Temple B’nai Tikvah

Interfaith Service     Sunday, November 18, 2018

Sermon: “An Attitude of Gratitude”     Dr. John Tamilio III

© 2018, Dr. Tamilio

I bring you greetings on behalf of the members and friends of the Congregational Church of Canton and our denomination: the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.  We Congregationalists are the Thanksgiving people.  We are the Pilgrims and Puritans who came to America almost 400 years ago on the Mayflower and celebrated the first harvest after the first, brutal winter.  It was this historic event that is the basis of the Thanksgiving holiday.

But this holiday, this holy day that we celebrate tonight and will celebrate in four days, is not just our holiday.  It really is, as a good friend of mine, Rabbi Paul Silbersher, is wont to say, it really is the only interfaith American holiday.  As I told my congregation this morning, Americans of every religion (and Americans of no religion) celebrate Thanksgiving.  It isn’t just for Christians.

So, I stand before you tonight in solidarity: my sisters and brothers who are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Agnostic, whatever your theological stripe.  I stand here tonight, and I am thankful.  I am thankful that we can gather in this synagogue and worship God however differently we define the divine.  And I am grateful for other reasons.  I have a full belly.  I have five healthy and successful children.  I have a wife whom I love more than life itself.  God has blessed me in ways I cannot enumerate in such a brief homily.

So, I stand before you tonight and am grateful — and I am also despondent.  Antisemitism in America is on the rise: up 57%.  A shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg last month claimed eleven lives.  Last week a man stood up at a performance of Fiddler on the Roof in Baltimore shouting, “Heil Hitler!”  Around the same time, fifty students in the Baraboo School District in Madison, Wisconsin posed for the camera giving the Nazi salute.  On November 1, another man wrote hate messages on all four floors of the Union Temple in Brooklyn, New York.

So I am forlorn, but I am here.  I am here knowing that my Christian tradition has a great deal of Jewish blood on its hands as well.  I am here to confess that my father’s sister’s husband was the first cousin of Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, AKA Pope Pius XII, AKA Hitler’s Pope according to author John Cornwell.  Yes, there is anti-Semitic shame in my own family tree.  It makes me sick.  It makes me not so grateful.

But I’m also grateful.  I am grateful, because I have risen from the shame of my ancestors, the shame of a history that kept Christians and Jews separate not wanting the twain to meet.  I stand in a synagogue as a Christian minster to celebrate this interfaith holiday with all of you: Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Agnostics, and maybe (God forbid) a New York Yankee fan or two!  I stand here.

I stand here with you, because I know that a better world is possible.  I know that Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of all faiths can coexist as children of the same God.  I know this can happen, because I believe (as my Scriptures say) that “God is love” and I believe in love.

You know what’s going to happen when we all shuffle off this mortal coil?  Do you?  I believe we will stand before God, and he (or she) is going to ask us one question.  God is going to say, “Did you figure it out?  Do you know why I created you?  Do you know why I placed you in diverse communities?  I did it so that you could love one another — so that you could rise above the earthly confines that separate you from one another and truly know how to love.  I don’t care if you are a Christian or a Jew, if you are male or female, if you are rich or poor, if you are gay or straight, if you are black or white, if you are citizen or an immigrant, if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.  Your differences are your strengths.  You were created out of love to love.”

There are many reasons to give thanks to God, and we will do so this Thursday with family members and friends.  I will give thanks, among other things, that there are occasions such as this: where people who are different can find common ground.  Where Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Unitarians can use a common tongue to praise the God who made us all.

Several years ago, I was part of an interfaith panel at a religious summer camp in New Hampshire.  I spoke about interfaith dialogue, specifically the differences between Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism.  After we were done, an old lady came up to me and said something I will never forget.  She said, “You know, Reverend, God gave us trees so that we could have air to breathe — but he didn’t give us just one kind of tree, did he?”

Different trees are needed as are different people — all of us are needed to overcome the hate this world is so quick to embrace.  All of us are needed to overcome the violence, the greed, and the intolerance that abounds.  We do so by being a thankful people, standing hand-in-hand with an attitude of gratitude.  I am grateful to be with you tonight.  Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.  Amen.