Lift up your hearts.So, begins the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer.
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right and just.
It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks. Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God
“Eucharist” is a verb and it means to give thanks. Giving God thanks is always and everywhere both our duty and our salvation. What specifically do we thank God for always and everywhere? In short, for everything: for creation, for existence, most especially for salvation through Christ our Lord. This morning we gather around the table of the Lord's word and body to celebrate together the Thanksgiving feast of all Thanksgiving feasts.
It is more than fitting that we gather for Eucharist on the day our country has long since designated as Thanksgiving Day. As Christians, everyday should be a day of thanksgiving. While all of this makes sense and is surely the kind of thing you expect to hear at Church, like many things we hear at Church, this is easier said than done. We must constantly battle forgetfulness and the vicissitudes of life.
At least for Christians, being thankful cannot mean being smug, smacking our lips and rubbing our bellies in a self-satisfied way. True thanksgiving, as our Collect for today indicates, requires us to be mindful of others, particularly those who might feel they do not have much or maybe even anything for which they can be thankful. In short, just as faith gives blossom to hope, which, in turn, bears fruit in love, genuine thanks results in giving of ourselves and of our resources.
Today’s Gospel is about thanksgiving. Jesus healed ten people of leprosy instantaneously on the spot. In other words, these ten people were very visibly afflicted with an illness, and, with a word, Jesus healed them. In the blink of an eye, they no longer had leprosy. Can you imagine?
Jesus told them to go show themselves to the priests. This was important, at least for the presumably nine Jews, so they would be ritually pure and able to participate in Israel’s worship. As they went, they suddenly noticed that they were cured. But only one of the ten, 10% of the total, came back to thank Jesus. The Greek word translated into English as “thanked” in this passage is euchariston.
I snap I took with my phone today that seems to illustrate what giving thanks often looks like
It is significant that the one who returns to thank Jesus is a Samaritan. Translating this into our context, it would be like Jesus healing ten people in Bountiful, Utah, nine of whom are Catholics while one is a Mormon. And in the end, only the Mormon comes back to thank him. Rather than overly dramatizing this episode from Luke, it probably under-dramatizes it significantly. But it is only the “stranger,” the non-Jew, the unorthodox one who thanks the Lord. Jesus himself loudly points this out. His point would not be lost on those who heard him.
As Brother David Steindl-Rast observed, “The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted.” While you can’t be grateful for everything, you can be grateful in every moment. Yes, every moment, even painful and distressing moments, maybe even particularly in painful and distressing moments. At times, being thankful takes some work and no little grace. But, as Christians, it is always and everywhere our duty and our salvation so to do, as Jesus himself and so many holy women and men have shown and continue to show us.
You can’t wait until you’re happy to be thankful. Thankfulness is not produced by happiness. Rather, happiness is the result of being thankful. It isn’t incidental or accidental that the Eucharist, or, using it as the verb it is, simply eucharist (i.e., giving thanks) is the central act of Christian worship. This is why it isn’t just nice but necessary for all of us to take an active part in the liturgy. We give thanks in worship by singing the songs, taking the postures (standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing), making the gestures, and saying/singing the responses, etc.
Perhaps the biggest mistake we can make when engaging Scripture, especially when reading the Gospels, which constitute the heart of God’s word, is to understand them as stories told or events that happened a long time ago in a land far away, in a culture not our own. The question today’s Gospel poses is not whether you’re a leper. Rather, the question is whether you’re a grateful or an ungrateful one. The fact that you’re here on Thanksgiving Day indicates the former.
As Brother David also observed: “Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness.” Jesus came that we might not only have life but that we have it in abundance (John 10:10). In this Eucharist and every Eucharist, he gives us life in abundance by giving us himself.
Like the grateful leper, we come to give God thanks and we are sent forth to continue giving him thanks. By fulfilling our duty to give God thanks always and everywhere, we realize that our salvation lies in our lives becoming continual thanksgiving, eucharist. Besides, I can only imagine how eager the healed Samaritan was to tell others what Jesus had done for him.
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