the people who pick it, the people who transport it to my table.

I celebrate the people who designed and built the trucks and trains that carry the produce of our farms; the people who designed and built the roads and tracks that are used to carry this copious abundance; the world community of which we are a part that sends foods of many kinds flowing towards my table. 

Local food is wonderful, but I also love global food.  I love oranges and pineapples; I love the fact that food from around the world, from Chile and China, India and Indonesia, is available in my local supermarket.  I celebrate and welcome it all.

I also recognize, celebrate and mourn for the people who were here before my ancestors, and from whom this land was stolen.  I acknowledge the injustice of pushing aside those whose land this was, the injustice of massacre and genocide, of pushing the survivors onto reservations of enforced poverty and of the attempts over the years to eliminate even the small pittances left to them.

And despite the sense of guilt that I feel for these acts, and despite the belief I hold that we have much to repay, I also am grateful today for the land that makes possible my standard of living.

I am grateful for the houses and apartments that have provided me with shelter over the years; I am grateful for the oil and gas that has heated those shelters, keeping me warm and healthy.

I am grateful also for one super luxury that most of us share: hot water.  I can walk into my bathroom or into my kitchen, turn a tap and have a prodigious flow of hot water; enough to shower in, enough to fill a tub and bathe in, enough to wash dishes and clothing.  That alone makes me wealthier than many an historic king or emperor.

And I am grateful that unlike my ancestors of the Middle Ages who did so only twice a year most of us use that hot water for regular bathing.

I am grateful to the universe that gave us birth. I am grateful to evolution that I am a human and not a chimp, or a paramecium or a slime mold.  That is no little thing.

I am deeply grateful for the development of emotions and for the level of intelligence that I and others of my species have been granted.  I am thankful that those emotions allow me to feel love for family.

I am thankful for family.  About a week and a half ago I heard a wonderful Thanksgiving sermon by a colleague in which she described her family’s Thanksgiving table as having the Peace Corps people at one end and the NASCAR people at the other, the Democrat at one end and the Republicans at the other, and she went on to mention several other differences within her family.

My family, too, has its differences.

Some of my family members are of a different political persuasion than I, the poor misguided fools (stated with a wry smile).  We disagree on public spending, global warming, affirmative action, racial profiling, torture, the justice of going to war, same sex marriage, the purpose of education, just what human rights are and who human rights apply to and a vast number of other topics.  That is true on both sides of my family, my father’s side and my mother’s side.  And yet I love those family members and I feel a connection to them; and through them I feel a connection to my heritage, to the generations of Bryces and Maynes and Hurleys and Russells that preceded me going back through time. 

And it isn’t only on issues of politics that we differ: For some of them my religion is not real religion; though I have been surprised by more than one of them when it comes to how much we have in common in our religious beliefs. 

It is an odd thing to love people and have such dislike of parts of who they are or what they believe; but I am sure that they have the same conflicted emotions about me.  Family, done well, teaches tolerance.

I am mindful of the fact that for me Thanksgiving is also a wistful festival, full of nostalgia.  Unlike Christmas or Halloween, it is on Thanksgiving that I am reminded of those who once sat at dinner with me but who no longer do.  I am mindful of their absence in a way that brings a soft sadness into my heart.  I look around the table and picture the empty chairs that exist only in my mind, the chairs where once sat my parents and other relatives now gone.  That does not take away from the gratitude I have for the presence of those now in my life; if anything, it makes that gratitude stronger.  And it is not just loss that I feel; I feel the presence and the gifts of those who went before.  I also miss them deeply at this time of year, but I also cherish who they were and what they gave me.

And so I am filled with gratitude this morning.

I sing praises to the Cosmos, to whatever God or Goddess or powers created the universe and gave rise to life.  I sing joy; may happiness and jubilation flow from me out to world, and may that help to fill the world with rejoicing and delight for all that is.   So let it be.