Harvest Thanksgiving

One thing I love about gratitude is how easy it is!  Some of the things we are commanded to do are difficult.  We may find it difficult to forgive, or to do the work to serve God or our neighbour.  To endure suffering patiently is almost always difficult.  There are times when we may find it difficult to trust or to hope or to believe.  But when we are reminded to think about what we can thank God for, all of us can all be thankful.  

I am thankful that we have this annual holiday of Thanksgiving.  Because while it is easy to be thankful when we are reminded to do it, if we’re left to our own devices we often forget.  I am also thankful that the Church reminds us so often to thank God.  It is such a valuable part of our relationship with God, as well as being one of the easiest and one of the most enjoyable.

In our Inquirers’ Class we’ve been reading about prayer, and the seven types of prayer: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, petition, and intercession.  If you would like to cultivate more prayerfulness in your life, adding a practice of thanking God at regular times is an easily accessible way to do that.  

The theologian Karl Barth was fond of saying that the basic human response to God is gratitude—not fear and trembling, not guilt and dread, but thanksgiving.  In his words, “What else can we say to what God gives us but stammer praise?” [Church Dogmatics, III/3, 564].  C.S. Lewis, as he explored his newfound faith, wrote about the insistence in the psalms, and throughout the Bible, that we praise and thank God.  He also observed the connection between gratitude and personal well-being.  He writes, “I noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least.  Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.” [Reflections on the Psalms, 78-81].  I think he's right about that.

With all the benefits of thanking God, in our faith and in our inner health, why don’t we do it more often?  I expect the reason for that is that we tend to pay more attention to the things we want but don’t have, and we pay less attention to the things we do have.  And the more attention we pay to the things we don’t have, the more likely we are to become cranks, misfits, or malcontents.  I’m not saying we should be in denial about our problems, or that we shouldn’t share with God in prayer the things we want for ourselves and for others.  Prayers of petition and intercession are an important part and even an essential part of our relationship with God.  We’re going to be talking about that more next Sunday when we read the parable of the persistent widow.  What I am saying is that it’s important that our prayers about what we don’t have are balanced with prayers of thanksgiving for what we do have.  Our scriptures teach us this directly.  Philippians 4:6 says, “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication WITH THANKSGIVING let your requests be made known to God.”  As with most aspects of practicing our faith, the more often we practice thanksgiving, the more we discover thankfulness welling up in us.  Or others may notice that we’re becoming less cranky.

Sometimes we might have the thought, “With all the things that are wrong in my life, or wrong in my family, or wrong in the world, it seems hard to be thankful.”  So as we explore that I’d like to look more closely at today’s passage.  We’ve got ten lepers.  Not only is leprosy a painful and disfiguring disease, but since other people were afraid of catching it, and since lepers were considered ritually impure, people who had leprosy were outcasts from society.  It would be a very lonely life, of constant rejection.  Normally, Jews did not associate with Samaritans, and considered them heretics and foreigners.  But in this band of ten lepers there is a Samaritan.  It seems that when you’re among the outcasts, you’ve got more in common with another outcast than with the society that cast you out.  The lepers approach Jesus, but they also keep their distance.  They call out saying, “Jesus, master, have mercy on us!”  They have probably heard that Jesus has been healing people, and they are hoping that he might heal them.  To call out, “Jesus, master, have mercy on us!” is, in its own way, a prayer of petition.  Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests, and they go.  And while they are going, all ten of them are made clean.  One of the ten thanks Jesus.  And this is not a polite good-manners thank-you.  This guy is so overcome that he bursts out praising God with a loud voice.  And then he even prostrates himself on the ground at Jesus’ feet, thanking Jesus.  He has experienced a miracle.  He has been made clean from this loathsome disease.  And more than that, he can be reunited with all the family he has lost, all the friends he has lost, all the community he has lost, all the holy rituals he has lost.  Wouldn’t you think that would be the reaction of all the lepers to this miracle?

Jesus asks, “Were not ten made clean?  But the other nine, where are they?  Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”  There’s a lot to unpack in this verse.  As Christian nationalists are relentlessly scapegoating foreigners, and claiming that people of other religions are inferior and should not be treated equally by the government, it is good to notice how different the words of scripture, and the words of Christ, are.  Jesus points out, as he often does, that the one with the right response to God is the foreigner.  Jesus points out, as he often does, that the people of his own religion, the ones you might expect would know better, do not respond to God with praise or gratitude, but the person they regard as an unrighteous heretic does.  This passage, in which the Samaritan responds with praise and thanksgiving while the people of Jesus’ religion don’t, has a lot of similarities to the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the Samaritan responds to the suffering man with compassion and service, while the supposedly righteous leaders in Jesus’ own religion don’t. 

And it may be that when we are used to having good things, we are most likely to take them for granted.  It may be that the Samaritan, who is an outsider to Jesus’ religion, is not used to having basic care that the insiders are used to, and take for granted.  And so the pain of outsider status makes him truly appreciate how much Jesus cares for him, and what a miracle Jesus has done for him.  In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the lawyer and the Pharisee are used to the safety that status in their community brings.  The Samaritan is not used to those things, and so feels empathy for the suffering man on the side of the road, and gives generously of his time and money to help him.

There are times when suffering breaks people.  And there are other times when people find, in suffering, opportunities for growth.   Those who experience exclusion are often motivated to work for justice for themselves and for others.  Those who live in poverty often show compassion for others in need.  Those who have been through pain are often especially empathetic toward the pain of others.  Most relevant to today’s passage: Losing something we used to take for granted can make us more thankful for what we do have, if we let it.

I was intrigued by two things I learned about the Greek in this passage.  As the lepers are on their way to the priests, they are “made clean” from the leprosy.  But when the Samaritan thanks Jesus in such a heartfelt way, Jesus tells him, “your faith has made you well” and he uses the word σῴζω (sōizō).  “Sōizō” means made well, made whole, or saved.  All ten of the lepers were made clean from the leprosy.  One of them responded with thanksgiving, and Jesus calls that thanksgiving “faith”.  I find it very meaningful that Jesus calls thanksgiving faith.  And I have the sense that for this one leper, his way of seeing the world, his way of seeing himself, his way of seeing God has changed, in his response of thanksgiving, in his response of faith.  And while Jesus making the ten clean from the leprosy is miraculous, it is not the only transformation here.  It is this thanksgiving, this faith, this seeing in a new way, where something happens in the Samaritan’s soul: he is made well, he is made whole, he is saved.

I was also interested to learn that the Greek word for thanks,  εὐχαριστέω (eucharisteō), appears four times in Luke’s gospel.  One time is in this passage.  Another time is in the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector, which we will read in two weeks, which shows us superiority masquerading as thankfulness, as the Pharisee thanks God that he is better than that tax collector, and Jesus is not fooled for one second by the fakeness of his thanksgiving.  The other two times are at the Last Supper, when Luke tells us Jesus gives thanks for the cup of wine, and gives thanks for the loaf of bread.  As he knows he is about to suffer crucifixion and death, Jesus thanks God for the bread and wine.  Our word “eucharist” comes from the Greek word for thanks, eucharisteō, and our eucharist today, and every Sunday, is a giving thanks.  We thank God for the bread and wine.  And more than that we thank God for the gifts of the entire created world, for the prophets and saints, for the faithful of all generations, for the teachings of God, and above all for the boundless love of God who is willing to sacrifice everything and to suffer everything to offer us mercy, forgiveness, and grace.  We thank God for this infinite love freely given to us while we were still sinners.  We thank God that this love still surrounds us and acts within us in the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We thank God that it is infinite and eternal.