THANK!
Richard P. Buchman
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
November 24, 2011
Thanksgiving Day

For my text this morning, I have chosen the final words of the hymn we just sang, the words addressed to the Pilgrims as they were preparing to go to the new world, by their pastor, John Robinson. “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from His word.” I do not, of course, know what Pastor Robinson meant by them. To me they mean, “Use the brains which God gave you, even when thinking about God.”

A little over a year ago, on the Sunday before the Day of All Saints, I preached from this pulpit a sermon which I called “Remember.” In that sermon I quoted these words from the writings of my seminary classmate Fred Buechner: “When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of whom I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us… It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart. For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.”

I did some serious remembering last June when my wife and I visited the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. We walked down the street where the senior faculty live, the captains and colonels. We admired the home of the superintendent. “I might have lived there,” I said to Sandy, “had I stayed in.” She said, “Dream on, Buster.” We walked through the beautiful chapel which seats, we were told, 2,500 people. On the way out we stopped at the Visitor’s Center. I told the lady behind the counter that I had two shipmates who went to the Academy and who became life-long friends and that I would like to make a contribution in their memory. She looked at me and said, “I wouldn’t know how to do that.” Then it hit me. This was not a small private college. This was the government. I’ve contributed to it, frequently. So, instead of writing a check, I once again thanked God for Marv Martin and Tex Lander, two of the best men I have ever known.

My first theology teacher was not Reinhold Niebuhr. It was my father, after whom I am named. His degree was in Electrical Engineering from what was then called the Case School of Applied Science, so he did not involve himself with the theological musings of St. Paul or with the arcane mysteries of the Gospel of John. Instead he worshipped a mighty God, and he understood that by so doing he was under a heavy burden of responsibility, a burden which he bore quite well, although we learned about much of what he did and many of the people whom he helped only after he died. His understanding of God was not sentimental. God was not his pal. My father told me that this is a hard world to live in, and that not everything that would happen would be what we would wish for. That was most useful because both he and I were fans of the Cleveland Indians.

He also told me that we should be thankful for whatever happened, because whatever happened was part of God’s will, whether we understood it or not.

After him, Reinhold Niebuhr was a piece of cake.

I observed my first Thanksgiving as a Congregationalist in this room 49 years ago. When I arrived in Wauwatosa, eleven months earlier, the Associate Minister, John Alexander, told me, rather gleefully, that I, and not he, would be accompanying 32 members of the Pilgrim Fellowship on a ten-day trip through New England at Easter time. One of those young people was the man who led us as we owned the Covenant earlier in the service, Bill Edens. Another was the woman who was to become his wife, Lissa Linn. It was a great trip. A couple of months after we returned, I went up to Minneapolis to attend the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. I met lots of people there, ministers and otherwise, many of whom are still friends. It became apparent very quickly that they did not all agree, that they were coming from different backgrounds and had very different theological perspectives. But after just a day or so I realized that that was the way it was, that it was to be expected, that there was no cause for alarm. I was amazed and I was delighted. We passed only one resolution at that meeting, to thank the churches for their hospitality. No one told us what to think or what to believe or who to vote for. In other words, every person’s individual conscience was respected. I have been thanking God ever since that Norm Ream found me or that I found him. I was born to be a Congregationalist. It just took me a while.

After that meeting I began to take the Pilgrims more seriously. In Sunday School, when I was a boy, they were presented to me as people who had something to do with a rock and who dressed in funny clothes. I found some books about them, one of which was called “Saints and Strangers” by George F. Willison, and I soon realized that they were very special people, very brave people, very committed people. In 1990 my wife and I went to England and drove up to the little town of Scrooby. There was an establishment right off the freeway or I-Road called the “Pilgrim Fathers’ Pub.” I went in, went up to the bar, and said to the lady behind the bar, “Can you tell me…” “It’s right up that road,” she said. Apparently we were not the first visitors. Right up that road was the manor house, the home of the postmaster, William Brewster. We walked over to the church, the church which, at one point, Mr. Brewster had left forever. I thought about the journey that he and his fellow separatists would take to Holland, to Leyden, and then back to England and then across the sea to the rocky shores of what is now New England. I have crossed that sea several times, but on a large ship employing powerful engines. We knew where we were, at any given time, and other people knew where we were. I cannot imagine what that voyage on the Mayflower must have been like.

When they finally got here, they disembarked into a strange land where they knew no one, and where they had to fight the elements and find food and watch too many of their small company die during that awful first winter. And what did those who survived do? They made friends with some of the native people and they invented today. They thanked God for at least several hours and quite possibly for a day or so. I have often thought it was indeed fortunate that the Pilgrims and not the Puritans started this custom. Had the Puritans started it, it might not have caught on.

The passage, which Roxanne read from the Book of Deuteronomy was directed to people who, like the Pilgrims, had escaped from an intolerable situation. The Israelites were virtually slaves in Egypt and, after a long sojourn in the desert, arrived in a land “flowing with milk and honey,” circumstances a bit different from those of the Pilgrims. But their obligation was the same. “I have put you,” said the Lord, “in a good place, a place which you did not have to build, a place which provides you with everything you need, even though you had nothing to do with creating it. Enjoy it but, as you do, remember where it came from. I am the Lord your God who took you out of where you were and brought you here. Take heed, lest you forget me.”

I cannot think of six more important works. “Take heed, lest you forget me.”

And, finally, I want to tell you about a man for whom I thank God regularly, and especially, on this, our High Holy Day. His name was Harry Butman. Born and raised in New England, he spent the last years of his very productive ministry in Los Angeles, where he played basketball into his 90’s and wandered around the desert in southern California armed with two pearl-handled revolvers. He was glad that he was wearing them on one of his jaunts, when he encountered what he was sure was the Manson gang.

He was a most memorable man, and he wrote the English language as well as anyone I have ever read. Every day, on this day, I read these words to a congregation, if I have one, or to myself.

“During the dour days of the early merger battle, I made it a yearly custom to ride a racing bicycle from my parish in Randolph, Massachusetts, down to Plymouth, a round trip of seventy miles. I used to do this during Thanksgiving week as a memorial act. I have poor circulation and my hands and feet were icy on these late November rides. But I did not go by comfortable car. Let the psychologist make of it what he will, I wanted to suffer a little as I paid my tribute to the men and women who has suffered so much.

So I would ride to Plymouth, look briefly at the late-placed rock, study the noble bronze visage of Massasoit, walk the banks of Town Brook, and finally climb Burial Hill to tread the holy earth enriched by the mortal dust of these martyrs and witnesses of immortal memory. Then, thinking long thoughts, I would pedal homeward through the deepening dusk, along ‘roads that run through three hundred years of memory,’ with my yellow carbide light for company, past the frozen cranberry bogs, with the night wind sighing in the pines and rustling the dry brown leaves of the scrub oaks.

And the word that sustained me then, and during the hard struggle to save our heritage, and is with me now was the epitaph on William Bradford’s tombstone, the Latin that translates into strong memorable English: ‘Let us not basely relinquish that which our forefathers have with difficulty obtained.’”

Remember! Thank! We are blessed. Amen.