It’s the week of Thanksgiving, a holiday for most unless of course you’re a turkey. Thanksgiving comes down to two words. Thank you. Saying Thank You and You’re Welcome recognizes the spider web of inter-connectedness that characterizes the truth of our lives. What happens over there affects the prices of this or that on the grocery shelf over here. So a thank you recognizes truth that you and I are all connected.
Our gospel story starts out talking as if it’s about a healing. Ten lepers approach Jesus, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Jesus sends them to the priests, and as they go they are made clean. We learn some things from this. We’ve also learned that healing sometimes takes time.
In this story about the healing of the lepers, Jesus is on the borderlands of Galilee and Samaria, and he tells the lepers to go and see the priests, who almost all lived down near Jerusalem. So it’s a long walk, and it takes time. It says they were healed on the way, not straightaway.
When we get to the second part of the story, we see that only one of them, a Samaritan, comes back to say thank you. He’s the Syrian. When he does, Jesus tells him, “Your faith has made you well” – or, “your faith has saved you.”
All ten of the lepers are healed; yet only one of them returns to give thanks.
All ten of the lepers get to live their lives free from social stigma, discrimination and exclusion. Only one of them gets to enter the company of Jesus.
For nine of the lepers, Jesus is a means to an end. For only one of them is Jesus an end in himself. And the key to the difference between that one leper and the other nine lies in those two simple words, “Thank you.” These are harvest words.
By saying thank you that one leper was saying, “This is not fundamentally a story about me; this is a story about God.” I’ve been healed not because I trained, or researched, or dieted, or even because I prayed; I’ve been healed because God’s power has been revealed in me.
When we’re reflecting on our lives – past, present or future – do we judge ourselves on how much we’ve achieved, how many people know us, or how much stuff we possess? Or do we see our lives as to whether they’re the kind of lives in which the glory of God has been revealed?
The curious thing is that the glory of God isn’t merely or even mostly revealed in the lives of accomplishment and success. Most often God’s glory is revealed in lives that are broken and have big holes in them.
So when we say thank you to God, it isn’t something we do when we’ve been given lots of success, lots of love or lots of stuff. Rather it’s to recognize that we’ve been given lives in which the glory of God can be revealed. We could call it a harvest life, or thanks living. The Samaritan leper had a Thanks living, or harvest life.
And if we’ve been given lives in which the glory of God can be revealed, that means that we’ve been given a part to play in God’s story. You and I have lives in which the glory of God can be revealed, any day. And the way to get to be part of the story is quite simple. It’s to make every day a harvest day. It’s to say thank you. A thanks living Day.
When we praise God and say thank you we recognize that life may not have been this way at all. It may’ve been very different. God might not have created you and me. It might have been a very different story. There might not have been a place for you. There might not have been a place for any of us. And the way we recognize that things might have been very different lies in saying those two harvest words: thank you.
Often we only focus on the parts of us that seem to go wrong. We discover our family isn’t as happy or straightforward as other families, and we look for someone to blame, one of our parents perhaps, or one of their’s. We find ourselves isolated from the way other people are woven into God’s story, and so we take to imagining that we have a level of pain or hurt that is so much greater than anyone else’s, and until that pain is heard and listened to and understood and affirmed we will refuse to trust or engage or enjoy the bigger story.
To a life that’s mired in resentment, gratitude is a stranger. There is only one medicine for a life turned in on itself. It is rediscovering the art of saying thank you, the art of harvest living. When he said thank you, the Samaritan leper entered a new community.
Luke’s gospel is all about God bringing people out of the exile of political oppression, physical sickness, spiritual blindness and communal exclusion by forming a new community around the crucified and risen Jesus. Four times in Luke’s gospel Jesus says the words “Your faith has made you well.” The first is to the woman in the house of Simon, the Pharisee, whom everyone knew to be a sinner. The second is to the woman with the twelve years of hemorrhages. The third is to the Samaritan leper, and the fourth is to a blind beggar. In other words Jesus makes a new community out of the sinner, the sick, the second-class, the disabled, the foreigner and the socially excluded.
And they are all astonished and joyful and full of thanks for being made part of God’s story. They turn out to be people in whom the glory of God is revealed. We become a harvest person with a “Thank you.” It’s an interesting company to join of course. Our society typically expends a lot of energy to stay away from the sinner, the sick, the second-class, the disabled, the foreigner and the socially excluded.
We come to church to join the company of people in whom the glory of God is revealed. And it turns out that first among them are the sinner, the sick, the second-class, the disabled, the foreigner, and the socially excluded.
It’s a wonderful company, so long as you never make the mistake of thinking it’s a limited company. It’s a harvest company. And it’s a company you enter when you say thank you. When you say thank you to the person who serves you food, to the person who holds the door open, to the person who notices you’re limping, to the person who handles your groceries, in this way you’re recognizing that, like God, this person has made you a part of a bigger story.
This is a story in which people are overwhelmed not by what they’ve suffered, but by what they’ve received. To say thank you is to recognize your dependence on another person, to say, “You make my life possible.”
And to say thank you is slowly, gradually, to become the most powerful person in the world, the person who is so filled with awe and wonder with the life and grace they have been given by God that no suffering or cruelty or tragedy can break their spirit. Harvest people. We all know there are huge inequalities in our world. Harvest has become a time when we name and see those inequalities and recommit ourselves to addressing them and rectifying them.
But maybe the real difference in God’s kingdom isn’t between the rich and the poor. Maybe the real difference is the harvest difference: the difference between the resentful and the grateful. Truly the most powerful person in the world is the one who in the face of horror and scarcity can see beyond it to glory and abundance. Nothing can destroy such a person.
Such a person was Martin Rinkart. He became the pastor of the small German town of Ellenberger in 1618 just as the slaughter and chaos of the Thirty Years War was beginning. This was a period so catastrophic that the population of Germany fell by around a third over thirty years. Ellenberger was a walled city. It became a crowded haven for political and military refugees. This left the city vulnerable to disease and famine. In the year 1637 there was terrible plague. Martin Rinkart was the only pastor remaining in Ellenberger. He conducted 4,000 funerals in that year, including up to 50 funerals a day. As the signs of peace began to appear and the tide of slaughter, famine and plague began to recede in the 1640s, Martin Rinkart had lost half of his own household, including his wife and kids. He could’ve been forgiven for feeling resentful, angry and unforgiving.
But instead he sat down and wrote one of the most famous hymns in the German language, which we know in English as “Now Thank We All Our God.” Viewing the wreckage of war, and the folly of his fellow human beings, he nonetheless still saw the ultimate grace of God, which had given him life, had given him Jesus, had given him hope, had given him unlikely friends and still gave him faith. He did the simple thing and just said thank you. It’s difficult to imagine what it might have meant for Martin Rinkart to be healed, but I think in writing that hymn healing happened.
In writing this hymn he displayed the same lesson discovered by the Samaritan leper: the harvest lesson, the power of saying thank you. Martin Rinkart was a person in whom the glory of God was revealed. It was revealed through his ability and willingness, even amid untold suffering, to say thank you to the God of wonder and glory, who created us all, who suffers in our suffering, and who alone can raise us to new life. May we too learn to say thank you, in great ways and small, and may we too become a harvest people, in whom the glory of God is revealed. Thanks living.