October 10, 2010
(Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 23)
(From The Lectionary Page)
Do Gratitude
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
True story: I was maybe 15 years old. It was Christmas Day and we were, per usual, at my grandmother’s house. All of my cousins were there, including Marcia. She and I were the only two girl cousins. We had been really close when we were kids, but by the time we were in high school we had a less in common. Okay, I’ll be honest. I was envious of her. She was a lot prettier, a lot more talented, and infinitely more popular than I ever had a prayer of being. And on that Christmas afternoon, Grandma put identically wrapped presents into our hands. Inside were identical necklaces. Except….I never wore jewelry. Marcia did, and that necklace was exactly the kind of thing she wore. But why on earth had Grandma given the same one to me? Surely she knew we weren’t the same. I was speechless with confusion and dismay, such that my mother had to prompt me as she used to when I was much younger. “What a lovely necklace,” I remember her saying pointedly. “Susan, what do you say to your grandmother?”
So I muttered some words of thanks without feeling a shred of gratitude.
Our gospel for today points us toward gratitude. Ten lepers beseech Jesus for healing. Nine go on to show themselves to the priests and be pronounced ritually clean; one turns back and offers thanks to God by falling at the feet of Jesus. And that one, we are told, was a Samaritan.
What are we to make of this?
Well one thing we cannot do is to assume that the 9 somehow were like me at 15: lacking gratitude. After all, Jesus had told them to show themselves to the priest. That was what the Law required of those who believed themselves cured of leprosy. The Torah also made clear what kind of sacrifices of thanksgiving were to be offered in the temple. They were doing what they were supposed to do in the order in which they were supposed to do it. The Samaritan, by contrast, had no reason to go to the Temple in Jerusalem. As a Samaritan, he would not have been welcome. The priests there would have had no part in pronouncing him ritually clean nor would he have been allowed to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, assuming he was even of a mind to do such a thing.
So it’s probably reading too much into the account to assume a lack of gratitude on the part of the 9, or a superabundance of gratitude on the part of the 1. But we CAN perhaps draw some conclusions about the healed Samaritan: namely, that he acted directly and immediately. And the key here, I think, comes in understanding gratitude as action, as opposed to emotion. Gratitude is something we are challenged to do, not something we may or may not feel at any given moment. Gratitude, as Jesus reflects on it in the gospel passage, means living our entire life entirely dependent on the grace of God. This means being aware that for all of our talents, all of our gifts, all of our successes, all of our wonderfulnesses, we are nothing apart from the grace of God.
Now I don’t know about you, but my back tends to go up a bit when I hear something like that. We are steeped in a culture, after all, that celebrates individual achievement, one which is predicated on egalitarian principles. How easy it is for us to be grateful for the grace of God when we’ve gone through a particularly rough patch and come out the other side. But in the back of our minds, how easy it also is to think that God’s grace is there primarily for emergency purposes, kind of like the oxygen mask that pops out of the airplane bulkhead when needed, as opposed to the life-sustaining oxygen we are given to breathe moment by moment, day in and day out, all the days of our lives.
The healed Samaritan is held up as an exemplar of how we are to be not because he felt the emotion of gratitude. He is held up as an exemplar because he, alone among the healed lepers, got it – down deep -- that he was continually in need of God’s grace, and because he responded to that awareness with worship. Where the other 9 were restored to their families and friends, able to work and worship as before, the healed Samaritan went back to being a Samaritan – a despised foreigner in a hostile land. His continued well-being was not a foregone conclusion. He remained utterly dependent on the grace of God and he knew it.
And so it must be with us. I don’t know about you, but I have found over time that it is usually more effective for me to act my way into thinking or feeling right, than to try to think or feel my way into acting right. The question for us is how can we – against all cultural imperatives -- remain actively centered and dependent on God’s grace day in and day out?
In a word, practice. And the good news is that the means of regularly practicing gratitude is within our grasp.
It’s what we do on Sunday mornings. It’s why we’re here. To practice
gratitude. To make Eucharist. Oh yes, that’s what the Greek word
εύχαριστία
[eukharistia] means: gratitude. Thanksgiving. In it, we remember the upper
room in which Christ took bread and gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to
his disciples in the full knowledge that his own body would be broken soon
on the cross and his blood poured out for the sake of all God’s people.
Christ’s entire life was lived radically in gratitude for the grace of God,
and his penultimate act on earth was to do give us the means to do the same.
And so we gather and we lift up our hearts. And sometimes those hearts are
heavier than at other times. Sometimes those hearts are feeling anything but
grateful. Lift ‘em up anyway in trust that God’s grace will be sufficient.
Because as that Samaritan showed us, it is right to give God thanks and
praise.