by CCW | 1 September 2013 18:19
God is extravagant with his mercies; we are miserly with our thanks. There is something profound and wonderful in this quintessential gospel that speaks so wonderfully to this time of transition from Summer to Fall, and especially on this Labour Day weekend. Nothing quite so transformative, in a way, than thanksgiving, the counter to all the tedium of our endless complaining, the counter, too, to all the despairing fatalisms of our world and day. Thanksgiving is our true and freest labour. We are, I think, a long ways from the suffering of the lepers – the outcasts and rejects – of the ancient world and, yet, there are the fears and anxieties of our own times that beset us and trouble us and which separate us from God and from one another.
There were ten “that lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”. But only “one of them when he saw that he was healed, turned back and with a loud voice glorified God and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan”. In short, there are many who cry out for mercy but few who return to give thanks. To cry out for mercy, it seems to me, is itself a great matter, a matter of honest realization about ourselves and the human condition. But to return – literally, to turn back – and to give thanks, well, that is something even far more amazing.
Repentance and thanksgiving go together. Both are a return to God, a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away in one fashion or another and turning back to the one upon our whole being depends. Redire ad principium. Repentance and thanksgiving are both about returning to the very principle of our being and knowing, to God in whom we find our truth and life.
To give thanks is far more than good manners as important as that is socially as a form of respect and charity in civic life. Thanksgiving acknowledges a mercy freely given and received and esteems the giver of that 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. In returning and giving thanks we enter into something more and far greater than what we can ever imagine. What is that?
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. In some deep sense, something of the very life of God moves in us in the activity of giving thanks. There is nothing more free than the giving of thanks and never more so, too, than in response to a mercy received and perceived.
It is the point of this gospel story. It is, as well, the signal note of all our liturgy or service of worship, itself a kind of labour or work, captured in the recurring refrain: “Lord, have mercy upon us”. Our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” – a powerful phrase coined by Cranmer – arises only out of a due sense of all God’s mercies. And if we should think the actions of one Samaritan to be a bit extravagant and even a trifle excessive, 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 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 bless the one who has blessed us that we may make our eucharist – “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” – in the “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice” of the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father. Here we are assured “of thy favour and goodness towards us”. Here “we give thanks to thee for thy great glory”.
Our thanks to God is part and parcel of the extravagance of his mercy towards us making his thanksgiving, his eucharist, in us. For, 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”. Then the extravagance of God’s mercy shall be the freedom of our thanksgiving. It shall be all our joy and delight and all our blessedness, for like the one who “turned back” we shall not only be healed but made whole. This is captured in a kind of prayerful mantra by the poet/preacher John Donne: “Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself.” It catapults us into the greater wonder of God himself. Only so shall we be made whole.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIV, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/09/01/sermon-for-the-fourteenth-sunday-after-trinity-4/
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