October 13, 2013
Pentecost 21 - Thanksgiving
Jeremiah 29:1,4-7
Luke 17:11-19
(prayer)
So, the Hebrew people have been forced from their land and homes - they have endured a painstaking journey across the wilderness and were now expected to live in makeshift refugee camps somewhere by the rivers of Babylon, and the prophet (still safely back behind Jerusalem’s walls, by the way) sent the exiles a message: settle down there, build homes, plant fields - treat it like your new home.
Let’s be honest... that’s pretty optimistic for a doctrine.
Let’s see: how can I relay to you all how silly those words from Jeremiah must have sounded? If only there was a scene from a movie that I love that could give us a flavour of this...
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Okay, I don't believe that Jeremiah was being flippant like Eric Idel and the boys of Monty Python in that scene from The Life of Brian. The prophet did, I believe, have the short- and long-term interests of the exiles in mind.
I suspect that he was recalling the fate of northern Israel - a separate Hebrew kingdom that split off from Judah centuries earlier after King Solomon's death.
If you heard or read my sermon from last week, you may recall that I talked about Habakkuk, a Judean prophet who preached a decade or two before Jeremiah, right at the start of Babylonian imperialism.
I mentioned that a main concern for Habakkuk was an arrogant attitude within Judah that nothing could ever challenge their status among nations or their place in the world. The prophet's concern was that the people didn't even seem to worry much about practicing their faith.
In the back of Habakkuk's (and Jeremiah's) mind were the lessons to be learned from the fall of the northern kingdom, almost a century earlier.
When the Assyrian Empire expanded west toward the Mediterranean, the people of Israel were scattered. Their capital city of Samaria was overrun. They lost their identity as a distinct Hebrew people.
By inviting the exiles to form new communities in Babylon, Jeremiah was giving the Judean people a chance to remain "a people" even away from home.
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Knowing who we have been helps us understand who we are and it is invaluable as we choose the paths to who we can become. I think Jeremiah was encouraging the honouring of all that made the people who they were as a means of surviving the trauma of exile.
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When the bible speaks about leprosy, it is not limiting the conversation to the specific disease we call leprosy. It referred to any number of visible skin ailments (some temporary, some chronic, some contagious, some not) that would have isolated people from their wider society.
Having "leprosy" (regardless we would call it today) in Jesus' time, meant being ostracized, kept away from family, work, church - people were so afraid of catching what you had, that you were required to announce your presence to others and above all keep your distance.
One of the hallmarks of Jesus' welcoming ministry is that he broke through those barriers: he visited the leper colonies; he invited the sick, and the sinner, and the outcast to dine with him on a regular basis. He broke down those walls on a personal level, but there were times like busted down the society's walls as well. Ten lepers were healed of their ailments. The priests would verify the fact, and these people would be welcomed again in their world.
That wonderful occurrence is actually the set up for the story today.
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After the ill were made whole, after they had started off to see the priest, one decides to come back and offer a personal thank you to Jesus - for this renewed chance at a full life.
To further emphasize that Jesus is all about busting through the walls of exclusion, it is pointed out that the one who came back was a Samaritan.
[In an interesting parallel to the context of Jeremiah's time, the Samaritans (of Jesus day) were those who populated some of the lands of the former northern Israeli kingdom. By Jesus' time, the differences in culture and religious practice were so vast that the Hebrew people did not view the Samaritans as kin. They were outsiders.]
To highlight how much faithfulness Jesus expected from the crowd made up of his own people, he praised the faithful gratitude of "the foreigner".
And the walls came a tumbling down.
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Earlier, as we gathered around the baptismal font with Elliot and her family, we share words of hope and promise: We are not alone. We live in God's world. Thanks be to God!
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"Thanks be to God." Good words to say on Thanksgiving Sunday.
Even though the harvests are coming in, for many people in our increasingly urbanized culture, ‘Thanksgiving’ is just a reason for another holiday long weekend. Many of us (myself included) don't have the personal experience to really appreciate the joy and hope that a good harvest can represent. In North America, it was not that many decades ago where life and death was dictated by the health of the harvest. And it is still sadly true in parts of our world.
[This coming Thursday, the local field that is dedicated to the work of the Canadian Foodgrains bank will be harvested. You are invited to come to the church at 10:30am Thursday to carpool out to the field and marvel at the fleet of combines working to feed a hungry world.]
The truth is… a good harvest represents not only a livelihood for the farmer, but life for the community. We should all be thankful for that.
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All of us are called to be appreciative of the life we are living. The ease of that appreciation is not going to be universal: some of us know bounty, others of us know emptiness – many of us move back and forth. The challenge of thankfulness is to appreciate life as it is in the moment – not what it might be if circumstances were different. The challenge of thankfulness is not to replace appreciation for arrogance if life is good or with despair if life is hard. The challenge of thankfulness is being open to the notion that we are not alone in this moment because God is with us.
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You may be familiar with Jesus' sermon on the mount (cf. Luke 6:20ff) - where he is quoted as saying phrases like:. Blessed are the poor; blessed are the hungry; blessed are the hated, the ostracized. And then he tells them, You should rejoice. [???]
I doubt that Jesus was saying that people should rejoice because of their poverty, their hungry, and their isolation. Rather… even in the midst of hardship, the rejoicing is based on a recognition that we are not alone - that God is with us in the easy and the hard. That is cause to rejoice.
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Few moments in life are perfect. And, let’s be honest, for some, life is so far from perfect that it is a miracle that they have as much hope as they do.
The call to thankfulness is not about what we have accumulated. It is not about what we don’t have.
Thankfulness is centred around a belief that God is with us in all circumstances, through thick and thin, in joy and in sorrow.
The exiles in Babylon could be thankful, even a wilderness away from their home - being under the thumb of the empire wasn’t going to dampen the thankfulness they were able to feel for the presence of God even in the foreign land.
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When the Samaritan ex-leper came back to express a thankfulness to Jesus, our Christ saw it as an act (not just appreciation) but of faith: “your faith has made you well.”
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I once read a paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm that began this way: “The Lord is my shepherd. That is all I have. That is all I need.”
It takes a deep and trusting faith to be able to say that. To be thankful for God, even if God is the only good and constant thing in our life.
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So how much easier should it be for us, when we have so much more that just God’s presence in our midst.
Let us make true the notion that honest thankfulness is an act of faith.
Let us pray:
God, wherever we find ourselves, draw us near to you and the bounty of your love. Hold us in your everlasting arms. Amen.
#185MV
“Ev’ryday is a Day of Thanksgiving”
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