“From Where We Have Come and To Where We Are Going”

Community Interfaith Thanksgiving Service 2006
Rabbi Schindler

Many of you do not know me, so I want to open by telling you something personal about myself. I am a preacher’s kid. Growing up, my siblings and I had this theory. We believed that preacher’s kids fell into two categories: there were the studious nerds who followed the rules. And there were those who were rebellious. All five kids in my family were determined to fall in the latter category. There is no need to go into the details… suffice it to say there was involvement with religious school principals, public school principals, and beyond. Preacher’s kids have a reputation for getting in trouble and let me tell you why. A lot is expected of them.

Now the tables have turned and I am no longer a preacher’s kid. I am a preacher. And I expect a lot not only from my own children, but from all my congregants’ children, from all children of faith. The reality is that in Charlotte and in society, we have set our standards too low and expect too little from ourselves, from our schools, from our congregations and broader community, and from our government. We have become far too accustomed to the inequities and to the iniquities of our world.

Let me you tell something else about being a preacher’s kid and being a preacher… Thanksgiving was and continues to be one of my favorite holidays. For growing up, on Thanksgiving Day, I did not have to share my father with any congregation. The beauty of Thanksgiving is that it belongs not to any one faith… not to the Jewish faith, or Christian or Moslem faith, or Buddhist, Bahai, or Hindu faith, Thanksgiving belongs to us all.

As a Charlotte community, and a family of co-mingled faiths, we have been blessed with a rich harvest. Our Queen City is gleaming with growth. Just as preachers have great expectation of their parishioners, and parents have high expectations of their children, so does God, on this day, place great demands upon us. According to the Bible, when we celebrate times of thanksgiving, God requires of us three essential tasks: God expects us to be grateful for what we have, God expects us to recall our journey to this place, and finally, God expects us to share our plenty.
Our first goal on this day is to be thankful for what we have. While this sounds like an easy enough task, I assure you it is not. The legend is told of God sending out angels to gather the complaints of the people. The angels traveled throughout the world and they returned with baskets overflowing -- human beings were unhappy, they had so many complaints.

And then the angels were sent on a second mission – to gather the thanks of the people. Yet after scouring the earth, passing by every land and every living soul, their mission was disappointingly fruitless. Their baskets came back empty.

You see, as human beings we have a fundamental flaw, we see the bad more readily than we see the good, we complain more than we offer gratitude. Robert Louis Stevenson once observed that “a person who has forgotten to be thankful has fallen asleep in the midst of life.” Most of us are sleep deprived – we are too physically tired or too spiritually disconnected to recognize the blessings that abound.

We are not the only generation to sleep walk through the miracles of life. There is a popular legend on the story of Exodus that explains that as the Israelites crossed the sea to freedom several of them completely missed the miracle of the splitting of the sea. When the waters parted there was mud on the ground and so a number of the Israelites complained. “Look at this mud,” they whined. “It’s so hard to walk in. It’s ruining my shoes. What kind of leadership is this? We would have been better off to have stayed in Egypt.” These Israelites became so focused on the mud that they failed to look up, to lift their eyes, to see the great miracle that was all about them.

There are two types of people in the world… those who feel that they haven’t enough… enough time, money, resources, or friends. They walk around the world angry and resentful, with their eyes glued to the ground, sharing only their discontent with those they encounter. And then there are those, even in the midst of life’s greatest adversity who feel blessed. Who feel that they have enough, more than enough, and because they do, they feel compelled not to take more, but to give.

On this week of Thanksgiving, God expects us to be the latter type of person. God enjoins us to look up from our over-scheduled and heavily burdened lives, and to get our feet and our minds unstuck from the mud of life’s daily tasks. The tenth commandment not to covet, enjoins us to be happy with what we have and to say “thank you” to others and to God – for our health, for our food, for our shelter, for our bodies, and for our souls.

The second task God demands of us on this day is to remember our past. The book of Numbers teaches us that when things are good, when we come into the land, when we till our ground, plant our seeds, and harvest our fruits, we need to remember our history. Scripture teaches that we cannot possibly appreciate where we are without remembering from where we have come.

So what is our history as a queen city? We have clearly grown in numbers. When this interfaith service was first convened thirty one years ago, Mecklenburg County had 350,000 residents. Today that number has nearly doubled. As we have grown in population so have we grown in stature. People are moving to Charlotte in droves because of our city’s beauty, its climate, its culture, and its economic stability. Though CMS certainly has its challenges, we have one of the best urban school districts in the country and we have great centers of higher learning: Queens, UNCC, Johnson C. Smith University, Johnson and Wales, Davidson, just to name a few. We have a vibrant business community that gives our city of Charlotte a good name across the globe. And, as evidenced today, we have a flourishing religious community. We have seven hundred houses of worship here with more than fifty percent of our citizens worshiping weekly.

Yet as we have grown, sadly we have also grown apart. We are high on the scale of philanthropy and religiosity but shamefully low on racial trust. We do not know one another well, and in many cases, we do not know one another at all. Apart from today, we do not pray together. Our sabbaths (whether they be Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays) are the most segregated days of the week. In our local legislation, we do not create policies that support each other and support all.

According to Thomas Hanchett in his book Sorting Out the New South City over the past century Charlotte has changed “From a place where people of all types lived intermingled throughout the town, to a Southern city “sorted out” – first into a patchwork of well-defined neighborhoods, then into groups of neighborhoods demarcated by color and class.” Rather than moving closer to one another we have become increasingly distant.

As I mentioned, I am a preacher’s kid and I was taught by my siblings to cause trouble. But growing up, the trouble I stirred was for no good cause. Today I invite you to join me in causing trouble by challenging the systems of our city and county and calling for change. Let us cause trouble by complaining loudly about the insufficiencies of low income housing, the inequities of education, the injustice of our health care system that denies support to those who need it most -- the hourly worker who cannot afford to pay for it. We should protest passionately about the lack of racial trust.

As a religious community, we are the jewel in the crown of this Queen City. But we are not meant to be just ornaments, shining in prayer behind our stained glass windows, we are meant to be instruments of change.

I pray that the history we recall at future Thanksgiving services will reflect the work we will have done in bridging the unbearable socioeconomic and educational gaps so that all of us in our city will have reasons to rejoice. If we work together to improve housing, healthcare, education and livable wages, we will indeed create a Queen City that is worthy of a royal reputation.

The final task that God requires of us this day, is to share our plenty. All of you in coming here understand that this holiday is not simply about food. This holiday is not about satisfying our own physical hunger, this holiday is about satisfying the hunger of others and through that process we satisfy our hunger to make meaning of our lives, and we satisfy our hunger to make a difference. The most important part of this Thanksgiving holiday is not just about gratitude, but about giving.

There are many stories that make this point but the most moving from Chicken Soup for the Soul tells of little boy, named Chad, who had little himself but nonetheless knew the value of giving. His mother tells a heartbreaking, yet at the same time heartwarming story of her son who was a shy and quiet boy.

It was weeks before the holiday of Valentine’s Day when he told his mother that he wanted to make a Valentine for every child in his class. The mother’s heart sank. You see he was unpopular and she was afraid that he might get hurt, that he would give cards and get none in return.

Nevertheless, she went along with her son and purchased the paper and the glue and the crayons. For three weeks, night after night, Chad painstakingly made 35 valentines.

Valentine’s Day dawned, and Chad was beside himself with excitement. He carefully stacked the cards up, put them in a bag, and bolted out the door. His mother, fearing her son would be disappointed, baked his favorite cookies to soften the blow when he got home.

That afternoon when she heard the children outside, she looked out the window. Sure enough there the kids came, laughing and having the best time and Chad, as always, was in the rear. He walked a little faster than usual and she fully expected him to burst into tears as soon as he got inside. His arms were empty, she noticed, and when the door opened she choked back the tears. “Mommy has some cookies and milk for you,” she said.

But he hardly heard her words. He just marched right on by, his face aglow, all he could say was: “Not a one, not a one.” Her heart sank. And then he added, “I didn’t forget a one, not a single one.”

The essence of this day is giving, giving thanks, not only through our feelings of appreciation, but through our actions.

On this day and every day, like the little boy in this story, let us focus not on what we hold in our hands, but on what we have given to others – may we be sure as a community to give to all an equal opportunity for survival and for success in our city.

On this day, let us not forget one, not a single one… not a child, not an adult, not a hungry, nor lonely, nor saddened soul who dwells in our midst. Amen.