19th Sunday after Pentecost

"The Lord be with you."

"And also with you."

"Lift up your hearts."

"We lift them to the Lord"

"Let us give thanks to the Lord our God."

"It is right to give him thanks and praise."

It is right. And it is good. And it is a joyful thing to give thanks to God always and everywhere.

To give thanks is to be holy. To recognize that we are only what we are because of a gift is to come closer to the true nature of creation. Because in recognizing that it is gift which makes us and gift which sustains us we recognize that it is gift which is at the very core of creation itself. We stand no closer to God than when we give thanks for life and know that "All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above."

William Law, theologian and author in the 18th Century, asked, "Who is the greatest saint in the world?" And he went on to answer the question in this way, "The greatest saint in the world is not the one who prays the most, or fasts the most. It is not the one who gives the most alms, or is most eminent in temperance, chastity or justice, but the one who is always thankful to God, who receives everything as an instance of God's goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for it."

Aren't you glad to know that it's not the one who fasts the most? Compared to fasting, giving thanks should be a piece of cake, so to speak. So what is it about giving thanks to God that is difficult? What makes it so special, even more special than denying oneself?

I believe it is difficult because, like fasting or any kind of denial, it comes from an attitude that God is first and that is always difficult for us to maintain. I believe that giving thanks to God is special because it is completely focused on God. When we fast we seek to deny ourselves so that we might be reminded of the need to put God first. When we feel hunger we are to turn the hunger toward God, and thus the fasting accomplishes what it set out to do, which is to remind us of God. Giving God thanks simply bypasses fasting or any other denial and goes straight to the recognition of God as the source of all things.

Living a life that is full of thanksgiving is difficult and special because it puts God first and it does so without any prompts or cues, such as hunger pains from fasting, living a life of chastity in a cloistered setting or the note on the Daytimer that it's time to pray. You do have notes in your Daytimer that remind you to pray, right? It is prayer itself to live a life full of thanksgiving.

But there is more to giving thanks than just being holy. It changes our lives. When we are thankful we can no longer mope around and pretend that the world is out to get us, or that life is so horrible that we just want to give up. To give thanks is to recognize hopefulness and to trust that if God is really up to giving us his love and care, which is always good, then we may bear any burden knowing that God can make good for us in the end.

In case you just tuned me out because you thought I said that we just need to put blinders on and only see the pretty side of life, please tune back in for a moment and let me correct that impression. Bad things happen. Terrible things happen. Tragic things. And they are not good and we do not give thanks that people blow up buildings or crash airplanes into them or spread disease. That would be at the least fatalistic and at worst very cruel. God does not ask us to be thankful for cruelty.

God does intend, I believe, that we are thankful for the firemen and police who rushed in to save others. God does ask us to be thankful for the love and charity which people around the world have shown to total strangers in the midst of fear and anger and incredible pain. God does ask us to be thankful to him for the love, the courage and the selflessness shown, because those are things that come from God as gifts to us.

Let me say more about how thankfulness changes us. If we are thankful we cannot be consumed with helplessness. The reverse is also true; if we are consumed with helplessness we cannot be thankful. So where do we go from there, from helplessness? All I know - and as the following story will show you, this is not a panacea - all I know is that we act thankful. We make ourselves say "Thank you" to God every day, several times a day.

Some people suggest putting a pad of paper at bedside and going through the day to list all of the things which we are thankful for before going to sleep. The point is to change our hearts away from self centeredness and toward God centeredness. By listing all of the little things we have to be thankful for we realize, sometimes slowly, that they are all gifts and we rarely do anything to deserve or make them. The things which we find ourselves being thankful for are part of the way God has created and not part of anything over which we have control. Even the flowers that we lovingly care for and water are beyond us to produce from nothing. As are the people we come into contact with every day.

We may not know how to give thanks for everyone we interact with in a given day, but most days we find someone that we can be thankful for, even if was just to listen to our complaints or make small talk at the store. What if we are ill? Then we can we be thankful for those who care for us. What if we are alone? I've met homeless people who are thankful for the sunrise, for a drink of clean water, for a warm meal, and even for a handshake because it was an opportunity to be touched by another person when they feel untouchable and unlovable.

Part of the point of this is that even if everything is a gift from God, we still must respond. To refuse to respond, to be ungrateful, is to leave ourselves open to hopelessness and despair. And, as you know from Fr. Casey, despair is presumptuous because it says something about the future which we cannot know. If the lepers would have given in to despair they would not have been on the road Jesus was on or would not have spoken up and asked to be healed. To encounter Jesus they had to keep responding to life even though it appeared that no response was possible.

Leprosy was considered an incurable disease that cast one out of the community for life. Lepers were ritually unclean and could not be in contact with, or even close to, the rest of us. So they had no reason to respond to life, but these lepers did respond on faith and were made whole and a part of the community again.

I once worked with a young woman who had no idea how to respond to the world or to God with thankfulness. She was too caught up by the awful experiences of her life to believe that it was possible to be anything but mistreated by others. Her father had raped her as a little girl and physically abused her. Other family members had ignored the secretive tragedy going on around them and left her confused and untrusting of all adults.

She came to us after extensive hospitalizations for suicide attempts and was on a drug that had to be monitored carefully so that the level in her bloodstream was kept constant. This meant many trips to an outpatient clinic to draw blood, usually with quite a number of other teenagers along. She was shy and this kind of special attention made her fearful both toward her teen peers and the adults working with her. Occasionally, however, one of the staff would have the luxury of taking her for the test and could spend some time talking.

I was able to take her a few times and I remember one time in particular because of her response to the trip. It was a beautiful spring day as we pulled into the parking place and right in front of the van was a small rose bush that had a million blooms on it. OK, maybe twenty or so blooms. But it was a deep red flower and the lower blooms had fully opened.

We both got out of the van and I headed to the rose bush, she to the door of the medical office building. I called to her to come back and see something. She complied, that's what it was - compliance, and stood there as I knelt on the ground and smelled the strong scent of fully opened roses.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "People are going to think you're weird." I didn't care what people thought, I told her. The roses were beautiful and smelling them only added to the experience of beauty. It wasn't every day that we would find such incredible beauty and stopping to smell the flowers would be a special gift for us that day. I asked her to kneel down and smell the roses. I knew I was asking a lot. She looked around and didn't see a lot of people gathering around to condemn us so she knelt and smelled the roses.

The aroma was powerful and she thought the roses smelled great. She couldn't believe she had just knelt down in public and smelled flowers. We talked on the way back about being thankful for little things, like flowers and rain and sunshine. They were nice, she thought, but why be thankful for things that were always there? She was amazed that we stopped to smell flowers, but she never was able to understand why we would be thankful for such mundane things.

I came to learn that she had nothing to be thankful for, because to be thankful meant allowing something or someone in, it meant becoming at least a little bit vulnerable, and that was not going to happen to her ever again. Other people might hurt her again, and they did, but it was not because she opened up, it was because she put herself in horrible situations where she knew she would be mistreated. She never put herself in any situation where there was an expectation that anyone would treat her well. So she at least felt some odd control over knowing that she would be mistreated. Expect the worst, she figured, and you're not surprised when you get it.

For this young woman, there was nothing to be thankful for in living a life filled with abuse and mistreatment and she would not open herself to be thankful even for simple things lest she be hurt unexpectedly. Being hurt expectedly was OK, she had resigned her life to that. She never seemed to understand acts of kindness toward her.

This story does not have a happy ending.

A couple of years after she left our care and went out on her own we heard that she had eventually succeeded in killing herself. All I could think of was that perhaps she could finally experience real love from God and know that it would not hurt her but would heal her. I pray that as surely as God's love healed the lepers, she has been healed. If only she could give thanks for a little she could gain all.

That's why giving thanks, living a life of thankfulness, is difficult and special. Because it changes all those who approach it and allows them to see past the immediate, past the purely tangible aspects of creation and into the heart of the creative act, love.

Love has been revealed in Jesus Christ and is the center of all thanksgiving. When we respond to God's grace with thankfulness we are responding truthfully and honestly to something we did not deserve, work for or cause to happen. We simply respond to the love of God in Jesus with gratitude and learn that gratitude is all we have to respond from, and even that is a gift from God. We lift our hearts to God for so many things, our lives and families, our community, our presence in this place.

As I speak I imagine and pray that you are making a mental list of all the things you are thankful for this day. And when we say the Prayer of Thanksgiving let us gratefully lift our hearts to the Lord and give him thanks and praise for all those things in our lives which make us truly thankful.

Because it is right. And it is good. And it is a joyful thing to give God thanks and praise always and everywhere.