I spent Thanksgiving last week in Water Valley with my parents and my brothers and their families. All of us were present except for my twin brother and his family.
I am very thankful for each of these my family members.
And part of the wonder of family is that our individual life stories interconnect and merge into one big story. It amazes me how all our lives collectively share in a single story that goes back to the Sartors in our early Clinton years in the 1970’s. That’s when we elder borthers were born and my father started his business as a consultant to cotton farmers. And even before that our shared collective story comes to us through the lives and lineages of both my parents. This takes us to the late 1940’s in Water Valley – and far beyond!
Decades and wars have passed as this story has unfolded. Marriages, births, and deaths have occurred. Real world events have happened involving my blood – me and my kin.
In the late-1700’s Thomas Scarbrough (on my mom’s side) set sail from Scotland to South Carolina, and in the early 1800’s his son William moved to Mississippi to establish a home. That home was on newly acquired U.S. land following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, an agreement which landed the Choctaw Nation of Mississippi on reservation lands in Oklahoma.
So our family’s bloodline and story is nested in a national one, too, that goes back to 1620 and Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, where Dutch Pilgrims sought religious freedom together in the New World amidst great peril and struggle. And so this year we celebrated another American Thanksgiving: family, nation, story intertwined
But like all histories ours, as one of my brothers likes to call it, isa “mixed bag.” During it’s otherwise glorious beginnings, America displaced some people and allowed its citizens to continue enslaving other people. It was recently brought to our attention that 1619 saw the arrival of the first African slaves in America at Jamestown, Virginia. This is true, but the truth is not for muck raking. It is for reflecting.
We recognize and grieve the truth of certain events in our history. The atrocities of slavery caused what Wendell Berry has called the “hidden wound”. Racism – which is always a result of fear, hatred, and pride – will always remain where there is a fallen human race. Despite America’s progress after the Civil War with the resulting abolition of slavery and the amazing success of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s… racism has since reared its ugly head at times, but we must not reduce, rewrite, or repress our history and our current corporate life by supposing it is a “casserole of racism”. (A casserole is intentionally put together and baked as one good thing. I believe America’s main course once had one bad aspect in it which had begun in it and was a poison in the dish, but it was not an ingredient in the overall recipe. So it was removed. With compassion and grit we can forgive and heal. And we are. Or we were until recently. We are an American casserole… and our ingredients are good and wholesome. We must include compassion and grit in our recipe. Grit shows we are aware of costs and high stakes, and compassion shows we are willing to risk letting go of our national past mistakes and move forward.)
We must expand and deepen our understanding of history. And we must enlarge our compassion for all. We must deal with racism appropriately, and, of course, there is only one way to do that:
We must live the ultimate human story, telling ourselves and our children that Story.
So the big question is quite obvious to most even if they are not acceptable to some Americans: To whom does America offer thanks?
To answer it honestly we must reflect back even further… all the way back to a story the Sartors and Americans share also with the whole human race. It’s a story that goes far, far back in time to cosmic beginnings and eventually tells our cultural beginnings. The story book is the Bible.
The entire human race shares in an amazing history told of the creation, fall, and complete redemption of all things. All current-day people groups are accounted for in Genesis (e.g. Genesis 12:3) and throughout the Bible all the way to the unveiling of the total narrative in Revelation (Revelation 22:1-2). The theme of inclusiveness runs throughout, but universality is the bigger point.
Despite contrary perceptions of Christianity that exist in the West today… Christians believe that all ethnic groups (Jews and non-Jews) are fully included and fully blessed in the Story. They aren’t just “allowed in” at the end. It was the plan all along.
‘Gentiles’ (nations) is how the Bible refers to people of any ethnicity or nationality other than the Jewish one. And the Bible refers to the Gentiles as being included in the story of Christ, a story that had to be set forth in a thoroughly Jewish context. This message of all ethnicities being included runs throughout the Old and New Testaments, and in Paul’s letters particularly. Paul hammers away at it in his letter to the Romans from the very opening (Romans 1:6) to its final closing thought (Romans 16:26).
Glory forever to him who is able to establish you in… the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ… so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience that comes from faith… Amen.
Romans 16:25-27
Sartors love the thought of telling and hearing stories through music, and so in Water Valley at the Thanksgiving table the subject of songwriting came up in our conversation. Someone – I believe it was Thomas – asked in his own sheer bafflement at the songwriting process:
“How do you speak effectively to a very large number of people about something that is intimately personal?”
This question is a good one. When we write songs we want to write to the people of the world – and into the cultural moment that is now! We want to connect with that world through what is personal to us. And so we try. Although nationalism or even global recognition are not the only objective in song writing, whole nations have, at times, been bonded together around a song. You may remember Michael Jackson’s and Lionel Richie’s We Are The World (1985) which united Americans under God (it says as much in the song) to support people on the continent of Africa suffering from poverty.
Songs are special. They are special because humanity can try to make them personal and particular while also embracing the diversity and commonality of all.
Our thoughts on Gentile inclusion and Thanksgiving today have been a reminder that all of our stories are part of The Story, that we are all invited to God’s table by faith – not because of our nationalities or any other identity. The invitation to give thanks is extended to Americans and to every human and even every creature on earth (see Mark 16:15).
The Bible story has to be about a particular people and their Messiah in order to be universally true, and so we proudly celebrate Thanksgiving as Americans. Our heritage is not only American, though, and our past is not reducible to racism. Also, our identity is not whatever we choose it to be. We are human. And that means our heritage is a primarily a universal history and religion that can be shared by all. Let us seek together what it means to believe in Christ. Let us give thanks to God in the highest!