Psalm 136, Luke 17:11-19 "Coming Back" Scott Hoezee

No matter what the calendar may say, here at Calvin Church last Sunday felt a lot like Thanksgiving Day! At the morning dedication service, but then especially at our evening program, words of thanks were getting lobbed in all directions about every five minutes. And there were so many people to thank. There are a few of you out there who spent 40 hours a week working here in the last couple of months. Every time I came here, I'd see certain volunteers until it got to the point that I got teary-eyed just seeing the loving labor you were donating to Calvin Church. A couple of times I just hugged some of you because no words of thanks were adequate for what I felt.

So when we tried to cover the bases last Sunday night in thanking people, I lived in terror of leaving someone out. And maybe I did anyway, for which I am very sorry if so. Whether or not it happened last weekend, the sad fact of the matter is that sooner or later we all have the experience of working hard on something but then never hearing a peep of acknowledgment or thanks. No card comes in the mail, no phone call comes in, nobody pumps your hand as he says "Thanks for everything."

When this happens, you know that it leaves behind a residue of incompleteness. Some circle has not been closed. You have no way of knowing whether your efforts were helpful or unhelpful, meaningfully on-target or confusingly wide of the mark. Such a lack of thanks-giving leaves you with an empty feeling--empty in the sense of the Latin word for "empty," which is vanus from which we also derive the words "vain" and "vanity." When you do not receive acknowledgment for what you do, it is easy to wonder if maybe your efforts were in vain, futile. It is a very disappointing sensation to experience.

But if such instances are rare in your life--if much of what you do receives an appropriately grateful acknowledgment from others--then you can absorb occasional ingratitude with ease. It's just a little mosquito bite on the surface of your soul: annoying but not finally very damaging. But if you rarely receive any thanks, the damage can be enormous. Because then that sense of vain emptiness pummels your soul daily, resulting in not a mere mosquito bite but an ugly black and blue welt of hurt and futility.

One of my favorite novelists is Anne Tyler. In her book Ladder of Years, Tyler introduces us to Delia Grinstead. Delia is a lovely, loveable, and utterly giving wife and mother who regularly does her level best to keep her household running smoothly. But as her children grow up, they become "great, galumphing, unmannerly, and supercilious creatures" who ignore Delia and who flinch from her hugs. What's more, they expect that their favorite foods will always be in the pantry or the fridge, but they never thank Delia for purchasing these sundries (though they will complain loudly should she forget one day). Meanwhile Delia's husband is so wrapped up in his medical practice that he, too, brushes past Delia day in and day out, regularly failing to notice the spic-n-span house, the clean laundry, the warm food set before his distracted face each evening.

After years of this neglect, Delia begins to feel like "a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges." Their ongoing lack of gratitude has killed something in Delia--not all at once, mind you, but day by day Delia dies a little, wilting like a flower that receives too little moisture. She doesn't even realize how dead she has become until one day she meets someone who is kind, who thanks Delia for a little something. This stranger's kind gratitude is like a few precious drops of water applied to her soul--a few little thankful droplets that reveal just how dry, cracked, and barren the landscape of her soul had become.

Finally the day comes when Delia just walks away from her family. She's taking a stroll on a beach and just keeps on going. Once her family realizes she is missing, they have a curiously difficult time describing Delia to the police. They just can't seem to recall the color of her eyes, her height or weight, what she was wearing when they last saw her. Of course, they'd never really seen her to begin with. They had been blinded by ingratitude.

Unexpressed thanks is an insidious way to hurt someone. A sin of omission if ever there were one, a lack of thanks-giving is a passive form of verbal abuse. We all know how we can wound people through what we actively spew out of our mouths. But silence can have a heft all its own--failing to thank people is an emptiness with substance, a gratitude vacuum that suffocates. As Lewis Smedes reminds us, life is out of joint when we fail to give thanks. The insensate way by which some people receive and receive and receive yet without ever saying "Thank you" is a baffling phenomenon--baffling, it seems, even to God.

Consider Luke 17 and the healing of the ten lepers. This is one of Jesus' long-distance miracles--he doesn't heal anyone on the spot but instead tells these still-diseased men to go show themselves to the priest. We all know that lepers back then were social outcasts. Jewish law demanded they stay outside of the community until they were cured, in which case the first step back to acceptance was to be examined head-to-toe by a priest. So by telling these lepers to go the priest, Jesus was holding out the promise of healing.

Picking up on that promise, the lepers high-tail it to the Temple, only to discover about half-way there that indeed, they were healed. One of the ten, upon seeing this, wheels around and flies back to Jesus. He falls at Jesus' feet in gratitude and thanksgiving. Jesus in turn responds with a triple question: "Didn't I heal ten lepers? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to praise God except this foreigner?" That last question is the narrative time-bomb of this story: the only thankful leper was a Samaritan. The nine Jewish lepers didn't say a word to Jesus. Only the loathsome Samaritan comes back to render proper thanks. Jesus responds by saying, "Rise and go; your faith has saved you."

Has saved you. That's what it literally says in the Greek, although the NIV has translated it as "healed you." All ten lepers were healed, but there is a hint in Jesus' final words that maybe just the one who came back to say "Thank you" was also saved in some deeper sense. Perhaps we could guess that only those who properly respond to the goodness of God show that they "get it," they understand how the universe works and so in that way show that salvation is operative in their lives.

If there is anything to that line of thought, then it is a dramatic example of what a huge difference saying "Thank you" may make. The simple, child-like gesture of politeness makes all the difference in the world. It should be noted, however, that the Samaritan broke the law by doing this. The law stipulated that even cured lepers were not allowed to be around anyone without the prior say-so of a priest. The other nine lepers, therefore, were maybe not outwardly very thankful, but at least they were doing what was expected of them.

But maybe there's a lesson in that, too. Expressing thanks requires going beyond what is expected of us. Genuine gratitude and thanks-giving should simply bust out all over! The Samaritan leper understood that offering up proper gratitude to Jesus was more important than the finer points of this or that regulation in the rule book. He went beyond what was expected of him to cut loose with a most fitting offering of thanksgiving.

A central tenet of our Christian faith is that we live in a world that is saturated with the goodness of God. "Give thanks to God, for he is good," Psalm 136 says over and over again. Every day we all benefit in some way from God's lavish generosity in creation and providence. What's more, as Christians we believe in something even grander: we believe we are held by a grace of God that has saved us, that has implanted in us already now a spark of eternal life. The more you notice these gifts in which our lives are marinating daily, the more you should see the whole of your existence as an extended act of thanks-giving.

We live for God's glory by going with the flow God established in creation, by living happily within the moral boundary fences God has set up, and by coloring inside the lines God sketched when he drew up the universe's blueprint. But on this Thanksgiving Day 2001, I want to suggest that our grand sense of thanks toward God should issue in lives that are keenly grateful across the board. The big river of Thanksgiving that flows from us to God should also bubble up in many smaller tributaries of gratitude that flow toward also other people around us--people whom we can nourish with the refreshing waters of thanks.

But to do that regularly and well will require that we go beyond what is expected of us, go beyond social convention. We should be on the lookout for the chance to say thank-you to all kinds of folks. Because each time we do so, we accomplish two things: one, we affirm again that all of life is a gift and we know it; two, we affirm the people around us who by their efforts enhance the gift of life in one way or another. Instead of brushing past people as though they were no more than cogs in a machine, we humanize them by lifting them up as worthy of a smile and a "Thank you!"

We ought to notice when spouses, children, parents, waiters, clerks, tellers, busboys, bus drivers, grocery baggers, or mechanics do a good job--we should notice this and then also say an overt word of "Thanks." So what if they are "just doing their jobs," if they've done their tasks well, then say so! In the wider Christian context, this is far more than just being polite the way you were raised to be by your parents. In the long run, this is a profoundly Christian thing to do; it's a God-like practice of celebrating life even as we make other people feel wanted, appreciated, and even special.

For as I suggested earlier, routine ingratitude little by little kills the people around us. But anything that kills others is not exactly healthy for the person who fails to say "Thanks" either. Failing to express gratitude sooner or later coarsens us even as it fosters an undue sense of entitlement. After a time, we don't deign to say "Thank you" to various workers in our lives because we feel we deserve the service they've rendered. We've earned it. We've paid our dues, laid down our cash, slaved away at our own job to make this dinner out, this vacation, this shopping spree possible. To say "Thank you" to certain people would be to admit that maybe what we're getting in life is less an accomplishment and more part and parcel of the larger gift of God. But for some people that is simply too demeaning.

This is particularly obvious among the ultra-rich. Their lives get moved along by whole cadres of servants who fill wine glasses, clear plates, sweep floors, polish cars. The rich man assumes his wine glass will be full each time he reaches for it and when it is, the butler who has filled it will most certainly not receive a whisper of gratitude.

A while back I mentioned the very fine film The Remains of the Day in which actor Anthony Hopkins plays a butler to a super-rich family. While researching this role, Mr. Hopkins interviewed a real-life butler. This butler told Hopkins that his goal in life is complete and total obsequiousness--a skilled ability to blend into the woodwork of any room like a mere fixture, on a par with table lamps and andirons. In fact, Anthony Hopkins said one sentence he will never forget is when this man said that you can sum up an excellent butler this way: "The room seems emptier when he's in it."

The room seems emptier when he's in it. The goal is to do your work, fill your wine glasses, clear the plates and silverware without being noticed, much less thanked. But that's just the problem with routine ingratitude: it makes people disappear. You are the center of your own universe and others don't warrant entree into that inner sanctum of yourself. That's what happened to dear Delia Grinstead in the Tyler novel: she disappeared to her family. They couldn't even describe her once she fled. Rooms had become emptier when she was in them.

But a simple word of thanks makes people visible again, it humanizes them. Those of you who have seen the film Schindler's List will remember the evil camp commandant, Amon Goeth, who dealt with boredom by taking his rifle and randomly shooting passing Jews from his balcony. They weren't human to him, they were just animals. All except for Helen Hirsch, who becomes his maid and for whom he develops affection. The startling moment when Oskar Schindler realizes this is when Helen quietly steals into the room and clears a plate of cookies. But before she is able silently to exit the room, Goeth says, "Helen, thank you." He noticed her. He humanized her. And it showed because he thanked her.

"What is the chief goal of human life?" the Westminster Catechism famously asks in its opening question and answer. "To glorify God and enjoy Him forever," is the answer. A chief way we do that is by thanking God moment by moment for the gifts that God has lavished upon us. That great big gratitude sounds a keynote and sets the tone for all of life, which means that Christians should just generally be the most polite, thankful people around. We are on the lookout for chances to say little words of thanks to all kinds of people as the natural, effervescent overflow of the thanks that constantly bubbles up in our hearts.

For better or worse, Thanksgiving Day in this country is a national holiday. Everybody knows they are supposed to be thankful today, but some folks have a hard time with that. If you don't much believe in God, then to whom are you ultimately thankful? As Neal Plantinga once noted, today lots of people feel thankful in general. But that's a bit queer: it's like being married in general. Marriage needs the target of a specific spouse even as thankfulness needs the target of a specific gift-giver.

Christians know what that target is: it is our great God in Christ. A famous preacher once said that in a way, the church is like that one grateful Samaritan leper. All the peoples of the earth benefit from God's goodness and grace. But far too many people are like those nine lepers: they don't come back to God to say thanks. Those of us in the church, however, come back, and we do so regularly because we "get it," we understand the source of all blessings. A good way to flex and tone our thanks-giving muscles is daily to take note of, and then lift up with a word of thanks, God's many servants who somehow or another contribute to our lives. Employers, co-workers, children, parents, spouses, waiters and waitresses, and yes even the average airport ticket agent deserve to be buoyed up by heartfelt words of gratitude from us.

If you take a seminary class on the Doctrine of God, one of the first things you may be taught is that God is self-sufficient. God is complete in Godself, lacking nothing and needing nothing from any outside source. Yet throughout the Bible there are hints that somehow God is incomplete without the thanks and praise of his people. "Didn't I heal ten? Where are the other nine?" Jesus sadly asked. In that question, you can detect the ring of divine disappointment. How often doesn't God feel that way? A lack of gratitude in and for life makes other people disappear, but in the long run it erases God from the picture, too. People soak up the goodness of life with nary a heavenward glance.

But that can never be how we live. It is good to give thanks today. But aside from the turkey, yams, and cranberry relish, there should be absolutely nothing unique about this day for us Christians. "Give thanks to God, for good is he, his love endures forever." Our holy vocation is to notice the overflow of that goodness and love in all the nooks and crannies of life: to notice it with thanksgiving. Amen.