St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, October 12, 2008

Yes, Thank You – Rev. David Mundy

Deuteronomy 8:7-18 2 Corinthians 9:6-15 Luke 17:11-19

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sometime over the course of this weekend most of us will partake of at least one meal that we will enjoy and regret. It is a wonderful Thanksgiving tradition to gather with family and friends and eat until we can’t eat any more. Then we will say that it was a great meal and that we really shouldn’t have eaten so much!

Eating is both a necessary part of our daily existence and a wonderful opportunity for celebration of special events. Nearly every culture and religion has its feast days and special foods to mark the occasion. You may have seen last week that Muslims in Toronto ended the fasting of Ramadan with a 10,000-strong gathering in the Rogers Centre. Foods from countries all around the world were shared as part of the feast of Eid.

Religious feasts are opportunities to say “thank you” for God’s provision of our daily needs and to express our gratitude for abundance.

It could be argued that in our culture feast days such as Thanksgiving aren’t as important as they once were. It’s not as though we experience many lean times when we are concerned that there won’t be enough food on the table to satisfy our hunger. In fact we Canadians spend billions of dollars every year to enjoy a cornucopia of foods from around the world, then we turn around and spend billions of dollars trying to deal with the “battle of the bulge” because we take in more of those pesky calories than we burn off.

Clergy often have a tough time keeping off the pounds or kilograms because people love to feed us. I have expanded and contracted a number of times through the years. At the risk of sounding like those people who claim they can quit smoking because they do it all the time, I have discovered a fairly good formula for weight loss which I have employed several times. It involves one exercise and three words, which is about as simple as gets. The exercise is pushing myself away from the table and the three words are “no thank you.”

There is a problem though. People who are showing hospitality through food don’t always want to hear the words “no thank you!” They would prefer “yes please” or “yes thank you” despite my explanations. Why? Because the giving of a gift, including food, and the response of gratitude are among the most important relationships we can experience as human beings.

We are here on Thanksgiving, or Giving Thanks Sunday and once again scripture reminds us of the importance of expressing gratitude and living our gratitude in the feasts times and the ordinary times of life.

As the people of Israel come to the end of forty years of trekking through the harsh wilderness, living “from hand to mouth” through all that time, God tells them not to develop amnesia when they come into a land of prosperity. The “Promised Land” is described as a place of abundant natural resources – it sounds a lot like our country Canada. The warning is simple. When you become settled and well-to-do, don’t forget, don’t forget, remember that it is God who provides for you.

You know the bible is such an irrelevant, dusty old book. Can you imagine a society of supposedly God-fearing people who get so rich and arrogant that they forget the basic precepts of their faith and take advantage of their prosperity? It couldn’t happen today, could it?

In the gospel lesson today Jesus heals a group of ten social outcasts, lepers who would have been shunned by family and community. You heard that he didn’t heal them right away. Instead they are healed “on the fly” as they make their way to the religious authorities who will declare

The Samaritan in the mix would have been the outcast of the outcasts, ostracized because his take on Judaism was considered inferior to the others. So he was the lowest of the low. But he is the one who doesn’t do what he is told. Instead this healed leper comes back to Jesus and throws himself at Jesus’ feet as he expressed his thanks.

Are there spiritual and Christian components to saying “Yes, thank you?” According to our readings there certainly are, but I think we would all agree that there are plenty of polite atheists out there who are just as ready to express their gratitude as people of faith. And there are folk who like to convey how holy they are but don’t come across as all that thankful.

Are you aware that not all languages even have a phrase that corresponds with the English “thank you” although that doesn’t mean those cultures don’t express thanks? Apparently English speakers say thank you on average about 100 times a day if they are “out and about” in the world. It is something we do even when we aren’t feeling particularly grateful. Since I heard this I realize that I say thank you as I get my credit card back after paying for gas even though the attendant took my money. I say thank you when the person on the phone puts me on hold, even though I hate being put on hold! It’s so Canadian! It’s rather odd really and yet we sense that our world is a better place when we say thank you.

Most of us start early with our children developing one of the most important social conventions we can impart. Recently one of our wonderful, precocious two-year-olds showed up at my study door while her mother was in the church office. We made a visit to the toy box I keep in my study, and in the end she borrowed a box of blocks to take home with her.

A week later she was back, with the blocks and she asked me, quite nicely, “what’s your name again?” “David,” I responded (how quickly they forget.) “Thank you for the blocks David” she said solemnly. “Goodbye David.” Two year’s old! It was adorable, but obviously it didn’t come naturally. Her parents have taught her to express her gratitude – her mom may have prompted her just before she walked in - and whether she knows what it means yet or not, it is a kind of dress rehearsal for life. She will learn that along with saying thank you, we can feel gratitude at a very deep level, and eventually find ways to reciprocate, to either “pay back” in some way, or “pay it forward” to use an expression from a movie of the same name.

As Christians we are encouraged to:

Say Thanks

Feel Thanks

Live Thanks

Margaret Visser, a Canadian scholar and broadcaster and writer, has just written a book called The Gift of Thanks which is four hundred pages on the history and sociology of expressing gratitude. She makes a spirited argument that giving thanks is one of those intangible essentials of life that we tend to take for granted.

She makes a point that had never occurred to me before but I find helpful. Expressing gratitude and exacting revenge have a lot in common, even though they are total opposites. When someone does a wrong to us or hurts us we are tempted to strike back, the “tit for tat” which breaks down relationships at every level, including between nations. The emotions attached to revenge are usually ugly and self-destructive. The affects of anger can actually kill us.

When we respond to kindness and generosity we are doing something similar in function, although not in outcome. Instead of destroying relationships we are building up relationships. Visser goes so far as to say that when we receive a gift from someone else, express thanks, and then reciprocate we are nurturing a love relationship.

I believe this is true and of course that love relationship for Christians is embodied in Jesus. We are here this morning as people of a loving and gift-giving God. The greatest gift God has given us is Jesus, the Christ, the Saviour, who heals our wounded hearts and creates hope within us and in our world. I think we would agree that there is far too much vengeance and not enough active thanksgiving in our world.

We appreciate that many of us may be experiencing the “no thank you” of life. We would like to say “no thank you” to diagnoses of illness that may change our lives or threaten our lives. “No thank” to family problems that are overwhelming. “No thanks” to financial uncertainty of which we are reminded every time we turn on the television or look in the newspaper. Unfortunately we don’t really don’t a chance to push ourselves away from the table and politely turn down the difficulties life serves up for us. It can feel as though we have barely enough energy for survival, let alone actively reaching out to others in a thankful way.

Yet we can’t live meaningful lives that don’t include gratitude, even in the most difficult of circumstances. The prayers you have written this morning will remind us that even though there are many situations for which we express concern we are also willing to say “thank you” for the abundant blessings of our lives.

We read only two of our passages for this day because of the constraints of time but really the reading from 2 Corinthians which we didn’t hear is equally meaningful. The apostle Paul drives home his conviction that living our thanks through generosity is central to our faith: