Matthew 7:12-14—The Narrow Gate and the Golden Rule

The origin of Thanksgiving in 1621 is a fascinating moment in American religious history. You know the popular picture: “Pilgrims” wearing black hats and shoes with big buckles and carrying blunderbusses gathered around a table with “Indians” wearing feathered headdresses and deerskin and carrying bows and arrows. It’s a cartoon image, of course, a caricature. But the obvious diversity of the people gathered around the table in that cartoon calls our attention to that first Thanksgiving as an object lesson of the best—and of the worst—of which we Christians on this continent are capable.

In the winter of 1620-21, a non-Christian majority—native Americans—acted compassionately and hospitably to save a struggling immigrant Christian minority from starving to death. The following autumn, the surviving Europeans invited the locals to participate in the Europeans’ traditional harvest festival. The invitation was a gesture of thanks by the Christians for the non-Christians’ compassionate action and hospitality to strangers that had saved the Christians’ lives the previous winter. When the locals accepted the invitation, that harvest festival in 1621 became a cross-cultural and interfaith moment for the history books—and the history-of-religion books in particular. But in the centuries since then, the story of that harvest festival has left a decidedly ambiguous legacy. In return for having been saved from starvation, the Christian minority, when it became the majority, drove the locals from the land of their living, farming, hunting and burying.

So the origin of Thanksgiving stands as a reminder of the principles of compassionate action and hospitality to strangers that are ingrained in nearly all the world’s enduring religions, but its aftermath stands as a monument to the insidious temptations that ethnocentrism and totalitarianism are for religious majorities, even those who once were a minority. That makes our Thanksgiving Day a reminder of the best of which we are capable and the worst.

One Wednesday evening two years ago, I was talking with a friend who was bemoaning the outcome of our national elections the day before. I recognized immediately that I was in the presence of an endangered species in the state of South Carolina, the rarely sighted and frequently depressed Democrat. But he said something that made me realize that his malaise ran deeper than merely being on the losing side of an election. “Whatever happened to the squishy middle?” he lamented. “Where has the squishy middle gone?” I bit my tongue, and I did not point to his waistline and say, “I believe it has settled about your belt.” I didn’t say that. You had to be careful what you said to a depressed Democrat in those days. They were fragile creatures then. But what he said made immediate sense to me as a commentary on the religious climate in our nation, in our world, and in our churches.

In the current religious climate we are at a loss to identify a center. Among our own Baptists, among my mother’s and my middle brother’s Lutherans, among my younger brother’s Episcopalians, among my late grandmother’s Roman Catholics, among my alma mater’s Presbyterians and among my publisher’s Methodists, there are no “centers” of any size or substance that we can recognize. And Christians are not alone in that dilemma. Other religions in our world are facing the same challenge. The political and religious polarization we see within Christianity has its parallels in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and even Buddhism. In all the enduring religions around the world, in the words of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” So the time has come to acknowledge that there is no longer a place in our world and nation and churches for a “squishy middle.” The only middle that is possible now is what the eminent observer of the American religious landscape Martin Marty has called the “hard middle.”

There is a wide and easy road of partisanship, polemics and polarization on the religious right and on the religious left, and there is a narrow and difficult road of conversation and collaboration in “the hard middle.” The challenge of Thanksgiving past, present and future is to issue a new call to enter through “the narrow gate” of which Jesus of Nazareth speaks in Matthew 7:13-14. For wide and easy is the road that leads to death, to partisanship, polemics and polarization, but “the gate is narrow and the road is hard” hat leads to life, to compassion and hospitality, to conversation and collaboration between the best in our world to counteract the passionate intensity of the worst in our world.

“The gate is narrow and the road is hard, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14). Now, if that take on the narrow gate and the hard road sounds off the beaten track of biblical interpretation to you, you might be no less surprised to notice that in the gospel according to Matthew, the saying of Jesus about the easy road that leads to destruction and the hard road that leads to life is attached to another well-known saying of Jesus that in one form or another is attested nearly universally in the enduring religions of our world: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (v 12). Set side by side in the gospel tradition, the “golden rule” and “narrow gate” interpret each other.

In the winter of 1620 and 1621, a non-Christian majority living in this land stepped through the narrow gate and onto the hard road to provide for a starving, Christian minority by doing to others as they would have had them do if the deer-skin moccasin had been on the other foot. And in the autumn of 1621, a Christian minority living in this land stepped through the narrow gate and onto the hard road to invite the non-Christian majority to dinner as a gesture of gratitude, doing to others as they would have had them do if the big-buckled shoe had been on the other foot. It’s a wonderful image, this act of coming to the table together around the golden rule.

But the sad truth is that the compassionate and hospitable encounter of these diverse folk did not lead to conversation and collaboration. In the end, these historic cartoon characters were unable to cultivate the sustained and habitual behavior that builds strong and lasting relationships between people with fundamentally different perspectives and deeply divergent convictions. So the first great American interfaith encounter became a dead end that has left an ambiguous legacy. Today, the national holiday that commemorates that first American interfaith harvest festival has become a platform for a new breed of Christian totalitarianism that willfully denies or ignorantly overlooks the interfaith origins of Thanksgiving. To counteract this ethnocentric version of the history of religion in this land, Americans practitioners of all the enduring religions of our world must come to the table together not only at Thanksgiving but often enough during the year to ensure that we move from the co-dependency of hosts and guests to the healthy interdependence equal partners at the table. We must cultivate each other’s company frequently enough to see to it that those who once were strangers become friends and those who once were needy become compatriots in the common good. We have much to learn from each other and much to teach each other.

But whether we succeed or fail on the narrow road that is epitomized in the golden rule will not depend in the end on how well we get along with each other in the “hard middle.” Instead, it will depend on how effectively we build bridges of compassion and hospitality, of conversation and collaboration to our partisan, polemical and polarizing co-religionists (and anti-religionists) on the wide roads to the right and to the left of us. If we don’t succeed in that bridge-building, then if we are remembered at all, it will be at best as one more cartoon, another cautionary tale of oddly diverse folk who came together once upon a historical time but who could not sustain the journey together.

What I am saying here is every bit as true of the congregation of First Baptist Greenville as it is of our community, our nation and our world. We are congregation of the hard middle, a people of God that calls those on the left and the right alike to the center of God’s love for all God’s children, not just for some. We are a congregation of the hard middle that insists that partisanship, polemics and polarization have no place in the kingdom of God. We are a congregation of people who stand with each other and stand up for each other even as we stand by our own deeply held convictions on which we sometimes disagree with each other.

So this Thanksgiving, when we are finished giving thanks for the hospitality and compassion we have experienced in one another’s company and for the kindred spirits and soul mates we have discovered in this place, we must set out on the hard road ahead of us to build as many bridges as we can. The gate is narrow, the road is hard, and we have bridges to build—in our church, in our nation, and in our world.

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

A shorter version of this sermon appeared on the “Faith and Values” page of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer on Saturday, November 18, 2006, as "Build bridges from the middle: History of Thanksgiving shows need for conversation, collaboration" (http://www.charlotte.com/).