Grace Church November Newsletter Article: More on Gratitude

Shall we do without hope? Some days

there will be none. But no

to the dry and dead woods floor

they come again, the first

flowers of the year, the assembly

of the faithful, the beautiful

wholly given to being.

And in this long season

of machines and mechanical will

there have been small human acts

of compassion, acts of care, work

flowerlike in selfless loveliness.

Leaving hope to the dark

and to a better day,

receive these beauties freely

given, and give thanks.

-Wendell Berry, in a poem excerpt from the Leavings collection

A couple of Sundays ago I was given the opportunity to preach on one of the Gospel’s richest texts. It is the story of the ten lepers who are healed: in the story, the ten are sent to the temple by Jesus and are cleansed on the way; but only one of the lepers, a Samaritan (and therefore an outcast in the Jewish society of Jesus’ day) returns to Jesus to thank him for making him whole. The 9 others are also cured, but Jesus makes the point that it is the Samaritan leper who is made truly whole by praising God and giving thanks. The congregation was invited to come forward and leave words of gratitude for the happenings in our lives.

I think it is easy to rattle off the words “thank you” in our everyday moments: we say thank you to the cashier at the convenience or grocery store, we might mutter “thanks” to the bus driver as we depart the bus and enter the day ahead, and we might even say thank you to our family members when they prepare a meal for us or listen to the stories of our day.

But I think this passage is meatier than that. It calls us to be deeply grounded in gratitude for the reality that we are children of God and that God makes us whole, regardless of whom society says we are or how we think we should be. When we take the time to remember to turn back and give thanks, even to the point of falling to our knees as the Samaritan did, we acknowledge this reality, and are transformed. We are all lepers-- some of us outcasts like the Samaritan-- and when we are summoned to the temple to be made clean together, our distinctions are dissolved, just as they are in this beautiful story in Luke.

I think Wendell Berry gets it right in the poem I shared above. There will be days that seem without hope, when the drudgery of all the sickness and weight of this world will be heavy. Even in these seasons of mechanical and machines, as Berry puts it, there will have been small acts of care and love that will show themselves.

So let us PRAISE GOD… for the small acts of care and compassion that emerge like flowers in the midst of the muck and monotony that life can sometimes be. Let us praise God for laughter, for muddy sneakers after soccer games, for warm soup on cold and dark nights, for communities like Grace Church that hold us and challenge us, for the people we will never see or meet who work so that we might have food and clothing and shelter, for anger at injustice and oppression. Let gratitude for the creatures of God that we are transform us into vessels of peace, hope, creativity, righteous indignation, and love.