November 27, 2008
(Thanksgiving Day)

A Life of Thanksgiving

By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Deuteronomy 8:7-18  •  Psalm 65  •  2 Corinthians 9:6-15  •  Luke 17:11-19
(From The Lectionary Page)

Now quite a few years ago, I ventured into a class of three and four year olds and their parents to talk about the meaning of the Holy Eucharist.  My goal was to help the children become a bit more familiar with the celebration of the Most Holy Sacrament. Their purpose was to show me how silly I was to think I could teach anybody anything.

I gathered everyone around the Holy Table, and explained that Eucharist was a Greek word for Thanksgiving.

I asked how many of them had a big meal on Thanksgiving Day. All the hands shot up into the air.

I pointed to the fair linen, and the candles, and asked if their Thanksgiving dining room table had a table cloth and candles. Again, all the little hands shot into the air.  I was on a roll, I thought.

Billy said, “We have big chairs around our table.”

I ignored him.

In brilliant fashion I next likened the paten and chalice to a dinner plate and wine glass, and again all of the children raised their hands, and I was content that I had achieved my goal of showing the Eucharist to be a great, festive meal.

But then I got greedy. I wanted more. So I pressed on, saying that when we come to the Thanksgiving Table in church every Sunday, when everything is ready, the priest says a prayer giving thanks to God.  “How many of you say grace, say thank you to God, before eating your meal?”

Not a single hand went up. I looked at all the parents, and everyone quickly and thoroughly avoided eye contact with me.

I repeated the question: How many of you pray and say thank you to God before you eat?

Again, no hand went up, though in the far corner one mother was looking at her daughter, urging her to raise her hand.  So I called on her:  “Elizabeth, do you say grace at the dinner table?”

“Yes,” she said, “we pray when grandma comes to visit!”

As I recall, Elizabeth and her mother left the class early that day.

How is it giving thanks comes to be overlooked?

In today’s Gospel account, Jesus sends ten lepers to the priest, and the scripture says, it was on the journey, as they made their way to the priest, that they were made clean.

One of the former lepers noticed immediately his new cleanness, and turned around and went back to Jesus and fell at the Lord’s feet. He returned the source of his cleansing, to the One whose power had restored him, and he gave thanks. This one, a Samaritan, a foreigner Luke calls him, one outside of the proper Jewish community, was the only one who truly gave thanks to God.  Jesus says, “Get off the ground and go. Your faith has made you well.”

Some scholars debate the distinction between being made clean and being made well. Perhaps we are dealing with terms referring to the difference between being cured and being healed. Or they may be synonymous terms.

But this reading is appointed for this holy day because it highlights the connection between giving thanks to God and living as a whole, well being. It is the essence of what the first testament calls shalom – peace, health, and wholeness.

You and I are not complete, we are not whole – and spiritually healthy – until we give thanks to God.

That pre-eminent preacher of The Memorial Church at Harvard, the Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes, is a native of Plymouth, Massachusetts. In his writings and sermons, especially on Thanksgiving Day, Dr. Gomes delights in invoking his birthright – the right to de-mythologize what has become the way Thanksgiving is practiced.

He writes: “I will be the last person to snatch one iota of praise and esteem from the Pilgrims of Plymouth, but I must hasten to say that Thanksgiving neither begins nor ends with them. Thanksgiving, if there is to be any at all, must begin and end with God. Once we have been able to liberate Thanksgiving from the clutches of the Pilgrim mystique. . .and once we have been liberated from the “count-your-many-blessings-name-them-one-by-one” routine, we will have made a significant step” in redeeming this day as a day to give thanks to God.  Thanksgiving is not about successes, abundance or blessedness. It is about God. (Sermons. Thanksgiving – Redeeming the Familiar, pp 232-3.)

Gomes goes on in this sermon to speak of the God of the second chance. When God forgives us, we have another chance to do what is right. So picture for a moment the reactions of the other nine, who reach the priest and discover that they are now clean.  Imagine what they do with this second opportunity to give thanks.

This Gospel lesson sounds familiar. We have all known what it means to discover, well after the fact, how God has been active in our lives. It the gift of hindsight – we look back and see how God has been so very much present in events, in the actions and words of others, in the silence and darkness when we thought we were all alone. We failed to understand or see at the time, and so we failed to give thanks. But we have second chances. Indeed, we are given many chances to give thanks, not only with our lips, but in our lives, and in the Church.

Thanksgiving begins with God.  It ends with God.  As Dr. Gomes concludes, “In spite of our fumbles and because of God’s grace we are not daunted by the troubles of this age, nor are we fearful of what is to come. We do not bless God for our wealth, our health, or for our feeble wisdom. We bless God that God is, that we are, and that his promise and love shall be with us when time itself shall be no more.” (p. 234)

May our lives be a continual journey towards God. A journey based on giving thanks not for some blessing or other, but based on giving thanks that God is, and that we have second chances to live lives of thanksgiving. If this is our journey, then we, too, will be cleansed and made well. We were created to be thankful.