A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Royal
Kemper
on Sunday, November 20 2005,
at Abington Presbyterian Church, Abington, PA.
Strangers and Pilgrims
Deuteronomy
26:1-11
Ephesians 1:15-23
"And you shall make response before the Lord your God,'A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number;" (Deut. 26:5") and having acknowledged that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." (Hebrews 11:13)
THE WORDS INSCRIBED ON THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, where it stands on Bedloe's Island in New York harbor are familiar to all of us.
Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to be free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me
I lift my torch beside the golden door.
The writer of Deuteronomy wrote:
A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous."
We begin with the idea that we, as a wandering bunch of pilgrims are looking for a place to call home. Trouble is that we don't always see that which prevents us from finding "home", which may be our own bondage. It was the theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich, who preached a gospel that said man is 'estranged not only from God but from himself.' It is in that period of being separated from each other, that God intervenes and sends us his Son, Jesus Christ, to bring us true freedom and salvation.
On this Sunday just before the Thanksgiving holiday, we think of those early settlers in Plymouth Colony. The men wore broad rimmed hats and a wide white collar over their black, mundane suits. Women wore a large white apron to cover their austere , floor length dresses. We recognize them as "pilgrims". We tend to think of these early arrivals in 1620, celebrating their first Thanksgiving with the help of Native Americans. Together they enjoyed a hearty feast of venison, turkey, wild game, corn or maize as they called it and a host of other holiday goodies. This coming Thursday afternoon we shall sit transfixed before television screens blaring our what passes for music, while one football team rushes down the opponents field to score a touchdown, and then there is the Macy Day Parade complete with an over-fed fellow with a white beard, dressed in red, shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho". With this grand entrance of the holiday gladiators we usher in that jubilant and yet over-strained season known as Happy Holiday time, or as some remember it, Christmas.
Now, what ever happened to the pilgrims that we talked about a moment earlier? Where have they gone? And did they find what they were looking for? In the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we learn that another group who acknowledged that they were strangers and foreigners, or "pilgrims" as the old King James Version has it. What Scripture says about them is most interesting:
"For people who speak like this make it clear that they are seeking a homeland... as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city." (vv.14,16)
No one of us likes to think of themselves as strangers, and certainly not foreigners, but that is exactly who we are. From time immemorial, mankind has behaved as if they were in a strange and foreign land, destroying, pillaging, taking at will what was somebody else's and trying to make it their own. Witness what happened to the remainder of Native Americans. And just what is it that we are looking for? Perhaps the writer of Deuteronomy can shed some light on the subject "Who is the wandering Aramean who is my father?" and how do we relate to him? The succeeding verses to this statement go something like this:
"When you come into the land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, and have taken possession of it, and live in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from your land that the Lord your God gives you, and you shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, ' I declare this day to the Lord your God that I have come into the land which the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.'
The worshiper then goes on to recite the shibboleth how his father was a wandering Aramean, that is to say, a person of Semitic origin, closely related to the Hebrews, who went down into Egypt and sojourned there, enduring all sorts of hardships, but at last rising to become a great nation. Suggestion is then made for the people to
"worship the Lord God and rejoice in all the good which the Lord your God has given you."
The entire thrust of this passage is that the people who came into the land were first of all strangers and foreigners, "pilgrims" if you will. Having over-come the hardships of being foreigners in a strange land is cause enough for rejoicing.
There is little debate about when and where this celebrated American holiday began. While there is strong historical evidence for such a day of thanks being held in 1620 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, let it be known that the first Thanksgiving was rightfully observed on December 4, 1619 at the present site of the Berkeley Plantation, on the banks of the historic James River in the Grand Old State of Virginia, not far from Williamsburg. What's more, (and tell it not in Gath), the first Bourbon whiskey in America was distilled at Berkeley Plantation from 1621 to 1622. Either of these historical events is just cause for celebration!
In early New England it was customary at Thanksgiving time to place five kernels of parched corn at the place of everyone as a reminder of those stem days in the first winter when food was depleted almost to the point of starvation. Even though those hardy souls had been extremely economical, they were also sympathetic and charitable to those who had none. Often, their food supply was a rationing of five kernels of corn per person.
240 years after the first Pilgrim fathers touched their knee to the ground to give thanks to Almighty God for preserving them and seeing them through the harsh winter, it was Abraham Lincoln who wrote these words:
We have forgotten the Gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and strengthened us, and vainly imagined all these blessings were produced by some superior virtue or wisdom of our own. Intoxicated by unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and too proud to pray to the God who made us.
Paul the Apostle, in his Ephesian Letter writes:
"I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, .. .and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe,... which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit in the heavenly places, and made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body. (1:16-22)
Thanks be unto God who gave us hope in Christ Jesus who leads us to an l&i eternal home where we shall no longer be strangers and pilgrims, but citizens of the heavenly kingdom.