“Welcome! Have you got any beer?” That’s said to have been the greeting that Squanto offered to the Pilgrims as he met them. He would become one of their lifelines after that first horrendous winter.
This year’s Thanksgiving marks the 400th anniversary of the occasion when our forebearers gathered for a thanksgiving meal after that deadly first year that had taken the lives of 50 of the 102 people who had set out on the Mayflower. They had finally managed to make a treaty with the Indigenous People (Ousamequin of the Pokanoket Wampanoag) and had managed to grow enough food and build enough shelter to think that they might survive. The Pilgrims’ religious practice was to gather for a feast of thanksgiving to God for the blessings. The stories always gather the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag together to share in a feast that many historians now say almost certainly didn’t happen as we’ve imagined it… but there was a gathering, and sharing, and thanksgiving.
Those Pilgrims are our UCC ancestors who, for my family growing up, were always a very present part of the Thanksgiving table. My ancestors trace their roots back to the immigrants on the Anne in 1623 (and Laura’s family on the Mayflower in 1620). The Congregational branch of the UCC traces back to those Pilgrim’s Puritan roots that sought to purify the church from the tradition that had emerged as the state religion: the Church of England (until 1534 England was a Roman Catholic nation, when King Henry VIII broke from Rome and declared himself head of the new national church). The Puritans wanted to reform the Church to get back to a simpler faith that was more aligned with the early Christians. Another group, the Separatists, wanted to break from the Church of England completely. Such are our roots – that commitment to return more closely to the ways of Christ and the early Christians instead of the trappings of the church or the ways that culture leads us from Christ’s ways of justice and love.
It’s interesting that it’s only been in the last couple of decades that I’ve started hearing Squanto and the Pilgrims’ story a little more deeply. “Welcome, have you got any beer?” is a greeting that could make any Wisconsinite smile. But most of us don’t remember why this Indigenous Person would offer this greeting. The greeting belies a sober story of Squanto knowing how to speak English and knowing of the blessings of beer because of his having been captured and enslaved. Enslavement allowed him to learn English and perhaps even be baptized prior to finding his way back to a land that would be renamed Plymouth – a land where his tribe had been all but wiped out by the diseases brought by earlier visits of Europeans. It’s interesting to consider how the survival of even the Pilgrims was dependent on this fruit of slavery and the inadvertent extermination by disease of the Indigenous Peoples.
Part of what’s interesting to me is that these Pilgrims who were trying to purify their faith practices were clearly still having a hard time letting Jesus lead them into a relationship with God that was beyond their deep-seated cultural assumptions. This is always the case for us. We want to hear good news of God's love, but maybe only to the extent that it reinforces what we already believe. But that’s not the full message of the good news.
Very quickly our season moves from Thanksgiving to Christmas. We might move from giving thanks for the blessings of our lives and this year, to pondering what new stories we need to learn to truly be thankful for our lives and to be more closely aligned to God's ways.
Perhaps the journey toward Christmas might help us to be more open to God's challenge to grow with each day. As we hear “Away in the manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head…” we might hear not only the magic of Christmas but also the challenge that this gift of God's love offered the world. It should be a little stunning to us when we stop and remember what scripture’s story of that first Christmas must have sounded like. Everything about the narrative is shocking, disruptive, perhaps even offensive!
John Dominic Crossan writes about how Jesus’ miraculous birth was a story that had roots in the culture of the time. He describes how the Roman Emperors would also have had miraculous birth narratives told about them in order to emphasize their power and importance, their divine sanction. But Jesus’ story took an outrageous, radical, twist away from the norm. Jesus’ story was the counter cultural divine birth story. Instead of his being born in all the powerful, auspicious, culturally celebrated, and acceptable ways; Jesus was born with a tenuous paternity, to a low caste single mother in a stable in the shadow of the empire. He was a nobody who was God's anointed. All of the titles that were used for Caesar Augustus: Divine, Son of God, God from God, Lord, Savior of the World, Redeemer, Liberator…; all of these terms were now shifted to this Jewish peasant child. Christianity hardly started in a place where the dominant culture would carry the story. No, the dominant culture found the story absurd and then offensive or threatening enough that Jesus’ birth precipitated his crucifixion. You don’t live a life that would dismantle the current cultural values without there being consequences.
Thanksgiving, Christmas, a New Year… God's story is inviting us to a place of growth, to a place of love, to a place of hope.
Christians have almost always been a part of the culture that much more closely resembles the powerful empire that Jesus was trying to transform than the community to which the Christmas story was made real. We take the message of a different way of being and turn it into cute, commercialized holidays that challenges none of our ways and only reinforce the brokenness of the world instead of transforming it with love.
We should hear the proclamation that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” as a word of profound hope in a world that continues to be wracked with discord, distrust, and fear. That little child is born in all the wrong places proclaiming a different way. That light is Love that is humble and giving, that sees in the other not fear but hope and promise. The Christmas story is a gift that God offers us to draw us out of our cultural comfort zone to welcome the unpredictable divine.
May God bless us this season!