“Mayflower, Pilgrims and Today:
How Shall We Tell the Story?”
No surprise, I wrote this sermon the Monday before Thanksgiving Day. I have been excited about Thanksgiving this year. It has become for me a true family day, no gifts to worry about and the rare chance to see so many family members. Thanksgiving for us this year was at Grandma Henry’s in Old Lyme,
Grandma Henry is one of the humblest persons I have ever known, and I have known her since I was eighteen years old. She self published a cook book of her own recipes some years ago. The cover picture is a snapshot of her dining room table set for Thanksgiving. The caption reads, “Dinner is served, such as it is”, a phrase she has used for many years to call us to dinner. Recipes are interspersed with Bible verses and pictures of Grandma doing the everyday activities of daily life, mowing the lawn, sailing with her son Kim, teaching school, which she still does at eighty-seven.
Today I want to continue the season of Thanksgiving as we explore the stories of our ancestors as well as some stories of today. Our book group choice for November this year was Nathaniel Philbrick’s recent book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Most of us in the group found this book a challenging read, for it is truly the book of a very serious scholar. In a sense, Philbrick reaches under the myth which we have learned and taught and shows us a reality of our past that is complex, challenging, and at times hard to hear.
Philbrick writes, “We’ve all heard at least some version of the story: how in 1620 the Pilgrims sailed to the New World in search of religious freedom; how after drawing up the Mayflower Compact, they landed at Plymouth Rock and befriended the local Wampanoags, who taught them how to plant corn and whose leader or sachem, Massasoit, helped them celebrate the First Thanksgiving. From this inspiring inception came the
He goes on to say: “But as I have since discovered, the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving. When we look to how the Pilgrims and their children maintained more than fifty years of peace with the Wampanoags, and how that peace suddenly erupted into one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil, the history of Plymouth Colony becomes something altogether new, rich, troubling and complex. Instead of the story we already know, it becomes the story we need to know.” (xiii-xiv)
Listen to some of the sobering statistics of what we now call King Philip’s War.
-It lasted about 14 months, but it changed the face of
-Native Americans and European settlers were intimately intertwined when fighting broke out in 1675.
-Some native persons fought with King Philip, leader of the Wampanoags, others against.
-A third of the 100 or so
-There was a proposal to build a barricade around the core settlements of
-By the end of the war, five thousand were dead, three quarters of which were Native Americans. The total population of
-Not counted in the statistics of deaths are the hundreds of Native Americans who were shipped away as slaves at war’s end.
Mayflower is a tough read. The details of individual battles seem to go on for hundreds of pages, and many of us found it hard to follow so many battles, places and people. Perhaps the author felt compelled to be so detailed as he took on a story which is at the very center of our self understanding.
There are heroes on both sides, heroic Native persons, as well as valiant Pilgrims. There are jealous and irresponsible persons on both sides whose actions often lead to needless conflicts and loss of life. There is no shortage, on either side, of selfish persons, greedy persons, persons who don’t keep their word. In short there is enough blame to go around on both sides for all the suffering, the loss of life, what became for all concerned a true reign of terror.
Philbrick does an excellent job of showing how it is the persons who are able to look for the redeeming qualities in the enemy who are finally able to bring this fearsome war to a close. Finally the leaders of each side sought each other out and talked long into the night. Benjamin Church of Rhode Island and Philip’s successor Annawon shared how the war had been such a tragic waste. They agreed that there is a great god who overrules all that will bring all of us to justice in the afterlife. In the final analysis, it was the capability of each of their peoples’ leaders to see the legitimacy of the claims of the other side that enabled the war to come to an end.
For me, this makes the whole story a far more compelling story than the one which we learned as children. I stopped at Plimoth Plantation this past week to buy some materials to share with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren at Grandma’s house. Sure enough, the scholars and guides at the
In recent weeks, I’ve been coming back to the theme of this world, this earth, as seen from outer space, what I call the astronauts’ perspective. They were the first to see us as that little blue and green marble, a marble full of people who, I believe, have to find a way to get along with each other. The alternative is way too frightening to even contemplate.
This past week, I have been reading some of the letters home from Pam Parker’s daughter, Corporal Rebecca Hinds, who is currently serving with the 82nd Airborn in
Everyday life here encompasses every emotion possible… which is exhausting. There are terrifying times, sad moments, happy moments, moments of triumph, moments of defeat. There are times when I am filled with compassion for the people here and there are times when I’m filled with hatred for them.
Most of the time, we are not sure what to feel for the people here. They reach into their shirts, and we aren’t sure if they are going to pull out an American flag or a gun. I’ve seen both. We’ve had cinder blocks thrown at us, been shot at, bombs explode when we drive down the street, chlorine gas has been released on us. We’ve been spit at and sworn at in Arabic, they wipe the bottoms of their feet at us as we drive by.
There are days that bombs fall on our base like rain, and we sit in our bunkers and pray. I’ve also been thanked in English by Iraqi men and women. I’ve been handed newborn babies. Little girls run up and hold my hands as I walk down the streets of their villages. I have shared a dinner table and eaten with very important Iraqi men. Iraqi men have jokingly asked me to marry them and told me they love me. Iraqi women smile and take my hand when I take off my sun glasses and they see that I, too, am a woman.
I sneak medicine and vitamins to villages and hand them out when no one is looking. I tell children that Flintstones vitamins are candy and I give them clean bottled water to take them with. I watch them gain energy and get stronger each day. I work with interpreters who are Iraqi men that give up their whole lives and risk getting killed to come work for us.
I’ve watched my friends cry over this place. I’ve watched them yell. I’ve seen them laugh, and we have all held hands and prayed together. Sometimes this all happens in one day here. Some days nothing happens here. Today, so far, (knock on wood), nothing has happened here. Yesterday, almost all of the above happened…including a tire exploding while we were driving through a village. Two of my guys were trying to keep the anorexic cows away while I climbed under the truck in all my ballistic gear to find a place to put the jack.
Meanwhile, back at the base, the flight medics left the lower half of someone’s leg inside a vehicle out on the main highway through
My friends, I know this is not an easy letter to hear. It tells of courage and facing down fear in ways that few of us are called upon to do. I believe that the war we are in is a very complex war in a complex time in human history. One of the things Rebecca’s Mom Pam Parker said recently in a time for sermon feedback is that when soldiers come home on leave to
So often, those who are caught up in war are not the ones who have brought us into war. That was true way back in the days of the war we now call King Philip’s War, and it is true today. The chances are that all war has a full measure of ambiguity and complexity to it. Listen to the words of Nathaniel Philbrick as he struggles to capture the mystery and ambiguity of all war. Philbrick writes: When violence and fear grip a society, there is an almost overpowering temptation to demonize the enemy. Given the unprecedented level of suffering and death during King Philip’s War, the temptations were especially great, and it is not surprising that both Indians and English began to view their neighbors as subhuman and evil. What is surprising is that even in the midst of one of the deadliest wars in American history, there were Englishmen who believed the Indians were not inherently malevolent, and there were Indians who believed the same about the English. They were the ones whose rambunctious and intrinsically rebellious faith in humanity finally brought the war to an end, and they are the heroes of this story. (p. xvi)
When we look at our world through an astronaut’s lens, we know for sure that our little green and blue marble is fragile indeed. When my clergy friend Daehler Hayes sat down several years ago with Yasar Arafat, he looked deep into Arafat’s eyes and said, “You and I have something in common. We are both grandfathers. We have to work for peace.”
May the God of this beloved world, bless us and keep us in the challenge that Jesus issued so long ago to go one step further than all other faiths…to love our enemies. And may we always seek to be a light on the hill. Shalom and Amen
Book Quotations are from Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, Nathaniel Philbrick, Penguin Group,
Letter Excerpted with Permission, Corporal Rebecca Hinds, 82nd
“Mayflower, Pilgrims and Today:
How Shall We Tell the Story?”
Text: Matthew 5:14-16
Rev. Kathleen S. Henry
Thanksgiving II
