November 20, 2022

Jeremiah 23:1-6

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

A righteous branch for David. A righteous heir to become a righteous king. One who is wise and just. And of course, one who is right.

This prophecy is meaningful in two ways. One it anticipates a return to better ways. And two, it proclaims that things are not going terribly well in the time of Jeremiah. If God is to raise up a righteous branch, it suggests the tree itself is not quite as righteous, as upright, as it might be. There is trouble in the land of Judah. Back to that later.

On another topic entirely, this is Thanksgiving week. I mention this in case any of you forgot. In one sense, Thanksgiving is uniquely American, like the Fourth of July. But in another sense, it is a modern version of ancient practices. It is a religious day of gratitude, clearly, but it is also a harvest festival.

We do not live as close to the land as in those times of old. Supermarkets and delivery services were not the norm in 17^th century New England. Late autumn would be the time when the crops had finally been stored up, the meat and fish smoked and salted, the vegetables and fruits pickled and preserved. Hopefully you are all set with that.

And in that moment, when food stood relatively abundant, people gathered to celebrate before winter came, before the snows fell. You might not get to see friends and family during those harsh times, so one more feast is in order while there is food to share.

And that leads to some planning questions. Who do you invite? Is the list etched in stone or does it change year to year? Is it simply assumed you would be going to a certain place at a certain time?

I remember growing up, knowing where I would be on the fourth Thursday of November around 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Knowing that there would be special dishes on the table and the same familiar faces around the table. The center of familial gravity had shifted to my parents’ house, so my grandparents would visit us. Occasionally we had to resort to a kids’ table, but mostly we were in the dining room.

Honestly, the holidays were the only times we used the dining room. The holidays were the only time we ate various foods. There was an expected pattern of behavior. There was even an expected pattern of misbehavior.

In my family, you tried to get any arguments out of the way before the soup course. In that way, tempers would flame out before the turkey was served. I doubt there was a conscious plan in place, but that seems to have been the natural progression of strong personalities compressed together in close confines for too long. It was like a controlled burn to manage a landscape prone to forest fires. I never knew anything else.

Years later, I got married and I began decades of travelling back and forth on holidays. To the North Shore to see my family and then up to the Merrimack Valley to see my in-laws. It was a strange transition. I felt like an anthropologist shadowing a new and mysterious culture. Things were not the same, strangely enough. They served strange foods like mince pie. To this day, I remain quite suspicious of mince pie.

What makes for a right Thanksgiving? What is needed for it to be worthy of that name, consistent with the expectations of that tradition-drenched holiday? Is it turkey and cranberry sauce? Is it the Detroit Lions playing football?

Is it pumpkin pie or squash pie or, dare I even say it, no pies at all? The horror.

Traditions happen. They linger across the years after having fallen into place. These were not conscious decisions in many cases. They were not choices anyone in living memory had made. They are traditions because we have always done things that way.

There is an old story about a young woman who was cooking a roast. Her spouse much appreciated the effort but was puzzled by why she always sliced the two ends off the roast. She said, because that is how my mother always did it. The spouse then called the mother-in-law and asked why do you cut off the ends of the roast before you cook it? And she said, well, because that is how my mother always did it. Still not satisfied, and now duly intrigued, the couple rang up the grandmother to ask, why do you cut the ends off the roast before you cook it? The grandmother said, “I only had a small little roasting pan. That was how I got it to fit.”

Traditions on holidays are wonderful things. They give a sense of the telescoping time, as if the years are melting away. The house smelling of cinnamon and sage. The absolutely necessary and occasionally baffling holiday foods like mince pie on the table. Even if you never touch the stuff, Thanksgiving would not be the same without these traditions.

But would it be wrong without them? Would it be broken? Would it be a mistake?

Some people get very particular about holidays and celebrations. I think that may be in part why my family would have some sort of dust up early on in the courses. Because there was so much work put in, so much effort to meet those enduring expectations.

Get out that one set of dishes. Trudge back to the store the day before Thanksgiving because I am out of walnuts. Look high and low for Grandma’s missing holiday decorations.

One Thanksgiving tradition is cranberry sauce. But what kind of sauce? Were you a whole berry family or a jellied sauce family? You know the kind that comes out of a can in a perfect cylinder? My personal favorite, by the way.

Well, one year, my mother decided to throw off tradition, put down the Ocean Spray cans, and make cranberry sauce from scratch. Now, I was only vaguely aware cranberries were an actual berry rather than a dark red substance that hatched out of tin cans. My mother bought the berries, followed some fancy recipe, and made her own cranberry sauce.

As you might expect for an incident that made its way into a holiday story, something went wrong. You see, sugar is devilishly similar looking to salt. And salted cranberries made me wish that I was eating mince pie. That bad. That story about the cranberries survived as its own tradition. It was told and laughed about year after year. I mentioned it in my mother’s eulogy.

Traditions are wonderful and it can also be wonderful to recall what it meant when those traditions were broken. It helps us to appreciate the meaning underlying the tradition. Or it reminds us that a tradition is simply one way things have been done, not necessarily the way things must be done.

Our scripture reading is about how things ought to be done. For Jeremiah, the kingdom and its leaders have fallen away from that which is righteous. The trunk of the tree is now suspect and it will take a righteous branch, a righteous diversion from a crooked path, to get Israel back to the straight and narrow. That is an expectation of returning to what is right.

The gospel reading selected for this day was about Jesus on the cross. He is flanked by the so-called Good Thief and Bad Thief, two bandits whose luck had finally run out. The Roman soldiers were mocking Jesus, asking if he was the King of the Jews and whether his army was coming to save him. The Bad Thief echoed that mockery, asking if you are the messiah why not save yourself and us along with you. The Good Thief did not harass Jesus and asked him to remember the thief when he entered into his Father’s kingdom.

In this story about Jesus, there is something like in the Book of Jeremiah, a type of branching off. Jesus is being mocked as the King of the Jews, as the Messiah who cannot save himself let alone his people. In that sense, Jesus is being rejected in the eyes of his contemporaries as the Righteous Branch, as the one who will deliver the people from oppression.

Where is your army? Where are your miracles now, your signs of power? Help yourself, said the thief, and then help me down from this cross. But that was not the help Jesus came to offer. That was not the meaning of his ministry or the meaning of his coming as a messiah. Instead, Jesus offered lessons about what is good rather than what was right.

For the Romans, for the Bad Thief, for many of the people of Jesus’ time, the only thing that matter was power. The Romans had the power to control and to punish. The Bad Thief agreed with that image, even as he suffered under its shadow. Recall that Judas himself was disappointed in Jesus as a leader because there was not going to be an overthrow of the Romans. This is not what they had all expected of a messiah. This was not the tradition they had come to understand in their harsh word of blood and battles.

There was not going to be a Righteous Branch for King David in this story because there was never going to be a King Jesus. He was never going to literally rule over the Kingdom of Israel. That is what Jeremiah was talking about, the restoration of the actual kingdom. That is what Judas and others expected from Jesus. That was the tradition, that was the historical form that a messiah took.

Was Jesus a disappointment?

I suppose if you wanted to overthrow the Roman Empire, if you wanted to set up a new empire. But in a sense, Jesus was rejecting such traditions. Wars had not delivered the people from oppression; they had merely delivered them into the hands of different oppressors. And that would not change over centuries.

Between the time of Jeremiah and right now, the land we call Israel has been controlled by a wide range of oppressive empires. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans, and the British. And peace remains elusive in the new modern nation of Israel. War was never the answer, assuming the question being asked was how would people ever come to live in peace.

Jesus was attempting something new. Among all his lessons and stories, he asked us to try to live in peace with one another. To forgive those who trespass against us. To turn the other cheek. To love thine enemies. This was not to be a religion about power, about kingdoms, about armies marching to and fro. It may have turned out that way in many instances, but that was not the original game plan. Jesus was trying to break a very long tradition.

I must admit that I am not a terribly dedicated pacifist, let alone an accomplished forgiver. The challenge Jesus left us was building more peace into our lives, our cultures, our traditions. How did that plan get placed aside?

Early Christians had their struggles, but then something happened. They unexpectedly took over an empire from the inside. They won. They grabbed the brass ring–and who wants to give that up?

But if you find that you like being King of the Hill, you have to figure out ways of defending the hill. Keeping that territory. Staying on top. And you do not hold that position of power and influence by turning the other cheek. You keep it by turning plowshares into swords. That is not what Jesus taught, but it is often how Christians have lived.

It is easy for me to parrot back Jesus’ lessons, knowing that they are hard to follow. Knowing that in a world of worry and anxiety it is fine to suggest that you love your enemies, but it is far different in practice. What should we do?

To start, have Thanksgiving dinner. I know, big challenge. But it is said that even a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Have Thanksgiving dinner.

Then think about the traditions of that day. Give thanks for the harvest. Share that harvest with friends and family. Contemplate the blessings of the year and the people with whom we feel blessed. Think about all that. And then literally say thank you. It seems almost silly to say it, but you should do it.

Saying thank you changes you. Gratitude changes you. That inner shift from worry and anxiety, that mental pause in the doom-scrolling through our brains changes you.

Life may not be exactly as we would like, of course. But tallying up the positives can help put the negatives in perspective. And once we are trending positive in our minds, we might open up to the stories of others. Their blessings and their struggles. It is a start.

Open up to other. Have some empathy for their feelings. Some sympathy for their perhaps less blessed state. Empathy and sympathy are stops along the pathway to peace. They are not the destination, they are not the finish line. But they are important milestones. Milestones we can celebrate like forgiveness, like love, like good cheer and good humor. It might seem silly to consider Thanksgiving as a leg on the journey to peace in our lives, let alone in the world. But it is a start.

Start with gratitude and you might imagine satisfaction and contentment. Start with hospitality and you might think of sharing the blessings of this life widely and well. Start with friendship around the table and you might accidently stumble into friendships across the aisle or across the border.

Peace is not the absence of war. When parents yell for a little peace and quiet, they are really looking for quiet regardless of who started the fight. So, it is not about fairness or justice but a break from the noise.

Peace might be better described as the absence of ill will, of a fundamental change of heart about those around us. And it may take quite a few steps to get there, quite a few sessions around the proverbial table. But we often have to start out small. We have to start out small before we can imagine what it would be like to go big.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Amen.