The year I turned 23, I prayed regularly with folks at the shelter where I worked on the west side of Chicago. Everyone who lived at the shelter was healing from a broken bone or a recent surgery or was living with a chronic illness like HIV. Nearly everyone was new to sobriety from crack and walking that difficult, daily walk. I was a middle class little white girl who had encountered few challenges in life up to that point, raised in a small Minnesota town by my still happily married parents and afforded every opportunity for growth and learning. At the dinner table in our house, we spoke most nights about the challenges people in our community faced and about how we could be good neighbors but not really about how privileged we were or how blessed we were. To be honest, when I first started working at the shelter, I saw our residents only as people bowed down by struggle and hardship, as people of sorrow who had encountered countless setbacks and hard knocks. …and then I began praying with people. To my utter astonishment, the vast majority of people’s prayers began this way: Thank you, God, for waking me up this morning. Thank you for giving me strength in my arms and legs that I can stand up and walk. Yes, people prayed for mended bones and restored relationships with family, but far more than anything, people thanked God. People thanked God for a safe place to sleep, for health care, for food every day. In all my 23 years of being a Christian, it had never occurred to me to thank God for strength in my arms and legs, for waking me up in the morning. All along, God had been waking me up in the morning and giving me strength in my arms and legs. All along, God had been providing for me in extraordinary ways, but I had never noticed.
In our Jesus story today, ten people with leprosy call out to Jesus for mercy. In the ancient world, leprosy caused physical pain as well as emotional pain for people with leprosy were marginalized and shunned, even by family. In this way, leprosy was both a social illness and a physical one. When these ten call out to Jesus for mercy, he tells them to go show themselves to the priests, a necessary act of ritual cleansing. They go, and on their way, they are healed. One comes back, a Samaritan, someone marginalized and shunned by the Jewish community not only because of the leprosy but because of their religious and cultural background. This one, only one, comes back to thank Jesus and to praise God. The other nine don’t, but this one recognizes the gift of their healing and their restoration to community. And Jesus commends him, saying, “Your faith has made you well.”
Today, this Samaritan teaches us that gratitude is to recognize the abundant gifts of God.
The story, it seems, everywhere is that leaders are corrupt, the world harsh and mean, the brokenness overwhelming. According to every news source. According to the stories we tell about our own lives. There is truth in these stories; of course there is. Still, God is good, and love and hope abound. God wakes us up every morning to a new day, and even when those we love do not wake to the new day with us, still, there is gift to behold. Maybe gratitude for God’s gifts seems too gentle, too joyous, a ridiculous focus in the midst of devastating climate change and nuclear tension, in the midst of our own illnesses and challenges related to housing or employment or a million other things. But how do we solve these problems? How do we get up from under all that might weigh us down? How do we move forward when stuck between a rock and a hard place? Will we push against the ocean and scream until we are red in the face, or will we first give thanks for all that God has done and is doing and will do? Will we name with raw astonishment the grace of God in this moment? Or as poet Linda Pastan writes in her poem entitled Imaginary Conversation:
You tell me to live each day
As if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
Where before coffee I complain
Of the day ahead—that obstacle race
Of minutes and hours,
Grocery stores and doctors.
But why the last? I ask. Why not
Live each day as if it were the first—
All raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
Her eyes awake that first morning,
The sun coming up
Like an ingenue in the east?
You grind the coffee
With the small roar of a mind
Trying to clear itself. I set
The table, glance out the window
Where dew has baptized every
Living surface.
Not even the real, gritty challenges of this life can erase the grace of God poured out for us. Like Eve on that first morning, we can rub our eyes and look around with raw astonishment at all that God has done. Like the Samaritan, we can thank Jesus and praise God when we recognize what God’s been up to in our lives. Like the people of God gathered at that west-side shelter, we can rise each morning and say, “Thank you, God, for waking me up this morning!” With eyes of faith, we see not only our challenges and our struggles but God’s grace poured out everywhere. Thanks be to God! Amen.