Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2:00pm service for the Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf
admin | 23 October 2011“And one turned back… giving him thanks”
God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. October is the month of thanksgiving, especially harvest thanksgiving. But thanksgiving is something more and greater than our thanks for the great bounty of God’s creation and the fruit of human labours. This Gospel story opens us out to the deeper meaning of thanksgiving and its importance with respect to the understanding of our humanity as spiritual creatures. Just note.
There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only one turned back “and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks.
To give thanks is more than good manners; it is to acknowledge the mercy freely given and received and to esteem the giver of the mercy freely and supremely. No doubt we have good reason to cry out for mercy like the ten lepers and yet God’s mercy is not given simply for us to take and run away with it. In returning and giving thanks we are more than healed; we are saved or made whole for then we enter into the motions of God’s own love: the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We enter precisely into the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father. That is the greater mercy and point of all God’s mercies towards us.
It is the point of this gospel story and the signal note of all our liturgies – “Lord, have mercy upon us”. Our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” arises only out of a due sense of all God’s mercies. And if we should think the actions of one Samaritan to be bit extravagant and a trifle excessive – not only “turn[ing] back” but “glorify[ying] God with a loud voice” and “fall[ing] down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks;” in short, making a bit of spectacle of himself, we might think – then we have only to reflect for a moment upon the extravagances to which our liturgy regularly calls us.
For here we cry out for mercy with triple intensity – “Lord, have mercy upon us; Christ, have mercy upon us; Lord, have mercy upon us”. Here we are reminded of “the great benefits that we have received” at God’s hands. Here we are bidden to turn back and glorify him with a loud voice, to come before his presence with thanksgiving, to fall down, if not on our faces, then at least upon our knees. Here we give him thanks “for all thy goodness and loving kindness to us and all mankind…for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and the hope of glory” as one of the lovely prayers puts it.
The worship of the Church always calls us to bless the one who has blessed us. We are constantly reminded of God’s manifold and great mercies signaling his favour and goodness towards us. We are called to give thanks in and through the great thanksgiving of the Son to the Father.
Our worship wonderfully counters the entitlement culture which assumes that somehow God owes us whatever pleases us. Thanksgiving is itself profoundly counter-culture.
Our thanks to God has in it nothing so simple as mere good manners but the discovery of the spiritual freedom that belongs to the true dignity and worth of our humanity. Our prayer is that we be truly and unfeignedly thankful, for that is the extravagance of his mercy towards us. Then we shall be like that Samaritan who perceiving the mercy which had been given “turned back and with a loud voice glorified God and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks”. For then the extravagance of God’s mercy shall be the freedom of our thanksgiving.
“And one turned back… giving him thanks”
Fr. David Curry
AMD October 23rd, 2011