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Thanksgiving Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 22, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 14:34-36; 41-57 Luke 17:11-21
The Bible never says where the nine are. It merely asks the question. All we know for sure is that one returned, a Samaritan, to give thanks and to hear the pronouncement of his health by the One from whose hand his health had come. Perhaps the whereabouts of the nine are not for us to know, are unimportant to the story. The point, after all, is that the foreigner returned, and in his return we behold the delicate coincidence of grace and gratitude that leaves us bowed down before the God who is the giver of both. But the question still haunts me. For I suspect that wherever the nine have gone, you and I are somehow in that number more often than not. For whatever reason, we stand at a distance from God and cry out for help. Then when help comes, or as John Baillie so simply and truthfully put it, "if the imagined danger disappears as it usually has done, I incline only to think how absurd were my fears and to banish the whole little episode from my mind with a shrug of relief. How often I forget," he confesses, "to follow up my petition with thanksgiving! Nine times out of ten do I forget, thus justifying Christ's question, `Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?'" We do not know. All we can say is that our daily existence justifies Christ's question. We do not know about the nine, but we surely know about ourselves. We know that nine times out of ten it does not occur to us to be grateful, to return thanks, to praise God for the wonder of our lives. We wake, our routines commence, we fill the day with activity, we refresh ourselves with food and friends and family and then, again, sleep. Nine times out of ten the gift of life, of health, of friendship, of work, of play, of food, of family, of shelter, of worship is experienced not a gift but a given. We not only accept the gift but come to expect it, cry out when it is not ours for the taking, and so it is that our daily existence justifies Christ's question. That said, our lives are not without moments of thanksgiving. There are, first of all, those unsettling reminders that evoke a kind of gratitude: a visit to a friend in the hospital, who will probably never regain strength, prompts us to remember, with all our aches and pains, that we do still have enough health for independence; a talk with someone, whose personal life is in pieces and whose spirit is broken, reminds us that the chaos of our lives is more ordered than we realize; an article in the Inquirer about home foreclosures in the suburbs, the death of another soldier in Afghanistan, the violent crossfire that felled a young person down the Avenue—the daily news calls us in an uneasy way to count our blessings while we keep our distance. Or, as John Updike's character Rabbit Angstrom puts it, "When you think of the dead, you got to be grateful." There is a sort of gratitude by negativity, a thanksgiving that comes in contrast which still leaves Christ with the question, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?" Or there is the gratitude that returns not to Christ but to ourselves. We consider the work of our hands, our patient dealing with our children, our health assured by vitamins and vigorous exercise, our future secured with a little nest egg in the bank or under the bed and, for all that, we seem to have only ourselves to thank. We are grateful for health, success, love, security because we have fashioned it and believe it is our doing. We are grateful and in this sort of gratitude we also justify Christ's question, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?" Then there are those of us who have it in us to be grateful but know not the name of the One to thank. Sir Leslie Stephen, at the death of his first wife in 1871, writes in a letter, "I thank--something--that I loved her as heartily as I knew how to love, that I would have died for her with pleasure and that I scarcely even saw a cloud in her bright face." I thank--something. Or again I return to the words of Katherine Mansfield who exclaims in the presence of the Alps, "If only one could make some small grasshoppery sound of…thanks to some one--but to who?" We may be struck in the deepest reaches of our soul with the gift of it all--the gift of someone to love, the gift of the earth and its fullness, the gift of something as elusive as purpose or something as mundane as the first cup of coffee in the morning, but if we do not know the One to thank, even our genuine response of gratitude leaves Jesus looking down the road and asking, "Where are the nine?" The gratitude that comes to us by way of contrast or as self-congratulations or as an emotion with no object may find us happy but without the faith that makes us whole. Hence the story in Luke's gospel. We do not know where the nine are, but as we read, we know where we are and we would not be surprised if, nine times out of ten, we live justifying Christ's question. But what of that tenth time? What was it about that one man and his providential encounter that prompted Jesus to proclaim the good news: "Rise and go your way; your faith has made you whole"? The detail we so easily miss in the story is the gift of gratitude itself. The gratitude expressed by the one was not something he did or created or worked at or controlled: it was a gift of God. "Your faith has made your well," Jesus says to him, meaning the Samaritan's return to Jesus was not the Samaritan's bright idea or bold initiative. The fact that the Samaritan returned has nothing to do with his essential goodness: it was not his own doing, as we often hear in the promise of the gospel on Sunday morning. It was a gift of God. The faith that made him whole and found him on his face before Jesus was as much God’s gift as the new skin on his back. But if gratitude is a gift, how is it given? Did God create the Alps or a baby's smile or the moon and the stars in order to make us grateful? Is gratitude somehow caught up in some grand cause and effect? Again, listen to the story. Precisely because the nine are not to be found we begin to suspect that gratitude does not rest on good fortune or good health or good weather or good looks, else they all would have returned. Rather we are shaped for thanksgiving by the God who has destined us, in love, from the foundation of the world. So it was the Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write in his last letter before he was hanged in Flossenburg, "You must never doubt that I am travelling my appointed road with gratitude and cheerfulness. I am thankful for all those who have crossed my path and all I wish is never to cause them sorrow, and that they like me will always be thankful for the forgiveness and mercy of God and sure of it." Gratitude is first of all a gift that is given not by the circumstances around us but by the One who created us. In the second place, gratitude that is true gratitude issues in action. What of the rest of that tenth leper's life? Notice that the story in Luke not only fails to tell us about the whereabouts of the nine, it also tells us nothing about the future of the leper who returned to give thanks. Was he that kind of fellow to begin with or did this event radically change him? Was his return to Jesus' feet only a momentary flush of excitement which faded as he returned and went on his way? What did it mean for Jesus to say that he was whole? What we begin to sense in Jesus' words to him is that gratitude is more, much more, than a momentary emotion which comes and goes as the occasion warrants. It is a way of life. Seen from the shallows, a life of gratitude may seem to be simply a word—that “magic word” we learned as children: thank you for the morning, thank you for the call, thank you for the dinner, thank you for the gift. Alexander Whyte once noted that there is little difference between a human being and a brute beast save that while…the pig attacks the food presented to him with greedy and unreflecting taste, human beings will often be observed to bend their heads for a moment before setting to and "in that little inhibition," he says, "in that moment of pause, our sole human dignity resides. But the tenth leper was destined for much more than table grace as he turned to go his way. He had been made whole. He had been turned, in Christ, toward a life lived in response to what God had done for him--is doing for us-- in Jesus Christ. By grace we have been saved, and that is not our own doing, it is a gift of God. The Samaritan now lived the life given him by God to live not in order to be saved but lived in grateful response to God's saving grace in Jesus Christ day by day. So in the second place, gratitude is a way of living in the light of God's love and forgiveness revealed once for all on the cross. In the third place, I think of Paul’s words to the Philippians, assuring them that the God who began a good work in them will bring it to completion. God surely was not done with this Samaritan! The God who began a good work in him by the healing of his leprosy had only just begun. God had done a saving thing with him. That is what miracles are meant to reveal: to give us a glimpse of God’s final, saving purpose. But now, in the mundane, daily, everyday sort of world to which the Samaritan belonged, it would be the providence of God which would continue to sustain him. Day by day are we made whole in all the little ways our lives are upheld by God's gracious providing. Therefore the life of Christian gratitude is both gratitude day by day for God's saving act in Jesus Christ and it is a life lived in constant awareness of the sustaining acts of God--the providence of God. Once you have seen such grace in the face of Jesus Christ, you are sure to see the signs of God's steadfast love in all things and so to return, again and again and again, thanking Him. But finally it must be said that gratitude, though a gift of God given in our individual lives, is a gift intended to be made known in the midst of our life together. The church, for all its faults and foibles, for its incredible humanity which causes us at times to lose faith, for its amazing resiliency which brings us to our knees, the church is a gift of God to each and every one of us. It is a community of the grateful wherein we are known and forgiven and found when we are lost and raised up when the world has brought us low and reminded week after week who we are and to whom we belong. The church is where we learned what it was to be grateful because the church is where we first heard the proclamation, despite all evidence to the contrary, that we are loved by a great and gracious God. Think of the gift of our life together: the babies baptized, children confirmed, hands held for the last time in death, marriages begun! How many, because of the witness of this people in this place, how many have been kept from falling? Or how many in the center of these very pews have heard the call of God to ministry or felt the hand of God upon their broken lives? How many have come here in search of they knew not what and found what they could never have imagined? How many have learned the old, old stories or felt the ancient rhythm of God's mercy made manifest in the singing of a hymn? How many ministers have come and gone; how many members served with no count of the cost; how many elders and deacons have been humbled by the hands laid upon their heads? How do people do without this gift in their lives? I do not know. Perhaps they are the nine: healed by God of their diseases but too far down the road rejoicing to seek the face of Him who loves them. Perhaps it is the one returning--all the ones returning--week after week, year after year, decade after decade, who have been called into the fellowship of the grateful and who dare to call themselves the church of Jesus Christ. Perhaps you are by God's grace the one in ten gathered in this place, the one to whom our Lord has said, "Rise and go your way; your faith has made you whole." Thanks be to God! Amen. |