Well, I guess you know what happened, don't you? I committed the cardinal error, a miscalculation common to clergy greenhorns and novices, but ever so rare to the experienced: I was absent for the planning meeting for this service. And here I am, the preacher!

In all fairness, I thought I had covered the bases. My trusted Cantor would be there to protect my interests, and with uncanny prescience would know, in the inevitable discussion of "Who should preach?", just when to defer in my name to a more likely candidate. With a minimum of subtly, I had already even suggested two or three likely prospects, carefully planting their names and elucidating their distinctions with Dr. Frampton and Reverend Merriwether. Only to return after but a few days away to be informed by my formerly trusted clergy partner: "By the way, you're it!"

Not this year! I would have done it last year, preached last Thanksgiving, and left it to last year's preacher to make sense of this Thanksgiving, 2001. For so much has changed after 9-11, and in so many ways, we are not the same people this evening we were last year when we gathered to sing, "Now Thank We All Our God."

Not since Thanksgiving 1963, which came only a week after President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, has the American people come to the Thanksgiving table so traumatized by the events of our nation and so unsettled by an awareness of our gross vulnerability. Says Shakespeare: "Troubles, when they come, come not as single spies, but in battalions"!

It seems to be true for America this year. Added to the haunting images of the crashing of the hijacked jetliners, the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and the walls of the Pentagon containing their thousands of precious lives, most of which were so cruelly, it seems, vaporized in the midst of sweet life, add to all of that the necessity of sending our military forces into harm's way. And our fright and preoccupation with questions of airport and travel security continue to unsettle all aspects of our nation's life.

Would last year's fine preacher have ever imagined any of this as she delivered her Thanksgiving message? Would any one who was here last year have ever entertained, for as much as an instant, the prospect of deadly anthrax in the U.S. mails and the closing down and relocating of the proceedings of Congress, the Supreme Court, the postal authority, and other agencies of the U.S. government and health departments? Never! I miss a meeting, and it's suddenly up to Cohn to remind us all of it.

So here we go!

In the Holiness Code of Leviticus, Chapter 19, which we have just heard, there was mandated that merciful law in ancient Israel, which directed that those who reaped the wheat and cornfields, and those who gathered in the vineyards would not harvest every sheaf or ear or pick every cluster. Instead, the corners of the fields, and a portion of every vineyard, must remain unharvested, so that the gleaners--the needy and the most vulnerable-would always find something by which to refresh and sustain themselves.

The Biblical thinking behind this reasoned, of course, that we ought not take it all because the world with its abundant harvest is not ours. But the "Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." So we were commanded to let something go unharvested in gratitude for the generosity and beneficence of God, and for the salvation of the truly needy among us.

Well, guess what? This Thanksgiving, in a spiritual and emotional sense, you and I find ourselves gleaners in the corners of the field.

That's right! In the wake of our nation's tragedy, we hunger for equilibrium and strength; we are the needy ones who must go in search to renew our notion of courage and hopefulness for the future. It is harvest time, my dear friends, for our afflicted souls and wounded sense of well-being. Won't you come with me, then, to the corners of the field and to those orchards and vineyards where eternal truths and unshakeable values and realities await our eager embrace? Yes, it's harvest time for the soul. Come, my fellow gleaners!

Hold that ladder, while we reach up to place this strengthening fact into our baskets: anything that was true the day before that Tuesday in September was also true the day after. But it is our perspective which has so profoundly changed! Our eyes have been opened and we no longer sweat the small stuff. For we have discovered that it is virtually all small stuff, isn't it?

You know, people in New York tell me that they no longer complain about a bad day at the office if they still have one to return to. We have a new-born awareness of the miracle of the universe, as our arrogant sense of entitlement has been humbled and mortally wounded. Yes, let's collect the fruit of a dis-illusioned but clearer vision: gratitude for the gift of life. Let's gather that!

Bring your baskets over here now, too. Let's reach out to take hold of this ripening awareness: God was present on that day in our nation's darkest hour, though at first we didn't even recognize Him.

• Going incognito, there was God as men and women formed human chains in the stairwells and gave their blood in record numbers.

• There was God as police and fire personnel heroically sacrificed with no concern for self.

• And there was God masquerading as those resolute men and women aboard a hijacked plane who fought their captors and in so doing may have altered the course of history, though not their own personal fate.

Hey, now, do you want to taste something really sweet and good? Take a bite of this reality: a whole lot of pseudo-sophistication and cynicism has fallen away, and you and I ought to pause right now to thank God for the miracle we call the United States of America.

We take it all so for granted. But more often than not, it brings out the best in our human nature, this country does. And from history's perspective, there has never been so welcoming and loving and just and generous and faithful a nation on the face of the earth. Perhaps we ought to just pause here a moment and simply pray. God bless America!

But wait. Look over there. There are some grapes over there that we really must also be sure to harvest. Taste them! They're both sweet and tart, at one and the same time, for they are the sobering awareness that God gives free will to all, even to the terrorists.

When the first son, Cain, of the first couple, Adam and Eve, determined to murder his brother, he did just as he pleased, despite God's most earnest wish. But we, too, have free will-to oppose evil. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. And so remember these grapes, the bitter, the sweet: free-will and freedom must be used wisely.

We're almost finished our Harvest Time, but over there on the side, I see one other crop awaiting our attention. It's the green, thick stalk of optimism. Even as they continue to sift through the rubble at Ground Zero and, as yet still unable to fathom the loss, losses, we must remain optimistic that these horrific acts will yet unleash a tidal wave of nobility and devotion to goodness which, perhaps, the world has never, ever seen before.

In the words of the old Hebrew prayer,

V'yei'asu chulam agudat achat.

They will band together with a sense
of urgency to rout out the forces of
terrorism wherever they may exist.

So on this Thanksgiving, won't you take it steady? And in the spirit of profound trust and patience, remember this from Niebuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime.
Therefore, we must be saved by our hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.
Therefore, we are saved by our faith.

Nothing we can do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by our love.