One lifeline in all that intensity was L’Arche Daybreak’s Friday night community prayer. Henri Nouwen was living at Daybreak then and he led most of the services. Henri was a world famous Roman Catholic Priest and author. He had taught at the divinity schools at Yale and Harvard, had written over 30 best selling books, was in demand as a speaker and retreat master all over the world, and is hailed as one of the most important spiritual leaders of the 20th century. He was very, very good and did many great works. It was quite a privilege to sit on the floor with this world-renowned priest around a simple altar and listen to him break the scripture open week after week.
Henri had some themes he kept on coming back to. One of his favourites was how God is present in our vulnerabilities, in our pain, and in our suffering. While there were lots of good things going on as well, vulnerability, pain, and suffering were pretty major parts of my life. I learned a lot during those Friday prayer nights about how God could become present to me, minister to me, and heal me precisely through the vulnerability, pain and suffering that the violence in my home created. I don’t know if I could have lasted for three years without those Friday nights.
But you get can get used to anything. After a while the novelty of listening to a world famous priest wore off. After a while I could almost predict where his reflections were heading and started to wonder if he would ever say anything new or different again. Did every gospel reading have to lead to a reflection on God’s presence in pain, woundedness, and vulnerability? While they were still meaningful, the Friday nights became like an old jacket that’s warm, comfortable, and taken for granted.
A few years after I had moved out of that house to get married, Henri’s Friday night homily was especially meaningful to me. Without thinking too much about it I went to him at the coffee time afterwards and thanked him for his words. I have never forgotten his response. Like a desperately thirsty man drinking water for the first time in a long time he said something like, “thank you for saying that. Nobody at Daybreak has told me they appreciated my homily for such a long time that I wonder if anyone is listening. It’s really hard to speak week after week without anybody giving any feedback to me. I often wonder if people like what I’m saying or not.”
I was surprised at his response to say the least. Here was someone selling thousands of books a week, getting many requests every week to speak somewhere, carrying on personal friendships with the Kennedy (John F. Kennedy) family, Mr Rogers, and the founder of McDonalds to name only a few. I didn’t think that he would need an ordinary L’Arche assistant to thank him for his homily. But he did. And I think that he needed it more from someone like me than he did from his admirers that invited him to speak at their functions. It meant more coming from a person like me because I wasn’t mesmerised by his “celebrity” status. I knew him, was aware of some of his frailties and vulnerabilities, and was still able to appreciate the word that God was speaking through him.
Jesus is more famous than Henri Nouwen. His book, the Bible, is the all-time best seller. He’s the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Word that spoke creation into being, the Alpha and the Omega. His list of ‘great works’ is second to none. He’s pretty much got it all. Maybe Henri needed to be thanked, but does Jesus?
Most of the lepers that Jesus healed in the gospel reading this morning didn’t think so. They were happy that Jesus had healed them but it didn’t occur to them that Jesus might appreciate a thank you. Only one of the 10, and a Samaritan at that, thought to come back and thank Jesus for healing him. Jesus doesn’t thank the Samaritan for thanking him, but in his question “were not 10 cleansed? Where are the other nine?” we can hear that Jesus misses the thanks of the rest of them and appreciates the fact that the Samaritan has returned.
Great are the works of the Lord: Giving Thanks Lethbridge Mennonite Church October 14, 2007 2 Kings: 5: 1-3, 7-15c, Luke 17:11-19 The saying goes that the best sermons are the one that preachers preach to
themselves. If this is true, then you’re going to hear a doozy of a sermon this
morning. If you’re wondering why, just ask Jackie how many times I’ve thanked
her for supper this year… I joined L’Arche in 1989 when I began living with 3 adults with developmental
disabilities and 2 other assistants in a home that belonged to the community of
L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario. I lived in that home for three years.
There were a lot of changes in the home: many assistants came and went and we
welcomed a fourth person with a disability in 1990. But two things never changed:
the intense violence and the intense friendships that were present in the home. I can talk about those three years for hours. I won’t do that now! All that I’ll say is
that I really loved living there. But there were also many times when I wondered
how I was able to live there. This was particularly true when I would be coming
back from holidays. I’d be sitting on the plane wondering how I could live there,
and not being able to come up with an answer. I’d remember as soon as I walked
back through the front door and be welcomed back by everybody, but it was still
difficult. I’d do it again without a question, but like many things that God calls us to,
it was very close to being impossible. Why was the Samaritan the only one to give thanks? That is an unanswerable
question. But maybe the reasons are similar to the reasons I didn’t thank Henri
more often for his homilies, and why guests to our home thank Jackie for supper
more than I do. Maybe the nine who didn’t return had heard so much about Jesus’
power to heal that they, while being thrilled to pieces about it, kind of thought that
now it was their turn to be healed. Jesus had healed lots of people, was a Jew just
like them, and today was their lucky day. In other words, they were kind of taking
Jesus for granted as a fellow member of their Jewish family. The Samaritan, on
the other hand, had no “familial” claim to Jesus. He therefore recognised his
healing as the undeserved act of a merciful God and made sure to give thanks and
honour where thanks and honour were due. The story of Naman’s healing from leprosy also ends with him giving thanks. The
scripture reading ended before the giving thanks part, but verses 16 and 17
describe how Naman attempts to give Elisha a thank you gift. Elisha refuses to
accept anything, but allows Naman to take 2 mule loads of dirt back to Aram so he
could offer burnt offerings and sacrifices of worship and thanksgiving to Yahweh
from now on. So, as I’m sure many of you have heard many times before, the readings today call
us to be thankful people. I know that last Sunday was Thanksgiving, but it’s
probably not a bad thing that today’s readings also lead pretty directly to reflections
on saying thank-you. As our society becomes more powerful, as our affluence
gives us access to more and more things, as we take more and more things for
granted, and as we develop attitudes of entitlement towards more and more things,
our ability to say thank you is rapidly eroding. Saying thank you means that we
appreciate what we have received. Saying thank you means that we somehow
needed someone else for some reason. Saying thank you means that we can’t do
it all on our own. Saying thank you is acknowledging that we don’t have it all
together and that there are places where we are weak and vulnerable. I think that
there is a direct correlation between our societies declining ability to say thank you
and the rapidly climbing price of oil, booming economy, and the expectation that
there’s no real reason why we can’t have it all. To close, therefore, here are three brief points on saying “thank you.” Firstly, saying thank you is a decision and a discipline that some individuals have
embraced, and that is still embedded in some cultures. The more we decide to say
thank you, the easier it is to say it the next time. We can also learn a lot from
cultures where saying thank-you is at the heart of almost every human interaction.
I think of the graciousness of so many of the people I have met, for example, from
Japan and from some African Countries. Secondly, saying thank-you is a God-given gift that some people have. This
doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook, but it is important to recognize and celebrate
the gifts of thankfulness and gratitude that God has given to some people. There
are people in this congregation with this gift. I won’t single you out here because
I’m sure I’d overlook someone. But after the service it might be “fun” if those of us
who need to decide to say thank you went and thanked those people in this
congregation who ooze “thank you” out of every pore of their body regardless of
whether of not they actually feel thankful. Finally, worship is nothing more, and nothing less, than saying thank you to God
for all of his great works: creating the world we live in, for creating us, and for
saving us from the power of sin, sickness, and death. May the word “thank you”
echo through every aspect of our lives and transform all we do and think into an act
of worship.