THE HOSPITALITY OF PILGRIMS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 21st, 2004


I thought I'd start out today by telling you all just one more story about Theodore Parker. As I mentioned last week, Parker was ordained to the Unitarian ministry at the age of 26 by the Spring Street Church in the village of West Roxbury, on June 21st, 1837, Midsummer night's Eve, the longest day of the year. And as was common both then and now, the members of the congregation had organized a reception for their newly-ordained minister following the service at the luxurious Taft hotel, which was located a mile or so away from the church. Unfortunately, as often happens in the midst of so much excitement and confusion, one important detail had been overlooked: no one had thought to arrange transportation for the guest of honor. So as his affluent congregation departed from the meeting house in their carriages or on horseback, Parker himself was left alone to walk to the hotel, and by the time he finally arrived, all the food had already been eaten! Some time later he would describe this experience as an "omen" of what awaited him in his career in parish ministry.

This is one of my favorite anecdotes about Theodore Parker, and I've thought quite a bit over the years about the nature of Parker's "omen," and why he saw things the way he did. One of the great occupational hazards (or perhaps great fringe benefits, depending on you point of view) of being a parish minister is that you tend to eat a lot of free food. And it's not just coffee hour and covered dish potlucks. Ordinations, funerals, christenings, and especially weddings -- there's always something delicious to nosh on close at hand, as well as an unspoken expectation that, as a leader and role model, the minister is supposed to taste and praise every single item.

I have plenty of colleagues (skinny ones, mostly) who really don't care for occasions like this, weddings in particular, and who will often go to great lengths to avoid doing any more than they absolutely have to. But to my way of thinking officiating at a wedding is one of the best parts of my job, and I'm always happy to schedule as many as I can realistically manage. To be sure, officiating at a wedding is a little extra work (although not nearly so much work as catering the wedding) but in exchange for your modest labors you get a chance to earn a little extra cash (which I can almost always find a way to put to good use), you get to meet some wonderful people you might not have had a chance to meet otherwise, and you get invited to attend a terrific party on what is typically (at least for the moment) the happiest day of these two person's lives.

There's only one catch, which is that more often than not, couples chose to celebrate their weddings on a Saturday, which means that if you are a preacher like myself (who no matter how early in the week I start am still working on my sermon pretty much right up until the last second), just about the time the happy couple is cutting the cake and uncorking the champagne, you're getting back in your car and heading home to the word processor, which has been waiting for you with the screen saver running the entire time you've been gone.

It's not just a question of better time management (although good time management certainly helps). The problem is that parish ministry as we know it today is still basically a job that was last redesigned in the 17th century, and has only hesitantly been adapted and upgraded for our own. It's natural rhythms are those of a rural, agrarian New England village — quill pens and lingering conversations, not Palm Pilots and Cellular Phones. It is a contemplative vocation, rooted in living tradition and the cultivation of profound interpersonal relationships intended to last a lifetime, literally from cradle to grave. It survives because we need it: because we crave the kind of comfortable, spiritual intimacy that the covenant of ministry promises, and because, like a couple on their wedding day, we are willing to overlook potential pitfalls along the way in exchange for the opportunity of having those promises fulfilled.

The life of Theodore Parker is interesting in this regard because his career comes at precisely the point in American history when the tensions between the old way of doing ministry and the demands of the way we do it now were first beginning to reveal themselves. As the United States (and New England in particular) started to change from a predominately rural, agrarian society to one with an urban economy based heavily on manufacture and commerce, the church as an institution was forced to adjust as well, often under protest, and with only moderate success. In Unitarian circles in particular, as we heard last week, the ministry of Theodore Parker helped to define the parameters of that adjustment, both as an exemplary paradigm of success, and also as a cautionary tale for those who would attempt too much.

Parker took advantage of new technologies like the railroad, the telegraph, inexpensive newsprint and high speed printing presses to create a sphere of influence far beyond the traditional geographical boundaries of a New England "parish." Yet for all his achievements and innovations, when he compared his own experiences as a minister to what his expectations had been, he felt that something was missing. And just as we look retrospectively to Parker's experience for inspiration and insight into our own times, Parker also looked nostalgically at his own New England past for inspiration: to Revolutionary preachers like William Emerson and Jonathan Mayhew, whose influence had helped to rally New England to the Patriot cause; to the 17th-century jeremiads of Increase and Cotton Mather; and, of course, to the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation, who had left their homes and crossed a stormy ocean seeking religious liberty in the wilderness of a New World.

Thanksgiving is the holiday when we celebrate this heritage, but the holiday of Thanksgiving has a history all its own, which in many ways is even more interesting. A century ago humorist Finley Peter Dunne [writing in the voice of his Irish-American character, Mr Dooley} observed that Thanksgiving "was founded be th' Puritan to give thanks f'r being presarved fr'm th' Indyans, an'...we keep it to give thanks f'r bein' presarved fr'm th' Puritans." But it was Abraham Lincoln who officially designated the fourth Thursday in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1863, and whose proclamation in the midst of the Civil War did "fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with Divine purposes to full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union."

The periodic declaration of a public Day of Thanksgiving had indeed been common in Puritan times, but the more relevant precedent to the annual holiday as we have known it since Lincoln's time was the celebration here in New England of something variously known as "Founders Day," "Landing Day," or "Forefathers Day," which commemorated, not the legendary feast we think of as the "first Thanksgiving," but rather the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock on December 21st of the previous year. At the bicentennial of that event in 1820, Daniel Webster stood in the First Parish Meetinghouse at Plymouth and praised the founders of that (now Unitarian-Universalist) congregation not only for their steadfast faith in Religious Liberty, but also as the inspiration for 19th-century New England's cherished beliefs in representative government and free public education, and then went on in no uncertain terms to excoriate the continued existence of slavery in less-enlightened regions of the United States, proclaiming that "it is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer." Nearly a quarter-century later, in 1844, Transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller wrote in the New-York Daily Tribune that "Thanksgiving is peculiarly the festival day of New England," a time when friends and family gather together "for the enjoyment of a good dinner," and expressed her wish that this "spirit of kindness" and "instinct of family love" might express itself more widely. "If charity begin[s] at home," she asserted, "it must not end there."

Yet despite these strong associations with New England, Abolition, and Social Reform, the periodic observance of a Thanksgiving holiday as some combination of public religious celebration and private family dinner gradually spread throughout the United States. In 1876 yet another component was added to the holiday, when Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association, whose annual championship game was held in New York City on Thanksgiving Day. In an era which knew neither the World Series nor the Super Bowl, this game quickly became both the nation's premier sporting event, and the unofficial beginning of the New York winter social season for a certain class of America's Ivy league educated social elites. An 1893 editorial in the New York Herald complained that "Thanksgiving Day is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given.... It is a holiday granted by the State and the Nation to see a game of football."

Yet it was also becoming a season of reunion and homecoming in a larger sense, a time when members of widely-scattered extended families could travel back to their birthplaces or childhood homes, and once more sit together under the same roof around the family table. The emergence of Turkey as the principal dish of this traditional meal was the result of an intensive marketing effort on the part of a consortium of Northeastern poultry producers; the original Pilgrims had eaten venison provided by their Indian guests, as well as a variety of unspecified wild fowl...most likely duck and goose as well as possibly turkey (although wild turkeys are notoriously difficult to hunt, even with reliable and highly accurate modern firearms. Ten years worth of archeological excavations at the site of the original Plymouth Colony have uncovered just one Turkey bone).

Yet beneath these many layers of tradition, some historical and some invented, Thanksgiving remains at bottom an occasion for giving thanks. Yes of course it's a time for family, and football, and feasting -- a time when second helpings are obligatory, and we continue to eat the leftovers for days. But it is also a time when we express our gratitude for what we have received through our generosity to others, by acts of hospitality...a time when we often invite into our own homes those who are far from home themselves. And in this regard, Thanksgiving is connected to a much larger spiritual tradition of feasts and banquets which not only celebrate the virtues of gratitude, generosity and hospitality, reminding us of Creation's great generosity toward us, beginning with the gift of life itself...but also provide a warning against the consequences of their opposites: of selfishness, ingratitude, and hostility rather than hospitality toward those who are strangers or different from ourselves, and distant from their own friends and family.

This brings me to the last thing that I want to talk about today, and that is what it means to be a pilgrim. Just as our sense of spiritual gratitude calls on us to show hospitality to others, sometimes our spiritual hunger also calls us to become pilgrims ourselves -- to leave our homes, and our families, and our relatively comfortable lives, and to set out upon an excursion into the unknown, seeking something that was missing in that former place, and relying upon the hospitality of others in order to successfully complete our journey. A pilgrimage is a journey of spiritual exploration, a path by which we come to discover that part of ourselves which is created in the image of God, and which we share with all of God's creatures. Pilgrims leave behind the comfortable and the familiar in order to become more comfortable and more familiar with that which is uncomfortable and unfamiliar. And pilgrims unavoidably depend upon the kindness of strangers as they travel along this pathway of self-discovery -- strangers whose welcome hospitality dissolves the strangeness of the unfamiliar with the comfortable reciprocity of mutual generosity and mutual gratitude.

The Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen once wrote: "In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their [Creator], we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found.... [I]t is...obligatory for [people of faith] to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings." This journey from estrangement to "a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and community can be found" is the pilgrimage which continuously awaits us all. And part of our mission, our "ministry" as a people of faith, is both the responsibility and the obligation to work to create that space, not only for ourselves, but for other pilgrims, both strangers and friends, who follow the same path and desire to walk together with us. And waiting for us along the road, often when we least expect it, there are feasts: sumptuous banquets where everyone gets fed, and no one need go hungry, no matter how far they have had to walk, or what time they arrived at the party.