Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
“And one … turned back … giving him thanks”
There were ten that cried out for mercy. There were ten that were healed. Yet 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.” Luke pointedly adds, “And he was a Samaritan.”“Where,”Jesus asks, rhetorically and ironically, “are the nine?”
Certain Gospel stories stand out and bear repeating even in the course of the year. They have a certain resonance. This is one such Gospel. Read today in the midst of the Trinity Season and in the beginnings of the turn to the Fall, it is also appointed for Thanksgiving Day; not for Harvest Thanksgiving but for our national thanksgiving day. As such it reminds us of the larger spiritual dimensions of giving thanks. And so, more significantly, it recalls us to the mystery of thanksgiving. It is, we might say, the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel which highlights the spiritual necessity of thanksgiving as altogether critical for our understanding of human redemption.
Thanksgiving is our highest freedom and yet it is nothing less than the grace of God active and alive in us. To give thanks requires our recognition of others and of God beyond ourselves. The counter to our selfish tendency to take everything and one another for granted, thanksgiving recognises the profound gift of life which God alone has given us in and through one another. It belongs to our life and walk in the Spirit, to our fulfilling the law of Christ, to our bearing one another’s burdens as well as our own.
You are alive. I know, we ‘all’ got problems. “All God’s children got troubles” as the old spiritual puts it. But we are alive only if we are alive to God, the author of life and of all good things. Thanksgiving is the realization in us of God’s surpassing goodness signalled in our recognition of God as life and the gift of life in each and every one of us. That is a kind of radical mindfulness – of God, of ourselves, of our world, and of one another. And all as gifts given – in short, grace. It is not about what we think we are owed. It is about freely giving thanks for the simple truth that we are, that we exist and that existence is itself an unconditional good. Such is the wonder of the God-given reality of creation and of our lives within it despite all our complaints and concerns. We can only have those, after all, because we exist. I know. There may be times when you think that you want to die – a very different matter from causing death – but wanting to die presupposes that you are alive and know yourself to be alive. From this standpoint, even the devil is good because he exists even if he exists in contradiction with the very principle of his being and truth, God. This highlights even more the significance of thanksgiving.
