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The sermon scripture reading is a psalm of thanksgiving. It is numbered 100. Make a joyful noise to the Lord all the lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into his presence with singing. Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us and we are his. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him.

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Bless his name for the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. One of the things which ministers often do when they get together in small groups for pleasant conversation is to discuss novel ways in which to

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approach passages of scripture for preaching. It's interesting to try to find some off-camera angles which you can use to bring a thought or a text into new light for your people. I remember one such conversation in which questions like these came up. It would be interesting to hear a sermon on the nine reasons advanced by the nine lepers who did not return to thank Jesus. In that

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same conversation one minister said, "I've always wanted to hear a sermon based on Zebedee sitting there in his boat with his fishnets in his lap while his two sons James and John went off to follow the newest cult leader." Another question was brought up was this, "What would the Good Samaritan have done if he had arrived on the scene as the robbery was taking place?" And then this

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question was asked, "I've always wanted to hear someone preach a sermon on the subject, 'I wonder how the Indians feel about Thanksgiving.'" Well there were other suggestions made but my mind stopped with that question, "How the Indians feel about Thanksgiving." And I've carried that question around with me for about the last six years. It is an interesting question. On this day

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when we celebrate our national abundance and our harvest, what do the Indians think when this land was once exclusively theirs? On this day when we look at our country and despite all of its imperfections find ourselves to be well pleased, how do the Indians feel as they look at America from their dusty reservations? Well I've read a lot of books about Indians and I've read some

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books by Indians and I've discovered that in my reading I've learned that many of my ideas about Indians were misconceptions. I always thought for example that the Indian who had the fanciest headdress was the chief and I learned that headdresses had nothing whatever to do with status in the tribe. I always thought that Indians burned people at the stake and was discovered to

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find that there's only one historical incident of one tribe doing that in all of the history of our country. I always thought that the Indians always took scalps and I was surprised to learn that the Indians never took scalps until the British and the French encouraged them to do so in order to indicate to the British and the French how many Americans the Indians had killed. If

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someone would have said to me "sitting bull" I would have said he's a great Indian chief. He was not a chief at all. He was a medicine man. I learned that many of my misconceptions came out of Hollywood versions of what the life of the Indians was like. But I thought enough about the theme that I feel at least a little safe in broaching it for our consideration this morning

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and it's appropriate to think of it on Thanksgiving for after all the Indians were there at the first Thanksgiving. There were three Indians, Samoset, Squanto and Massasoit who had special importance to the pilgrims. Samoset was the Indian who first welcomed the pilgrims to our shores and bad them come. And then there is Squanto. He had spent 15 years in England before the pilgrims had

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arrived and he knew English and thus served as the translator between the pilgrims and the Indians. And then there was the great Indian chief Massasoit who entered into a solemn peace treaty with the pilgrims which Massasoit and his sons and the pilgrims kept for almost 70 years. That first Thanksgiving was celebrated probably in the month of October of 1622. And the menu was quite

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extensive. Foul, a lot of turkeys, five deer which the Indians brought to the celebration, cod, eels, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, plums, cornbread. It was Squanto who had taught the Indians how to plant corn and how to make cornbread. There was watercress and leeks and red and white wine. And they feasted for five days. And you ladies might be interested in knowing that

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all of this cooking for five days was done by only five women. And Massasoit, the Indian chief, was there with more than 90 of his braids. So it seems to me altogether appropriate that on this day of national Thanksgiving we think about the Indians who were part of the first Thanksgiving experience. I wonder how the Indians feel about Thanksgiving. Let me share with you just two

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thoughts. First, I think the Indians would join us in reverence for God, for the creator and the owner of us all. I think they would display a profound gratitude for all of his gifts. Indeed, perhaps more profound than our own. You remember a few years ago when that television commercial was being prayed. It was really a promotional piece. An Indian riding along on his horse and

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he comes upon a stream and it's hideously polluted, tires, beer cans, oil slick, junk. And he looks at this for a moment and then he turns and looks at the camera and you see tears rolling down his face. That was a very honest promotional piece of television. For the Indians had a deep and profound regard for nature. They lived face to face with all the elements of the one they

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called their earth mother. That incidentally is how the Indians were so readily done out of so much of their land. You see, because they saw nature as the expression of God, they didn't believe anybody could own it. You can't own the wind. You can't own the water rushing by. You can't own the earth, they reason. You can't take the great spirit and chop him up into real estate.

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And that's the reason they so readily signed treaties which seemed to take away from them all that they possessed because they thought it absurd that anyone would think that they could honestly own the land. Most Indians went barefoot in order to be in touch with the earth. Tecumseh, who was probably the greatest of all of the American Indian chiefs, was once in a meeting

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with William Henry Harrison. This was before Harrison had become President of the United States. And Harrison said to him, "I, your father, bid you to take a chair." And Tecumseh replied, "The sun is my father and the earth is my mother and I will repose upon her bosom." And with that, he sat Indian-style on the ground. Now, of course, there's a great difference between how Christians

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look at nature and how the Indians looked at it. For Christians, all nature is made by God. Psalm 104, "The earth is the Lord's." For Christians, nature has value in itself. Christians remember from Genesis 1 and 2 that God said about the creation, "It is good," and he said it six times before man ever appeared on the scene. The Christians have a high view of the integrity

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of nature, the storehouses of the snow of which Job speaks, for example. And Christians honor the material just as much as they honor the spiritual. That's the reason the resurrection of the body is as important as the resurrection of the soul to any thinking Christian. Christians understand themselves to be different from nature, but not superior to it. Oh yes, God gives nature

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into man's hands in order that man might protect it and use it, but that does not carry with its superiority. Rather, it's a different order of creation. Now, the Indian did not look at nature in that way. The American Indian saw nature as an expression of God himself. In other words, American Indians were mostly pantheists. They believed that the earth and the air and the wind

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and the fire, all these things were God. And what that does, of course, is that denies reality to nature. If you honor nature because it's something other than what it is, you are denying the fundamental nature of nature itself. Also, the pantheistic views of the Indians tended to overlook the ugliness of nature. Because they wanted to see in it only good, they tended to hide from

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their thinking the fact that nature is oft times red in tooth and claw. And another weakness in the pantheistic view of the Indians was that they many times subordinated man to nature, whom they saw as God. You see the same thing in India today, for example, where sacred cows are treated with more reverence than human beings. Pantheists often get into the place where they exalt nature more

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than they exalt human beings. But having noticed this theological weakness in the Indians' position, I think it's very important to observe that we as Christians have abused nature in ways that the Indians never did. One of the things that destroyed the Indian civilization in America was the fact that the Indians were almost literally starved out. In the 1870s, for example, over 4 million

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buffalo were killed in America. But of that number, only 150,000 were killed by the Indians. The passenger pigeon was once the most common bird in America. It's now completely extinct. And interestingly enough, most of those pigeons were killed as a kind of sport entered into while religious camp meetings were being held. Christians have attacked the forests and the buffalo and the

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beaver and destroyed the beaver dams, which led incidentally to much soil erosion. And this kind of thing still goes on today. This afternoon, when you sit down at your table and look at that turkey, remember that Benjamin Franklin wanted to make turkey the national bird of America. Now, the turkey that he was thinking of is not that butterball that's going to be on your table

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this afternoon. It was a gorgeous, sleek creature that could fly 65 miles an hour. Franklin was opposed to the eagle because he said the eagle was a scavenger, which it is, and was often quite lousy. And that's true. They often do have lice. So he did not think that a fitting symbol. But I wonder what he'd think about the turkey that will be on our tables today. We've changed turkeys.

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We've made them so obese that they are almost inert. Turkeys have become so stupid that they literally have to be taught how to eat. No turkey today can fly. They are mutations from what they ought to be. They're a kind of feathered Dolly Parton, 60% breast and wings. And that has come about in large measure because we can sell the turkeys for more money. That's what's been behind

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much of our destruction of nature, money. You remember Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond? Today Walden Pond is a drugstore. Remember Robert Frost's poem on stopping by a snowy wood at evening? Today that snowy wood is an automobile graveyard. The last time I visited Plymouth Rock, which is about nine years ago, I counted 167 beer cans within 20 feet of it. Now my friends,

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it's a sin to deface nature. It is a sin to upset the balance of nature, to fragment nature, to make nature disharmonious rather than harmonious. We are called upon because nature is God's gift to us to love nature and to be stewards of it, to bless the earth. And it seems to me that Thanksgiving Day is a very appropriate day for us to think about the beauty and the

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produce that come from nature. The Indians always looked at nature with profound reverence and we ought to do the same. And there's some practical things we can do too. We ought to buy only what we need. We ought to use soap instead of detergents. We ought to recycle everything that we can. We ought never to litter because it's a filthy habit. We ought to teach our children reverence and

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respect for nature. We ought to vote intelligently on conservation issues. We ought to join conservation groups when it is possible for us to do so. And we ought to report those who violate the law. If we were to do these things then maybe someday we would be able to say in the name and spirit of God what God said when he first looked out on what he'd made. "Behold, it is good."

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But I have one other thought I'd like to share with you and that's this. I think the Indians probably on Thanksgiving remember how things started with the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims. And they must be filled with profound regret for all the suffering which they have undergone at the hands of prejudice across the years. Now I suppose there are some people who

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have come here this morning knowing what I was going to speak about who think, "Well, he's going to flagellate us because of what our ancestors did to the Indians." No, you'd do me a disservice if you think that. One of the most important books of the 20th century is Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" and one of the things he teaches us in that book is this, that you can't

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blame yesterday on today. There is a statute of limitations in history just as there is in law. So we cannot be faulted today. We need not feel guilty today because of what was done by our ancestors a hundred years ago. But at the same time that we ought not to feel guilty, we ought to learn from yesterday and to see that nothing like it ever happens again. Let me give you just

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a few illustrations of some things that did happen. Did you know, for example, that germ warfare was first used in the conflict between the settlers and the Indians? General Jeffrey Amherst wrote a letter to his subordinate officers. I quote one sentence from it. "You will be well advised," he wrote, "to infect the Indians with sheets upon which smallpox patients have been lying or by

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any other means which may serve to exterminate his cursed race." Incidentally, there was a captain, Simeon Ekeuler, who was one of the commanding officers here at Fort Pitt just a few blocks from us. He used that technique of smallpox infection against the Delawares who used to move through this area. Or let me give you another example. It's called the Moravian Massacre. Moravian

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missionaries had won a small portion of a tribe to Christianity. They had become Moravian Christians, these Indians. And one day a Colonel Crawford came into their midst and he asked if he could worship with them. So they went into the little church which they had built with their own hands and there they began to worship. And as they were singing, Colonel Crawford suddenly ran from the

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church. His troops had come up on the outside as he had previously instructed them. He ordered them to shoot any Indians who tried to get out of the building. And then he lighted the building afire and incinerated all of the 100 Christian Indians who were inside. Or just one more example. The Cherokee were a remarkable people. They adopted the white man's ways very quickly. They lived in

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log cabins, they wore homespun clothes, they developed their own alphabet of 60 different characters so they could speak not only Cherokee but English. They published two newspapers, one in Cherokee and one in English. They had a form of government which had the executive and the legislative and the judicial. They had their own Supreme Court with five judges upon it. Many of

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them had become Christians. But in 1838, because the white man wanted his land, the Cherokee were driven off on what was called the Trail of Tears. They were made to walk, men, women, and children, a thousand miles. And in the course of that walk, one out of every four of them died. And then when they got to the place which had been set aside for them, they were told they couldn't stay there and

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were made to go on another 600 miles. Now, there are hundreds of these examples. I could talk about Wounded Me or Corn Planters Despair or the Battle of Sand Creek. The thing to remember is that there was very little difference in those days between the Indians and the settlers. An Indian village usually consisted of about 200 people. That's the way the settler's villages were. They had games

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that they played, lacrosse and horse racing. They would often trade things. That was a form of amusement. Their children played the same kinds of games and did the same things that the settler's children did. Their toys were the same, cut down tools, cut down bows and arrows, small things, just a copy of what their parents had. The women did the things that settler women did. They

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sewed, they cooked, the men went out and hunted. And in the evenings, they would come back and they would sit about their fires and they would sometimes dance, dances which in many regards were very similar to the square dances which were popular at that time. There was nothing about the Indian culture which was decadent or obscene. But you see, they were of a different color. They were

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inferior. So the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Across the years, we made 370 treaties with the Indians and we didn't keep a single one of them. Now my friends, on this Thanksgiving day, 1986, we ought to recognize that prejudice still exists in our land. It comes to us out of our history, it comes to us out of our economic experience, it comes to us out of our social

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background. Even today, our United States government is involved in trying to move the Navajos from their reservation in Arizona because of large mineral deposits that have been found there. Now, whenever you scorn God by disparaging a people because of the color of their skin, you go against not only the Bible but also against biology. For the scriptures are very true when

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they say, "God hath made of one blood all the peoples of the earth." To deny the equality of all women and men before God is evil, whether it's done by a Hitler or an Archie Bunker or some rednecked preacher holding forth in the backwoods of Idaho. It is true that sometimes races rise and sometimes races fall and that is because of the circumstances, the geography,

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the nexus in which that race finds itself. It is not because of the inherent deficiency of any race. Prejudice is a lie. Prejudice is unintelligent. Prejudice is ignorant and prejudice in its most extreme forms is insane. It denies God as surely as atheism does. It denies the gospel which said that God came to love the whole world. It puts hate above love, it puts evil above good. And

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it seems to me that Thanksgiving is a good day to remember that. You see, the Indians are still a great people. Just about everything else associated with the Old West is gone. The prairies have been divided and subdivided. The mountains have been made into national parks. The grizzly bears and the buffalo, well, they're behind fences so the tourists can see them. And there are very few

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cowboys and the desperados long ago disappeared. But the Indian is still here. Ghettoized, debased, debauched, but still here. Last week I spoke to a young Navajo girl and as I listened to her speak about the privations of her people, I was reminded of that word of the Apostles Paul in the letter to the Ephesians when he said, "Let the thief no longer steal. Let him labor so that he is able

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to give to those who are in need." Prejudice is a way of stealing the dignity and the worth of other people and it must not be allowed to continue. Instead we need to work in order that we can, out of the honesty of our toil, not only bless ourselves and bless our nation, but bless those who have little. We need to honor the history of the Indians. We need to provide them the very best

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in education and schools. We need to speak to their poverty. We need to have in our universities courses on Indian culture and art and literature. We need to support our Presbyterian Church's grand missions amongst Indians. We need to put hospitals and clinics where the Indians can make use of them. We need to let the Indian be free so that he can travel and he can work and he can trade

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and he can choose for himself what he will do. It all came home to me the other day when I read a comment of Archbishop Tutu in South Africa, where incidentally they're doing in large measure to the natives of that place what we did here a hundred years ago. Tutu made this comment, "If you are neutral in a situation of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant

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has his foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse is not going to appreciate your neutrality." As Christians, we should have no neutrality in this. As ones whose spiritual fathers sat with Massasoit at a table of thanksgiving, we need to reclaim the spirit of that first thanksgiving. I think it would please the heart of God to see us give thanks

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today and to make an act of resolution that we will reverence nature as his gift, that we will look with regret and repentance on prejudice wherever it has shown itself in our history, yesterday or today, and that we will resolve that in goodness and generosity we will build kinship, and in kinship we will find peace, and in peace we will be well-pleasing to God.

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I wonder how the Indians feel about Thanksgiving. The fact of the matter is I don't really know. But I do know that in thinking about that question, I feel somewhat differently about Thanksgiving. And it's been good for my soul, and I hope it will be some kind of blessing to yours. Let us pray.

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O thou who has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, we thank thee for our kinship with women and men of different color. We are grateful for the traditions, for the cultures, for the experiences, for the contributions made by all people to the human treasury. We pray that thou will take from us any cavalier attitude we might have with regard to the precious

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earth on which we ride through space, and take from us also any prejudice that would lead us to look down on those who ride with us as second or third class passengers. O God, when we give thanks today, let us also make solemn resolution to rejoice at what you have given, and to rejoice in one another. For Jesus' sake, amen.

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