SO MANY MIRACLES

November 24, 1985, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
gJohn M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicage

"Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to
return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"
~ —- Luke 17:17, 18 (RSV)

Scripture

Deuteronomy 8:7-18
Luke 17:11-19

If you have ever given a gift and then felt incomplete when the recipient
neglected to thank you, you may have found yourself engaging in a dialogue
with yourself... ;

"T g@idn't do it to get a ‘thank you'. Why, then, do I seem to
want one, almost resent not getting one?

"am I so small that I can't just enjoy giving and knowing he
enjoys the gift...am 1 giving in order to get affection? Of
course not! Then why doesn't it feel right until the ‘thank
you' comes?"

The simple fact is that the act of giving is not complete until there is a
response. Or, better said, the act of receiving is not wholly complete with-
out a response.

Oh, the person took what we offered, ate the candy, smelled the flowers, read
the book -- probably enjoyed it. But that part of ourselves, our love, our
affection, which was why we gave the gift, doesn't feel as if it has been
received until it evokes a response... There is nothing in life that feels
emptier than expressing your love and having your expression ignored. .

The dynamics of gratitude are complex indeed!

Henri Nouwen, Dutch Jesuit, professor at Yale Divinity School, popular theologian,
“ts also a very interesting and perceptive human being. Several years ago he

took six months off from teaching to work among the poor in Latin America. The
journal he kept during that time is published under the title Gracias! The

entry for November 26, 1981 reads:

‘Thanksgiving Day! There is probably no day I liked so much in
the United States as this day... It was always a day of being

together with friends, and truly a day of saying thanks. In
many ways it struck me as a more spiritual or religious day

than Christmas: no gifts, few commercial preparations, just a
coming together to express gratitude for life and for all the
blessings we have received... I am more and more convinced that
gratitude is one of the most sublime of human emotions."

(Gracias!, p.55} _\

of course, an American Thanksgiving can be trivialized...sometimes superficial
exercise in self-congratulation for being more productive than anybody else.

And yet there is a simplicity about Thanksgiving that makes it more difficult

to corrupt than Christmas. There is also a theological problem which for
thoughtful people has a distressing way of becoming a personal and moral pro-
biem. Sensitive believers have always pondered the dilemma inherent in thanking
God for good health, good fortune, or enough food to survive the winter, which
is what it was about originally. If God is to be thanked for abundance, is

God thereby responsible for famine as well? Does it make sense to thank God

for the good things and not blame God for the bad things? Christian theology,
at its best, says “yes -- it does." God does not will, nor cause bad things to
happen. God does will good things’ and is working for good, sometimes against
enormous odds. It is the oldest theological quandry around and just when you
think you have it resolved, it comes back at you, in an unguarded moment, when
in the middle of the evening news, before dinner, cocktail in hand, you encounter
the incredible tragedy in Columbia.

Whatever else it is, Thanksgiving is not a time for smugness. If there is any
moral way to affirm our affluence, it is surely in the direction of translating
gratitude into generosity, and seeing -- as the best of our ancestors did, those
Pilgrims, for instance, with their peculiar ideas about compacts and covenants
and the interdependence of the community -- that God has given us gifts, not

for enjoyment alone, but for their reinvestment, their re-giving to the human
family.

It is not a time for smugness. [os there remains an elegant and elemental sim-
plicity about Thanksgiving that “addresses something in all of us. Giving thanks,
in our tradition, is the fundamental religious act. The religion of Israel is

in the midst of a profound shift when, in the Deuteronomic code, a portion of which
we heard this morning, we encounter an instruction to bless the Lord for the good
land after the people had eaten their fill. The faith of Israel is here showing
the first signs of becoming a religion of gratitude -- not solely duty, and
Israel is beginning to perceive God as a God of grace -- not solely demand.

It was Karl Barth who taught that the essence of God is grace and therefore

the essence of our response to God is gratitude. "Grace and gratitude belong
together like heaven and earth," he wrote. "Grace evokes gratitude like the
voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder follows lightening."

(Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, Part 1, p.41) George Arthur Buttrick paraphrased
Barth exquisitely:

"Praise is native, and men and women give thanks for the same
reason that birds sing." (Ibid, Vol. VIII, p.299)

We are most human, most ourselves, our best thinkers have taught, when we
are being thankful. We never stand taller than when we are on our knees in
thanksgiving. Praise is native -- gratitude is natural.

Well, maybe. If it's natural, why doesn't everybody do it? If gratitude is
native, why do we have to have a day for it? My parents, at least, weren't
willing to chance it. They knew that wonderful line of King Lear's:

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
fo have a thankless child."

And so, saying "thank you" and writing proper "thank you" notes, making obligatory
"thank you" telephone calls to aunts and uncles and grandparents was a priority
item, regardless of whether or not one happened to feel gratitude. They repre-
sented that venerable school of thought that held that feelings weren't all that
important: if you get the behavior right, the attitudes and feelings will fall
in line in time, and if they don't it doesn't much matter because the people who
needed to be thanked got thanked and that was the point of the whole exercise.

It wasn't particularly pleasant at the time, but I'm thankful for the discipline.
Having thought about it for several decades, and still having to field an occa-
sional inquiry about whether I've written a thank’ you note to my brother or aunt
yet, I'm not at all certain about the nativity of gratitude. I'm not convinced
that if there is no imperative to say "thank you“ that feelings of gratitude

will take hold. I suspect, rather, that in saying "thank you" we put ourselves

in a position to learn and experience thankfulness. If that's true, it is very
important.. Our full humanity depends on our being grateful and the feeling of
gratitude is not only expressed but, in fact, develops within us as we express it.

That, I conclude, is precisely the point of an incident in the 17th Chapter of
Luke which was the lesson for the day and is a favorite Thanksgiving text. It
seems at first to be a fairly simple story about ingratitude. Nine men were
insensitive, ungrateful, rude. One feels, in their boorish behavor, the truth

of the Shapesperean dictum... "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is" indeed!
But on closer inspection the story is not quite that simple. It is about salva-
tion, health, wholeness, wellness -- and the intriguing suggestion that gratitude
is integral to it.

Think again about the story. Jesus and company were approaching a village near
the border between Galilee and Samaria. At the outskirts of town they came upon
a small leper colony. It would have been a fairly common sight. But religious
law and cultural custom required that people with leprosy be totally isolated
from the rest of society. And so those involved banded together in a kind of
pathetic sub-culture -- the first century version of what we have done under

the guise of deinstitutionalizing people and then re-institutionalizing their
isolation by making very certain that they don't find it easy to live and work
and have being near the mainstream. The group homes and halfway houses clustered
around the urban core where no one else wants to live -- is the equivalent of
this group of people. In any event, first century lepers were miserable. Any
skin disease, any persistent rash or infection was called leprosy. If the
victims didn't die of whatever disease they had -- and they rarely did -- they
suffered from hunger, expusure or, because of their isolation, went mad. There

were ten people in this group and when they saw the company approaching they
stirred and from the prescribed distance called out, “Jesus, have mercy!"
Translate that, "Give us money for food."

What they got from Jesus was neither money nor instant healing but a peculiar
instruction to show themselves to a priest, the person society assigned the
responsibility of diagnosing leprosy. The first interesting nuance about this
incident is here. Elsewhere in Luke Jesus does a lot of touching. Jesus lays
his hands on people and they become well. Luke, the physician, is ordinarily
an intimate and warmly human story teller. Here, he obviously wants us to

see something else -- something other than Jesus' power to heal. All Jesus
does is send them off to see a priest: on the way they are “cleansed" and the
point is next. One of the ten, the Samaritan, the one first century readers --
for whom this was written -- assumed to be morally inferior, turns around, finds
Jesus and falls on his face thanking him.

after wondering out loud about the other nine, Jesus says, “Rise and go your
way, your faith has made you well." Now clearly, that is not true. His faith
had nothing to do with it. The leprosy had left on the way to the priest for
all ten of them. Faith has nothing to do with it unless the wellness Jesus
means is something more than the absence of leprosy. And that's the point

of Luke's subtle story. The nine ingrates weren't well. The ones who didn't
say "thank you" didn't have leprosy any more but they weren't healed. Human
wholeness, in Jesus' way of thinking, includes gratitude as a basic ingredient.
Living out the new life Jesus gives includes being thankful and saying “thank
you" and if you're not doing that you're not as whole, as well, or healthy,

as you could be.

Can that be tested in any objective sense? Some think so. Dr. Herbert Benson
of Harvard Medical School is one of the leading spokesmen for those who find
relationship between stress and disease. Benson's prescriptions, in his excel-
lent little book on stress, The Relaxation Response, come very close to prayer
and meditation and practicing gratitude. One much quoted psychiatrist, Hans
Selye, writes, “Among ail the emotions there is one, which more than any other,
accounts for the absence or presence of stress in human relations: that is the
feeling of gratitude." And Henri Nouwen whose reflections on Thanksgiving
launched the exercise notes in a volume of prayers that fear and anxiety diminish
in one's life as we experience gratitude and gratitude comes gradually with the
awareness that all of life is a gift. (A Cry for Mercy, p.149)

The critical issue, of course, is whether or not a feeling can be produced or
forced like the narcissus bulbs I just purchased and which must be subjected
to a specific ritual designed to convince them that they have slept through
winter and it is now a balmy week around the beginning of April. Does talking
about how pleasant and healthy gratitude is contribute to making us feel grateful?
I think there are possibilities for spiritual deepening and growing here.
so
“Gratitude is, it appears, a posture, a stance, into which we seem to grow over
the years. It is the acknowledgement that I am not complete in and of myself;
that I do not have everything I need, innately; that I have been and am capable
of being enriched, graced and enlarged every day of my life. And while that

may seem terribly basic and clearly evident to some, it does swim against the
cultural current of vigorous self-sufficiency; the lone, strong individualism
that looks nowhere but within for strength.

The better posture, the human posture, here punctuated by Jesus Christ -- is
the posture of receptivity, hands outstretched and ready to receive, eyes open
to see beauty, ears open to hear loveliness, and heart open to God. It isa
very basic posture of elemental gratitude.

There is a wonderful story about the late Abraham Heschel, distinguished Jewish
philosopher and theologian which illustrates:

"Several years before his death in 1972, Heschel suffered a near fatal heart
attack from which he never fully recovered. A dear friend visiting him found
him woefully weak. Just able to whisper, Heschel said to him: ‘Sam, when TI
regained consciousness, my first feeling was not despair or anger. I felt only
gratitude to God for my life, for every moment I had. lived... I was ready to
depart. Take me, O Lord, I thought. I have. s6en so many miracles in my life
time." (Seasons that Laugh or Weep, Walter/ Burghardt, p.126-127)

iN a
Is it axiomatic that we human beings must be near death before we come to the
sense of "so many miracles?" Isn't it possible, now, to live out the wholeness

of gratefulness? Isn't it possible to unclench our praying hands, and in the
privacy of our secret place actually to pray with our hands cpen, paims up, to
receive God's gift of love? Isn't it possible to experience now the elementary
wonder at that most elementary miracle of all -- the fact of our own existence?
Isn't it possible to affirm that basic miracle by greeting your image in the
mirror every morning, as Frederick Beuchner once confessed he did with this
little rubric:

"You are alive. It needn't have been so. It wasn't so once, and it will not be
forever. But it is so now. Take this day and be alive in it." (Alphabet of
Grace, P.36}

The essays of Lewis Thomas, a microbiologist who is Chancellorof the Sioan
Kettering Clinic in New York are full of the ontological wonder and gratitude.
He is one of our better prophets -- does not claim to be a theologian -- but
knows about miracles. Asked once to name seven new "Wonders of the World,
Thomas wrote a delightful essay in which he named an esoteric collection of
newly discovered bacteria which lives only in the 300° centigrade water which
comes out of vents in the ocean floor, and termites which when enough get to-
gether suddenly start building a perfectly engineered, climate controlled
cathedral, and the olfactory receptor cell that can differentiate between jasmine
and anything non= jasmine, and any human child, and in first place, wonder of
wonders, the living system of life that the earth is..."an immense organism,
still developing, regulating itself, making its own oxygen, maintaining its
own temperature, keeping all its infinite living parts connected and interde-
pendent, including us.' (Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth

Symphony, P.62)

You don't have to be on your death bed to experience the grace of God —- the
miracle -- which is in the gift of life itself. That, I believe, is what Luke's
story of the 10 lepers is about. You are a miracle. How sad not to have known

-6- _

it. You were loved into life by a man and a woman and God, Against all the
astronomical odds of non-being, there is a you. You were loved and nurtured
from infancy to childhood through adolescence. None of us arrived fully who
we now are. None of us showed up alone.

You are a miracle. So is the person beside you. He or she was loved into
existence against all the odds. He or she has been nurtured and loved by others
each step of the way. Your life is a gift -- so is the life of the other. So
particularly is the gift of another's love: the generous openness to you, the
extension of that precious life into your life.

The basic posture of gratitude begins with wonder, the ability to be amazed,
and the humility and the energy to receive and to savor the glorious gift of
life.

According to Jesus, our wholeness, our wellness, our relative fullness of life,
depends on our capacity for gratitude. And so we come to Thanksgiving. I be-
lieve the Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers had to know, deeply, about the wholeness

of a grateful life. Their hold on life was so very precarious and they had
suffered so severely through that first winter that whatever they were celebrating
it was something far more profound than enough food to pull them through the next
winter -~ although it was that, too.

Their deepest gratitude was for God's goodness and grace, which is not always
expressed in material abundance and well being. Our best gratitude, likewise,

is related to a love and grace which are at the heart of life itself. "Gratitude,"
the theologians teach us "is what must characterize our dealings with God because
grace is what characterizes God's dealings with us." (Robert McAfee Brown, The
Pseudonyms of God, P.13)

The Christian Gospel, the Good News, is that God's loye is constant: that God's
love.for us, along the way Of our pilgrimage, is strong and real and never ending.
The incarnation of that love, the gift of that love, more precious than life itself,
is the life of Jesus. Christ.

So, in his name, in his love, by his grace, let us join our voices with the voice
of one thankful Samaritan, and with the voices of Pilgrims out of the past, and
with the voices of one another, expressing our best and highest humanity...

"For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies:

Lord of all to thee we raise

This our hymn of grateful prace."

Praise and glory and wisdom

And thanksgiving and honor

And power and strength

To our God for ever and ever. Amen