Thanksgiving Wisdom: 1. Not Back to Normal

In this week of Thanksgiving in America, I'd like to look back to the Pilgrims from whom the festival derives.  They have become lost in the current ferment of the United States, a later political creation, but 400 years ago a body of people set sail on the Mayflower (well, they actually set sail on another ship first) to join other settlers on the shores of the New World.

Many were from a church in Holland that had been formed from Christians fleeing England, and they have become known as the Pilgrim Fathers. The majority of the Church in Leiden, Holland stayed back, as did their Pastor.  It was the younger, more adventurous who set sail, yet the harsh conditions took many of their lives in the opening years of settlement.   Thanksgiving was born out of gratitude for their first Harvest.  

John Robinson, their Pastor, never did the journey from Holland (though he had previously fled England of course).  Yet his wisdom and determination played a large part in the Mayflower story and I want to look at a few things he said or wrote:  first this, from a letter to a sympathetic English nobleman who had supported them throughout:

It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again . . . we hope not to recover our present helps, neither look ever to attain the like in any other place in our lives . . .

This quotation reminds us of wisely adopting a pilgrim spirit in this world.  Covid-19 has left everyone wanting to recover normality - these pilgrims understood they were giving up a lot in order to go forward.

As the disciples might have done when they left their nets by Galilee to follow Jesus. With Jesus most of the good things are in front, not behind.

Who am I?

Last Sunday we read Psalm 139.  Psalm 139 is one of the most dramatic pieces of Scripture.  It affirms God's total knowledge of us; that he knows us better than we know ourselves.

 

An obvious reason is that he saw my unformed body.  Another that he knows all the days ordained for me.  Our self knowledge of our early life is nil as is our knowledge of our future.

 

What we might excel in is our self-knowledge in adult life - the middling bit.  There at least we can know what we're about even if God knows us better.  Or so we'd like to think.

 

I have always been struck by the disciples' question at the Last Supper when Jesus says someone will betray him.  They asked, "Is it me?" (Mark 14:19).  Do we know ourselves in mid-adulthood?

 

 

I have also witnessed a thousand broken promises made by grown up people - promises made perhaps with great ceremony - only for time to prove that the vowmaker did not know their own heart.  A few days ago I read a glowing statement by a wife writing about her husband after he'd had a great sadness: she wrote of how much it made her realise she loved him.  She added that, looking through their future life, I want to be there for him through it all.  I found the statement scary because I know this model marriage, applauded in several Christian publications, ended with her running off with someone else one Christmas.  Through it all, didn't even mean, as it was to turn out, through very much.

 

The Psalmist wisely ends with a prayer that is ironically often used as a statement of emptiness: Search me!  The believer can add that crucial other word - Search me, God.  The disciples didn't know themselves very well, but they knew who did!