Luke 17: 11 – 19
On Monday this week I phoned in my veg order and paid by card. “Don’t worry if we’re out, just leave it on the step” I said, and a lovely box duly appeared later in the day. On Wednesday my computer keyboard packed up, so I ordered another one online. The next day it arrived on my doorstep, I unwrapped it and started using it. As reflect on my week I realise that essential items that I’ve needed – in order to eat, in order to work – have arrived on my doorstep….and that’s happened without me saying thankyou to the person who delivered them. Well of course a doorstep delivery is covid safe. But there’s something missing. A few years ago, I would have gone into a shop, bought my goods and smiled and said thanks to the person on the till. As life moves more and more online, those opportunities for simple interactions with other people are becoming fewer. Does that means, I wonder, that the word thankyou is spoken less now? Is there generally less thanking going on? And then I wonder if we are saying thankyou to one another less, are we also feeling less of a sense of thankfulness?
That bothers me. Because gratitude is fundamental in our life together in society, and it is fundamental for Christian people in our lives together before God.
I worry that as our lives become more atomised – each of us able to get whatever we need delivered to our doorstep with a few clicks of the mouse - that we will start to feel more entitled, and less grateful. It’s every easier for us to put ourselves and our needs at the centre of the world and expect that whatever we need will simply come to us, without any sense of the human relationship that underscores that transaction.
The word thankyou is actually a verb – I thank you. It recognises that you and I are not separate, independent people. We are interdependent and connected. When I thankyou I’m recognising that something has taken place that connects us Thankyou acknowledges our interdependence – we need each other.
And as Christian people the prayer of thankfulness works the same way. When we offer our thanks to God we recognise that we are not separate and independent. On the contrary, we depend on God’s grace for every breath we take.
Meister Eckhardt, the great Christian thinker and mystic said this: If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “Thankyou”, that is enough.
Perhaps you find that surprising. It’s not the way we usually think about prayer. The default setting for Christian prayer is often to pray that God will give us the things we need, ( intercession) or that God will forgive us our sins (confession). So why say that the thankyou prayer the most important?
I think it’s because expressing our thankfulness to God helps us recognise the very basics of where we stand in relation to God. In the words of the psalm “ It is he who has made us and not we ourselves, we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” We are created, and God is creator. Life is a free gift that we receive from God, who is the giver. It’s that G – word – grace. Grace begins, with God’s gracious act of creation, of bringing into being this amazingly evolving ecosystem that is life on this planet. And then God’s grace continues by coming among us in Jesus, helping us to recognise what it means to find life in all its fullness. Grace is a one way street: God gives, and keeps giving, then gives some more. The grace of God inspires gratitude in us. If the only we prayer we say is thankyou, then that is enough.
Of course, if we come to believe we are independent and self-sufficient beings in our shiny consumer world, then we don’t need other people and we don’t need God. We don’t need to be grateful to anyone. The word thankyou becomes increasingly redundant.
Harvest is the season in the Church’s year when we renew our thankfulness in response to God’s goodness. And of course harvest festival was established in an earlier time, before people lived in cities, when lives were lived around the rhythms of the farming year. Before the mechanisation of agriculture there was a real sense of risk and vulnerability around harvest. A failed crop could be disastrous for the whole community – think of the terrible potato famine in Ireland.
From our vantage point of the 21st century we feel insulated from this sense of vulnerability of a failed harvest. In our era of sophisticated food choices we expect the supermarket shelves to be filled with cheap produce no matter what. Yet the evidence is that agriculture and food production is a massive contributor to the carbon emissions that create climate change. The evidence suggest
recognise that if food production and eating habits continue as they are, if we we will reap a bitter harvest for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Recognising our human fragility – our global fragility - is a good thing. It is a good thing when it encourages to re-think again our dependency on God and our interdependency with one another in this global village which is God’s world. And it is a good thing when it encourages us to translate out thankfulness into action.
In our gospel story we heard how Jesus heals ten people suffering from leprosy, and of these ten, just one comes back to thank him. For all we know the other nine may have been feeling thankful. They may have been thinking about how grateful they were. But only puts thankfulness into action and actually does something about it by coming back, throwing himself at Jesus feet – a powerful physical gesture. Jesus’s healing is unconditional, just as God’s grace for us in unconditional. There is no requirement that we sign on the bottom line. God’s grace comes to us as a gracious invitation, it invites a response, in love and thanks, and in the story it is the outsider, the Samaritan, who models this gracious response for us.
It’s a strange harvest festival this year – we are not able to decorate the church, to sing the lovely harvest hymns, not able to sit around the table together and share a harvest supper. The pandemic is pressing the pause button on so much of what we took for granted.
Yet through all of this God’s goodness and grace continues to flow into our lives, inviting us to respond in lives of active thankfulness. The thanksgiving prayer we said together at the start of the service prays that we may show forth God’s praise not only with our lips, but in our lives.
A question for you.
What action could we take in this season of harvest, to reflect our thanksgiving to God? We could make a regular donation to High Peak Food Bank – their website tells you the different ways you can do this. We could decide to eat a meat free meal a couple of times a week. We could find out more about what Acclimatise Whaley are doing to promote sustainability in our area – you can ask Jamie Richardson about this. We could decide to say grace before meals – either aloud, or by silently taking a moment to reflect thankfully on the food on our
plate. What will you do? And what should we as the parish church community be collectively doing?
“ If the only prayer you way is thankyou, that is enough.” On your service sheet you have the General Thanksgiving prayer. Why not take it home and use it to pray the prayer every morning for a week. Let gratitude fill your soul and shape your day. And then who knows what might happen next.
Frances October 2020