Homily: Thanksgiving, Oct 12 2014, St. Albans
Readings: Deut 8.7-18; Ps 65, 2 Cor 9.6-15; Lk 17.11-19
“A
Story about Sight”
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| Creative Commons - Photo by TheStolpskott |
Today’s gospel is the story
of a healing. It’s the story of ten
lepers, ten people who had been forced out of society because they suffered
from a dreaded, contagious disease of the skin.
When Jesus arrives at the outskirts of their village, they call out to
him from a distance, “Jesus, have compassion on us.” And when Jesus sees them, he has compassion,
and he tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, because that’s what
the law said they had to do to rejoin society.
And as they went on their way, the sores disappeared and pus on their
skin vanished, and they were healed.
Now if this is where the
reading had stopped, and I was to ask you what the story was about, you
probably would say that it was about the healing of ten lepers, that is to say,
a story about skin.
But the text doesn’t stop
here. As we continue reading, we’re told
that one man, seeing that he was healed, turns back and in so doing he takes
our story in a whole new direction. Because for ten men, this is a story about
skin. But for one man, it is a story
about sight.
What is it that the one man
sees that the others don’t? Surely all
ten could see that their skin was healed, that the sores had disappeared. But the one man sees something more,
something that makes him stop dead in his tracks, separate himself from the
group and turn back toward Jesus. He
sees something, so he changes direction.
He sees something, and he praises God.
He sees something, and so he prostrates himself at Jesus feet and thanks
him.
What did he see? Ten men saw the gift, the healed skin. One man sees the Giver.
Today we celebrate
Thanksgiving. It is the time of year
when we deliberately direct our attention towards the many gifts that we
receive, all the good things that we enjoy.
It is therefore an opportunity for us to learn to see, to see not just
the gift, but also the Giver.
Are we like so many, who
receiving a gift, think to themselves “Boy am I ever lucky!” or are we like the
one man who is able to see the active presence of God working in and through
all the events of our lives, and, as a result, is truly able to say “Thank
you”.
I don’t think it’s
surprising that nine out of the ten people in today’s text were unable to see
God in their own healing. As our first
reading from Deuteronomy reminds us, we have a tendency to forget God, to lose
sight of the divine in the day to day happenings of our lives. Our vision tends to narrow over time. We become near-sighted. We become complacent. We no longer belong to a culture that sees
God’s hand in the events of our lives.
We belong to a much more skeptical age, a empirical world that places
its emphasis on what we can measure and on what can be experienced with our
five senses. Most of us after all, at
some point in our lives, have been taught that “seeing is believing.”
But what if we’re wrong
about that. What if we’ve got it
backwards.
There’s a man named Dewitt
Jones who’s a photographer for the National Geographic. You know, the yellow magazines with all those
amazing pictures that, back in the days before Google, many of us used to
collect and use for school projects.
Over the past thirty years, Dewitt Jones has learned a thing or two
about vision. His insights originate
with his photography, but I think they speak to us too. Here’s what he says:
“I started out in life, as
most of us do, holding the maxim “I won’t believe it till I see it”. Yet the more I worked for the Geographic, the
more I realized I had it backwards. The
way it really works is “I won’t see it till I believe it”. That’s the way life really works.”
“They sent me out to places
I’d never been. I believed there would
be beautiful landscapes – and they were there.
I believed there would be interesting people to photograph – and I’d
find them.
“Perception controls our
reality. If we don’t believe it, we
won’t see it.”
How open are we to seeing
the divine in the midst of our lives, to seeing the active presence of God in
our world?
In the midst of the chaos of
our lives are we aware of the divine spark within that urges us to live lives
of meaning and purpose?
In the midst of the conflicts
and injustice of our world, do we hear God speaking in those voices throughout
history that have urged us to do justice and to love our neighbour as ourselves?
When we consider the air
that we breathe and the water that we drink, do we think of these as fortunate
outcomes of random processes, or do we have a vision of an awesome, evolving
creation which is life-giving and is a reflection of its Creator.
When we suffer, when we are
in pain, are we aware of a subtle force which suffers with us and brings a
transformative energy to bear on our situation.
If we believe it, we’ll see
it.
But sometimes we have
trouble seeing. Sometimes our sight gets
clouded. When life gets hard, when we or
those we love encounter difficulty, our vision loses its clarity. When we encounter skepticism or doubt, our
field of vision narrows. Even, or
perhaps especially, when times are good, our vision becomes complacent and near-sighted.
When our vision fails us,
what are we to do? It’s at these times
that we need to come together, to tell each other our stories, to hear the
stories of those who have gone before us, to celebrate in praise and in song
the presence of the divine in our midst, to be reminded of what we once saw and
to be encouraged in our belief that we will once more see the active presence
of God in our lives and in our world.
That’s what we’re doing here
this morning. Some call it worship,
others just say they’re going to church.
Someone on the Internet that I read this week says he likes to think of
going to church as weekly cataract surgery.
We may come in with our sight clouded, but if the surgery is successful
we go out with a clear vision of God at work.
And on this Thanksgiving
Sunday, on this day when we pay particular attention to the good things of our
lives, we want to learn to see not just the gifts, but also the Giver, and when
we do, we respond by praising God and saying Thank you.
Giving thanks is good and
right, and to top it off it’s also good for us.
But is there more that we should be doing?
Yes there is. Because once we’ve learned to see the Giver
in the gifts, we then should realize that each one of us is called to
participate in the giving.
That’s what Paul is trying
to explain to the Corinthians in the second lesson that we heard this morning.
Paul was doing something
quite remarkable, something which was actually unprecedented. He was organizing the world’s first foreign
aid project. Corinth, you see, was a
prosperous Greek city of the Roman Empire, a sea port which benefited from
trade and commerce. Jerusalem, however
was exactly the opposite, a poor, remote city under Roman Military occupation,
oppressed by the Roman military because of its rebellious past. And so Paul has organized that a collection
be taken up in the prosperous Greek cities, including Corinth, so that the
money can be given to the poor in Jerusalem.
And apparently his project
was meeting some resistance among the Corinthians. Why should we give our money to those no-good
foreigners? they complained. “We worked
hard for our money. Why should we give
it away?”
And so Paul writes them a
letter, part of which we heard read today.
Why should we be generous? Why
should we give?
We give because that’s what
Jesus did. Jesus gave his life for us.
We give because all that we
have, all of our wealth is a gift from God, and the purpose of wealth is to do
good for others.
We give to others because
that is how we express our thanks to God for what we’ve been given. As Paul writes, “Generosity produces
thanksgiving to God, for the rendering of this ministry of giving and
generosity not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with
many thanksgivings to God.”
As we gather here this
morning, we have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. We live in a land of plenty, we are loved by
friends and family, we have our health and our lives and so much more. May we learn to see God at work in all the
blessings of this life, and seeing, may we also realize that each of us is
called to participate in God’s work, to be generous and giving towards others,
for this is how we offer thanks.
Amen.
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