November 27, 2008 | Thanksgiving Day

The One Who Gives Thanks

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 17:11–19

O give thanks to the Lord, for God is good;
God’s steadfast love endures forever!
Let Israel say,
“His steadfast love endures forever.”
Let the house of Aaron say,
“His steadfast love endures forever.”
Let those who fear the Lord say,
“His steadfast love endures forever.”

Psalm 118:1–4

It occurred to me today that it’s a good thing that Thanksgiving worship comes before Thanksgiving dinner. What a nightmare it would be to preach to a congregation of people fighting off a tryptophan-induced hibernation. But as it stands, you’re all eagerly awaiting your Thanksgiving feast—whether it’s here or elsewhere—and so maybe, just maybe, I’ll actually have your attention. But then again, today’s first football game starts in fifteen minutes, so there may be some of you out there zoning me out to check scores on your phones.

And in all honesty, I can appreciate that. There are few other holidays that bring together pretty much all of my favorite things: family and friends, food, and football (in no particular order). And as John Buchanan noted in today’s Fourth Church daily devotion, our culture hasn’t yet co-opted Thanksgiving into a gift-giving marketing ploy, though one step out onto Michigan Avenue or a look at today’s Thanksgiving Day parades reminds us that the season of profit and consumption is upon us. But for today, at least, we can simply give thanks and limit our consumption to good food, good company, and overpaid athletes knocking each other silly. God bless the Pilgrims.

Yet our scripture reading this morning reminds us that God also blesses the Native Americans. In fact, it may be that the Native American—the “other” of the Thanksgiving story—is the one who is truly blessed.

This short little story that is nestled in a rather hodgepodge section of the Gospel of Luke is actually quite remarkable. It begins typically enough, with Jesus traveling through Galilee and Samaria, as was his custom. He is approached by ten lepers, and this, too, is quite typical. When they asked to be healed, Jesus does what he normally does and he heals them. Then one of the ten—and only one, it is important to note—returns to praise God and thank Jesus for healing him.

And this is where the story really gets interesting, because after we are told what this lone person does in gratitude for his healing, we are told that, by the way, he is a Samaritan. Now that may not seem like much to you. So what if this guy is a Samaritan? After all, Jesus is on the border between Galilee and Samaria, so it stands to reason that he’ll run across at least a few Samaritans. And what’s the big deal about Samaritans anyway? The Samaritan we are most familiar with seems like a pretty good guy. In fact, we call him the good Samaritan.

But the story of the Good Samaritan, like our story today, gets its fullest meaning from the fact that for the Jews of Jesus’ day, Samaritans were not considered good people. They were enemies. They were outsiders. Even worse than outsiders, they were offshoots of their own people, people who had departed from the Jewish faith centuries before and practiced a religion that seemed to the Jews to be a cheap corruption of their own beliefs and practices. They were people who had taken the truth of God and twisted it to fit their own ideas and ways of being. These people were “others” in the worst sense.

To think about how this would translate to our own time, you must think about who your “others” are. Maybe it’s Christians who don’t believe the same as you. Maybe it’s Muslims or people of other faiths. Maybe it’s Iranians or North Koreans. Maybe it’s rich people. Maybe it’s homeless people. Maybe it’s gay people. Maybe it’s straight people. Maybe it’s black people. Maybe it’s white people. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s you.

Whoever it is, this is the person who returns to Jesus to thank him and praise God for his healing. Whoever it is, this is the person who shames the rest—presumably good Jewish people—by doing what they all should have done. Whoever it is, this is the person who shames us by doing what we should do too.

You can’t avoid seeing the irony of our current situation. After centuries of demonizing people of African descent, our country has turned to an African American to solve its most pressing challenges. Four hundred years after this country was created and built on the backs of people that looked like him, Barack Obama will become the first African American President of the United States in the midst of national and global challenges that equal or surpass those faced by the forty-three white presidents who preceded him.

Regardless of your politics, Obama’s election is something to be thankful for on this day, because it marks a transition in our culture—a transition in an unfinished evolution, to be sure, but a historical transition nonetheless. Yet the evolution of our culture is unfinished, because for many, our next president is still a Samaritan, still an “other” whom they’re not quite sure they can trust.

And the question that everyone is asking themselves, whether they verbalize it or not, is this: Is Barack Obama the one? Is he the one Samaritan who will return to give thanks? Is he the one Samaritan who will shame us by doing what we should have been doing all along? Is he the one Samaritan who will break down the barriers that separate “us” from “them” and show that we are all equals before God?

Yet our story of Jesus and the ten lepers goes even further than this, because the Samaritan isn’t actually equal. The Samaritan is better than the rest. The Samaritan is more advanced, more evolved. The Samaritan is closer to God.

So the question for us this morning is this: where do we fit into this story?

I suspect that there are many of us who belong with those silent nine. Perhaps you’re a corporate executive who received a bailout but won’t give up your multimillion dollar bonus. Perhaps you enjoy our freedom without considering its cost. Perhaps you eat convenient food without thinking about the people who labored for little pay to produce it. Perhaps you wear clothes and ignore the working conditions of those who made them. Perhaps you fill up your tank and though you curse the price of gas, you don’t fully recognize the cost of the oil that produced it. Perhaps you live in a house and forget about all of those who don’t. Perhaps you take your spouse or partner or parents or children for granted. Perhaps you consume goods and create waste and assume that our planet will never suffer harm from the people who inhabit it. Perhaps you simply take a breath of air and don’t marvel at the miracle of life.

But perhaps, perhaps you are the one who thanks.

And here is the other remarkable thing about this story. When all is said and done, Jesus says to the Samaritan healed of leprosy, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” Do you notice something peculiar about this?

When Jesus says this to the Samaritan, he’s already been healed. If it is his faith that has made him well, a faith that compelled him to give God praise and thanks after his healing, what is it that made the other nine well? Because when they don’t offer thanks, the implication is that they don’t have the same depth of faith that the Samaritan has.

Perhaps, then, when Jesus tells the Samaritan that his faith has made him well, the wellness Jesus is talking about is not his physical healing but something deeper. Perhaps Jesus is saying that like the ten lepers who are healed, our lives are full of blessings that we are not responsible for. Even when we don’t realize it, our lives are infused with the grace of God. And instead of taking these things for granted, instead of feeling entitled or deserving, we should be humble and mindful and thankful.

This is the wellness—the wholeness and completeness—that the Samaritan achieved and that we should strive for. It comes through offering praise and thanks to God for the goodness we enjoy. It comes from the boldness to recognize God’s presence even when we feel the world collapsing around us. It comes from the faith to feel God’s love even when we are rejected by God’s children. This is the faith that makes us well. This is the faith that makes us whole.

Friends, as you know so well, we have so much to be thankful for on this day. Let us be like that Samaritan and give thanks to our gracious and loving God.

Amen.