True Gratitude

Delivered at Evangelical Lutheran Church, Mt. Horeb, WI. Thanksgiving Day.
Texts: Deut 8.7-18; 2 Cor 9.6-15; Lk 17.11-19

As I listen to our text from Deuteronomy today, I cannot help but think of a painting that hangs in my parents’ house. It is a portrait that my father painted of my great-grandmother Magdalena Egstad. Scenes from her life surround her portrait in little vignettes: Born in 1890 in Vardal, Norway, she left on a steamship bound for America in 1911. That same year, she married my great-grandfather, Hans, in Buxton, ND, and in 1916 they homesteaded north of Nashua, MT, where both my grandmother and my father grew up.

As I think of this painting, I am reminded that everything I have and everything I am is thanks to people like Magdalena who came before me and paved the way for me to be what I am and do what I do. All that I am is a gift of those before me; no matter how hard I have worked or how much I have earned, I owe it all to my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. In the end I, and they, owe everything to God. It is God who brought Magdalena safely across the ocean, who led her to Hans who brought them to the farm. It is by God’s grace that my grandmother survived childhood, even though two older siblings died before the age of 2 before my she was born. It is God who gave me the family that brought me here today.

This is what God is reminding the Israelites. They had been slaves in Egypt, a people without hope for a future of anything but hard labor and oppression. Then, God called them out of Egypt, sustained them through forty years in the desert with miraculous manna for food and water from bare rock, sustained them with the leadership of Moses, and brought them through trial and hardship and failure to a land rich in food and drink, a land full of grain and vines, pomegranates and figs, a land welling up with springs and hills full of iron and copper.
Over the generations, as their silver and their gold multiplied, God’s people placed more and more value on their own power and their own ability. They deserved the money they earned, they earned the fruit of their labor. I made this wealth through my own hard work and merit, I worked hard for it, and it is mine! I have a right to spend it or save it however I choose. Sound familiar?

When we feel that we are entitled to what we have, it becomes harder and harder for us to appreciate it. A paycheck is always too small, a house is never big enough. We think about all the things we want or need and how we can’t afford them, and we grasp tightly onto those things we do earn. This is what we learn from the story of the lepers. While Jesus and his disciples are heading to Jerusalem, he heals ten lepers. Of the ten, nine follow his command to go show themselves to the priests. It is not that they weren’t thankful, but before they could rejoin society, before they could return to their families and their lives, they had to do this thing. They were thankful, certainly, but they were Jews who had asked a Jewish rabbi to heal them. He did, now they went and did as he commanded. It was only fair.

The tenth, on the other hand, was a Samaritan. He knew that he had no right to ask anything of Jesus, because Jews hated Samaritans. That Jesus paid him any mind at all was a gift he did not expect. It was precisely because he saw how unworthy he was of Jesus’ gift that his thankfulness compelled him to return to praise God. His Jewish companions did not return because they expected Jesus to act, and were not surprised when he did. This man expected nothing, and so he was able to see that he had been given everything.

We forget sometimes how unworthy we are. In our minds, we know that we are sinners, but we also know that we are faithful churchgoers, upstanding citizens, ready volunteers and trustworthy friends. The blessings of this life have made us quietly entitled, and that entitlement too often creates distance between us and those we perceive as not working as hard or being as decent as we are. Though we try not to, we look down our noses at immigrants, at welfare moms, at those “rough” people. I think that we are secretly afraid that they want to take what we have without earning it. We forget that all we have is a gift of God’s boundless generosity.

St. Paul compares generosity to a farmer sowing seed. “…the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully…He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.” His point is that God has given us these gifts freely, and will continue to do so. God is faithful—we need never fear that the flow of God’s generosity will dry up!

When we stop to remember how little we truly deserve and how richly we have been blessed, we cannot help but be thankful. Not just thankful enough to sing songs and hymns of praise, not just thankful enough to give up an hour every Sunday to come to worship, not even just thankful enough to put our check in the offering plate. No, God’s incomprehensible generosity is bigger than that. We have nothing of our own: all that we have and all that we are is a gift from God—the sheer magnitude of this blessing inspires in us true thankfulness, the kind of thankfulness that drives us to action, just like the Samaritan on the road to Jerusalem. Though all ten lepers were grateful, the one man returned to thank Jesus, and according to Jesus, only that one man was ‘made well.’ True thankfulness is not just gratitude; true thankfulness is grateful action.

Now, you must understand, it is not that we ‘owe’ God a ‘debt’ of thanks. Jesus did not heal the lepers on the road so that they would get him a nice bouquet of flowers and a card. Our grateful action is actually a part of God’s generous action. Consider Paul’s analogy of the harvest: when the farmer brings in the harvest, it is not only the farmer who benefits: the grain is made into bread which feeds the whole community. In the same manner, God sows blessings of wealth, prosperity, good health, love and mercy among us in order that the whole human community may benefit.

Our true thankfulness to God is as much a part of God’s gift to us as the harvest is a part of the sowing; the grain goes in, and the stalks come out. So it is with us: God sows among us generously and we respond generously to God and to God’s world.

This week, by proclamation of the sixteenth President of the United States and out of civic custom, we gather together to celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. Yet, even as we gather to share a meal with family and settle in for an afternoon of football, we cannot help but be painfully aware of how many millions of God’s beloved people around the world and in our own backyard go without adequate food, clean water, or ample health care, how many people are not afforded the dignity and freedom that we in this country call “rights.”

As we look at these millions upon millions every day wasting away in poverty and hardship, we sometimes ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t God do something? If God is loving, how can God allow this to happen?” Friends, God is doing something: right here, right now, among us. St. Paul writes, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.” God has blessed us richly an intends for us be a rich blessing to others. God has heaped good gifts upon us so that we might trust God’s boundless generosity and never fear for our own security as we share those gifts with the world. All that we have, all that we are is a free gift of God bestowed with love upon us, upon our parents, upon their parents and their parents’ parents. God has sowed abundantly the seeds for love, peace, and plenty within this community, and the harvest is ripe for the picking. Let us give thanks to our God.