This Thursday is Thanksgiving. So, if you’ve been coming to church for a while, you know what the traditional thanksgiving message is. Thanksgiving Sunday is the Sunday when the pastor complains about how we’ve lost the real meaning of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Sunday is when the pastor tells you how on Thanksgiving Day we should be spending the day in prayer, thanking God for all the gifts God has given us, rather than spending the day watching football and eating lots of turkey.
Well, my problem with saying that is that I fully intend to spend a great deal of Thanksgiving Day watching football and eating lots of turkey. Since you all know what a sports fan I am, there’s really no point in my pretending otherwise. So, I really cannot give that traditional thanksgiving message. I had to come up with something else.
Have you ever thought about why we’re supposed to give thanks to God? I mean, we know we’re supposed to. Every month, when we have communion, part of our responsive communion liturgy is where the pastor says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” You respond, “It is right to give our thanks and praise.” Then the pastor says, “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.”
So, we know we’re supposed to do it, but why? Why do we need to say thank you to God? Is God so sensitive that God needs to hear us say thank you? I doubt it. I mean, I’m sure God appreciates it when we say thank you. I don’t imagine God likes being taken for granted any more than anyone else does. I think the things we do or don’t do can hurt God, so I think God can be hurt when we don’t acknowledge all the things God does for us. Still, God’ll get over it. After all, this is God we’re talking about. It’s not like God’s going to crawl into the corner and cry because we’ve hurt God’s feelings.
To understand why we’re supposed to give thanks to God, let’s look at our reading from Luke for today. Jesus is walking down the road. He enters a village, and there are ten people there suffering from leprosy. Now, understand that leprosy is a very serious illness. It’s an infectious disease that causes severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms and legs. It was not necessarily fatal, but it put you in a position where you could not do any physical work. Since there were no welfare or disability payments at that time, if you could not work you either begged or died. So, even though the disease itself was not fatal, it pretty much amounted to the same thing. It was not a highly contagious disease, but people were scared to death of getting it, and so they would have nothing to do with people who had leprosy.
We’re told that these ten people with leprosy approached Jesus, but they kept their distance. They did not know how Jesus would react to them. Since Jesus was usually not traveling alone, they probably did not know how those with Jesus would react to them, either. Still, they call out to Jesus, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Jesus responds, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
We’re not told what the ten people expected Jesus to do, but I’d guess that this was not it. Maybe they expected Jesus to lay hands on them. Maybe they expected Jesus to pray to God. Maybe they expected Jesus to say some sort of magic incantation, some words in a language that no one could understand. Jesus did not do any of that. In fact, as far as they could tell, Jesus did not do anything. He just said, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”
They must have really been disappointed. After all, Jesus was probably their last hope. No doctor had been able to cure them. No priest had been able to help them. They may even have been thinking, “Show ourselves to the priests? The priests are the ones who declared us unclean in the first place. They won’t even let us into the temple, because they’re afraid we’ll ruin it for everyone. Show ourselves to the priests? The priests probably won’t even talk to us.”
Still, they went off to go to the priests. On the way, they were healed. One of them went back to Jesus. We’re told nothing about the one who came back, other than that he was a foreigner. He praised God with a loud voice and threw himself at Jesus’ feet, thanking Jesus for healing him. Jesus tells him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
We don’t know what happened to the other nine. We’re told all ten were healed. We assume the other nine probably went to the priests, and were pronounced clean. We assume then that they went on to live their lives the way they wanted to.
So now, if you’re still awake, you’re thinking, “Wait a minute. You said this story was going to help us understand why we need to give thanks to God. How’s it do that? After all, the nine who did not thank God were healed just the same as the one who did. Seems like they all got the same thing, the thing they wanted. It seems like this story says God will do things for us whether we thank God or not.”
Well, yes and no. It’s true that all ten of them were healed from their leprosy. In that sense, the same thing happened to each of them.
Here’s where the difference comes, though. In reference to what happened to the ten, the scripture first says, they were “cleansed”. Then, it says they were “healed”. Then, Jesus says that ten were “cleansed”. At the end of the verses, though, Jesus says to the one who came back, “Your faith has ‘made you well.’”
Your faith has ‘made you well.’ See, it’s one thing to have a physical healing. That’s important, of course. Anyone who’s suffering from a serious illness, or who ever has, or who has a loved one who is or has, knows how important physical healing is. Every Sunday there are people for whom we ask God to bring about physical healing, and it’s important that we ask God to do that.
Still, it’s one thing to be healed physically. It’s another thing to truly be made well. To be well means to be healed in body and in mind. It means that things are pleasing, that they’re good. It means that everything is in a proper and satisfactory situation. In short, to be made well means that things are as they should be in every way.
That’s what Jesus was saying to the one who came back to say thank you. When that one person came back to say thank you to Jesus, he showed that he had faith in Jesus as his Savior. Jesus told him that because of his faith, he was not only physically healed, he was well. He was well in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Everything about him was right. He was who he was supposed to be, he was where he was supposed to be, and he was doing what he was supposed to do.
Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt, even if just for a minute or two, that everything was right, that you were who God wanted you to be, that you were exactly where God wanted you to be, and that you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do? It’s a pretty incredible feeling. In fact, it’s pretty much the greatest feeling in the world. To know, in that moment, that you are who God wants you to be, that you are exactly where God wants you to be, and to know you are doing exactly what God wants you to do. There’s really nothing like it.
That’s what it means to be well. That’s what the one person who’d had leprosy felt when he came back and thanked Jesus. That’s how we can feel, too, when we truly give thanks to God.
See, we don’t thank God because God needs to hear our thanks. We thank God because we need to give God our thanks. We need to acknowledge that all the good things we have come from God. We need to recognize that everything we have, everything we are, comes from God. Without God, we would not have anything. We would not even have life. Everything comes from God.
Thanking God is the first step in acknowledging that everything we have comes from God. Acknowledging that everything we have comes from God is the first step in trusting God. Trusting God is the first step toward having faith in God. Having faith in God is what gives us that incredible feeling of knowing that we are who we’re supposed to be, we are where we’re supposed to be, and we are doing what we’re supposed to do. In other words, having faith in God is what makes us well in every way.
So, on Thanksgiving Day, go ahead and eat a lot of turkey. Go ahead and watch some football. It’s okay. When you do, though, remember that we don’t put our faith in a turkey. We cannot be saved by watching football. Give thanks to God, not just on Thanksgiving Day, but every day. Acknowledge that everything we have comes from God. Trust God. Have faith. Then, we will all truly be made well.
So, on Thanksgiving Day, go ahead and eat a lot of turkey. Go ahead and watch some football. It’s okay. When you do, though, remember that we don’t put our faith in a turkey. We cannot be saved by watching football. Give thanks to God, not just on Thanksgiving Day, but every day. Acknowledge that everything we have comes from God. Trust God. Have faith. Then, we will all truly be made well.
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