A Pilgrim Thanksgiving

This is Thanksgiving Week.  Tonight at dinner, a fellow resident called out to me as Molly and I were leaving the dining room:  "Is there a Pilgrim Thanksgiving Service at your church again this year?  I want to be sure to receive my five kernels of corn."

He had been before, and heard the Pilgrim drums beaten as they were to call Plimoth Colony to church as in those earliest days on New England's forbidding coast.  Churches down the years since 1621 have given worshippers each five kernels of corn, to remind them of the starvation of that first terrible winter when half their company died, and to remember that feast of Thanksgiving the next fall when they reaped a harvest thanks to Squanto and other Indian friends who had helped them plant and receive from God the blessing of a crop that saved the lives of their remaining numbers.

It's a grand tradition we have tried to keep through these last 55 years of Colonial Church's life.  It's one of the reasons for Colonial's name within the history in America, of the Congregational churches.

These were the churches of the Pilgrims - those 102 young people, who separated from the Church of England to found a free way of church life led by the Holy Spirit among the people gathered together as "the two or three in Jesus' Name," to live solely by the Spirit's guidance.  They braved a wild ocean to cross to a wilderness land they didn't know, in order to plant a new way, a faith way on what would be America's soil.

It is a great story, and America and these churches of the Pilgrims keep the feast each year to gather with prayers of thanks for what God has given them in this good land.

We have precious freedom for which to thank Him.  We have life.  We have love.  We have an absolutely democratic way of government - unique in the world - to shine as a light of  hope for all the world.

You would be welcome to come to this wonderful celebration service this Thanksgiving Day, Thursday of this week - 10:00 in the morning at 6200 Colonial Way, in Edina, MN, just west of the firehouse at Tracy and the Crosstown.

Bless you, and all your dear ones, in these important days.