Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

Not too, too far from here (28.28 miles as the crow flies) is Plymouth Rock — the place where the Mayflower landed in America and its passengers (the Pilgrims) established Plymouth Colony. This happened almost 400 years ago.

At first, these English Separatists went to Holland voluntarily between 1607 and 1608 to escape religious persecution. “In the 1600s everyone in England had to belong to the Church of England [and]…James I, the king of England, led the church.” Eventually, with the help of some investors, a minority of these Calvinists, who were part of the Leyden Congregational Church, sought to establish a church in the New World. Hence, they embarked on the Mayflower: 120 passengers with a crew of about thirty set sail on September 6, 1620 and landed in Plymouth on November 9 that same year.

Church history scholar Dr. Elizabeth Nordbeck, who used to teach at Andover Newton, fleshes out the details of these settlers a bit more. “By 1558 in England, two distinct lines of English dissent had arisen.” There were those who were “convinced that the Anglican Church was irredeemably corrupt,” writes Nordbeck. These Separatists, as their name suggests, sought to separate themselves from the Anglican Church and became the “forerunners of Plymouth’s Pilgrims.” There was a second group, however: the ones who sought to purify the Anglican Church and not to disassociate with it completely. These are the Puritans we hear about. Representatives of both groups migrated to American between 1620 and 1640.

We, those sitting in these pews today some 400 years later, are heirs of these people: those who came to these shores to practice their faith as they wished, free from political and ecclesial oppression.

The Thanksgiving holiday is based on more than one celebration that took place in the Colonies — the two more popular being one that occurred in Virginia in 1619 and the other is the one we focus on: a 1621 feast shared between the settlers of Plymouth and the Native Americans who helped sustain them through the first, brutal winter. “By the spring of 1621, about half of the Mayflower’s passengers and crew had died.” They succumbed to dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and exposure. The Mayflower, anchored offshore, served as a hospital and hospice center for the sick and the dying. The survivors were in a state of grief, everyone having lost someone: a parent, a child, a friend. And yet, they made it through. They survived, and they thanked God for delivering them.

When we celebrate Thanksgiving each year, we express our gratitude for all of the blessings in our lives, all that God has bestowed upon us. We gather around a table with family members and friends giving thanks for our health, for our homes, and for the love that unites us. But that is a bit different from the impetus for the first Thanksgiving, no? Having survived a horrific winter filled with glacial temperatures and ghastly diseases, the Pilgrims offered prayers of gratitude that most of us, gathered around warm hearths, can hardly fathom. To understand the thankfulness they felt, we have to think for a moment…

Think of a time in your life when all seemed to be lost. You may not have faced such an experience, and you may have been in such a state more than once. Try to recall the feelings that overshadowed your spirit. When we are mired in deep grief or are terribly frightened, we sometimes feel as if there is a wall all around us. Some of us build such walls to protect ourselves, but I am referring to something else. Walls often appear around those in severe pain, because they cannot think of anything other than their dire situation. They cannot see rays of hope. They cannot perceive improvements. They are void of hope. They’re on the Titanic, it’s sinking, and the filled-to-capacity lifeboats have departed.

You may have been behind one of those walls when you lost your job, or the love of your life, or when you were diagnosed with a horrific disease. You may have wanted to run out of your skin to a safe haven, but your feet were mired in the news you received. Such a feeling may give you some insight into how the Pilgrims felt that first winter. Everything was bleak. The future grim. No way out.

But then, a miracle! Although forty-five of the 102 Mayflower passengers died, it is incredible that fifty-seven of them survived. Imagine the feeling of being one of the fifty-seven… You faced hardship upon hardship to worship God as a free person. The oppression of James I couldn’t stop you, nor could a cross Atlantic voyage, nor could a hostile new land. You may very well have surmised that if it weren’t for God, you wouldn’t have made it. Indeed, that is a reason to rejoice — a reason to give thanks.

You weren’t one of the Pilgrims or Puritans who came to the New World in 1620 or the decade that followed, and neither was I, but we are their heirs. We have reaped the fruits of their labors. And we have seen hard times of our own, whatever they may be — times that seemed hopeless. And yet, we have made it through. The impenetrable walls blocking out the light of God weren’t so impermeable after all. God was able to topple them. This is cause for us, 400 years later, to give thanks in a similar way — to feast on the bounty of God’s good earth with a prayer on our lips and a word of thanks in our hearts.

Our God is good, and he will see us through whatever tragedies we may encounter. We may not believe or see how such deliverance is possible when we are in the thick of it. Oh, that we had the faith of the Psalmist, who wrote, “But as for me, afflicted and in pain — may your salvation, God, protect me.” Although we may not at the time, many of us develop such faith after the fact, after being delivered. I do not believe that God causes us pain to test or punish us, but being redeemed from such pain gives us the strength we need the next time we find ourselves in similar situations. That’s why it is so important to pause and give thanks when you feel the redeeming touch of God in your life. It’s what the Pilgrims did 400 years ago. It’s a model for us to follow today.

In his massive, two volume Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions, J. Gordon Melton says the following about our heritage: “The Congregational organization had four distinct features.” He enumerates those features as:

1. “The church was built on the concept of people together.”
2. “The church was tied to a place. It was the covenanted people in a specific location.”
3. “The church was to be an established church.” Melton means that the church was connected to civil and political life. It used to be that ministers, for example, were paid by civil authorities and that the church building was also the town meeting house. (Of course, much of that has changed.)
4. “…the church was to be the sacred institution for the society…clergy spoke directly to issues of public morals, expected to be consulted on matters of importance to public life, and often represented the colony as political figures.”

I’m not about to ask the Town of Canton for a raise or run for the Board of Selectmen, but you never know…

I bring up Melton, because I think he’s missing something. Congregationalists are also a thankful people. We are a grateful people. We know that we cannot do it (whatever it is) without God, and we offer God prayers of gratitude for blessing us with good fortune and seeing us through the difficult times. God is always there for us.

So, when you gather with your family members and friends to break bread in four days, grasp the hand of the person next to you, and with your heart grasp the hand of God, and give thanks from the deepest recesses of your being for all that God has done and continues to do for you and for us. May the name of God be praised. Amen.