Thanks                                                      First Presbyterian Church

         A parishioner offered the preacher a quart of his home-made brandy provided the pastor acknowledge the gift in the Sunday bulletin.  The pastor accepted.  He wrote: “My hearty thanks to Brother Beavers for his gift of fruit and the spirit in which it was given.”

         Giving thanks is important.  We even drill it into the heads of little children.  Give the children candy and the first thing a parent will remind them of is: “What do you say?”  And the child immediately obediently responds “thank you.”  Somehow though we appear to lose that habit the older we get.  Writing thank you notes for Christmas gifts seems to be a thing of the past.  I rarely remember to thank those who provide treats for coffee hour and it is even rarer to thank people who have touched our lives.  We assume they automatically know we are grateful. 

         That is probably what the nine lepers in our scripture today assumed – or maybe they were so excited about their healing that they simply forgot to say thank you.  Too often that is us. 

         We see a breathtaking sunset and we comment on how beautiful it is, but we rarely breathe a thank you to the One who made it.  We thank those who pray for us when we suffer a serious illness, but frequently forget to say thanks to the Great Physician who healed us.  We are more frequently pray our requests than our thanks. 

         There is a story of the man who died and when He got to heaven, St. Peter took him on a tour so he could see where the angels worked.  The first room was crowded with angels answering phone call after phone call.  “What are they doing?” asked the man.  “Oh”, St. Peter said, “This is the room where all the personal requests come in.” 

The next room was also filled with angels busily at work.  “What about here?” he said.  “This is the room where we receive requests for somebody else.  We had to split the rooms up because they’re kept so busy.” 

Finally they got to a third room with one angel with his feet up on the desk and a dusty looking phone.  “Why isn’t this room busy?”  the man asked.  “Well, this is the room where we receive the prayers of thanks.”

Why are thank you’s so important? Part of the answer may be found in the dictionary and the thesaurus.  They remind us that thank you tells the giver that we are conscience of a benefit received.  Remember how your grandmother called to see if the gift really got there because no one said thanks?  I think that sometimes God wonders if we know the benefits, the blessings, He gives us.  When was the last time you thanked God for the love of your husband or wife? 

How many parents have thanked God that their child is finally graduating from college --- and even better – that they have found a job!  And the sigh of relief expressed by a “thank God.” doesn’t count.

The thesaurus also tells us that thank you can also be expressed by the words “gratitude, and appreciation.”  But what really caught my eye was that you could substitute the phrase “I will never forget what you have done.”

I think that was the message of the tenth leper.  He returned to Jesus and fell on the ground before Him to say not just how much he appreciated what Christ had done, but that he would never forget it.  It would change his life forever, and he didn’t mean just the physical healing.  He meant the spiritual healing as well, and because he recognized that, because he acknowledged that, Jesus tells him that his faith has made him whole. 

It surprised me that when I went to my favorite book of biblical meanings written by Frederick Buechner thank you was not included, even gratitude was missing --- and what struck me as profound is that gratitude would have come right between grace and guilt.  That is far too often true of our lives.  We find it difficult to accept pure grace and oh so easy to give into guilt.  I think truly acknowledging the one would help stem the other. 

And how do we give thanks to God?  How do we show our appreciation, our promise to never forget?  It is found in one word: “thanksgiving” for that one word is actually two:  “thanks” and “giving”.  We show our gratitude to God by the way we live our lives, by the things we do.

So today we are saying thank you to the choir and the acolytes for making our worship even more beautiful, but what we are really thanking them for is their thanks-giving to God and for their willingness to use the gifts God has given them to help us praise the Lord.   

But our greatest thanks will come as we celebrate communion this morning, for it is truly a celebration as we remember God’s greatest gift of love.  It is our declaration that we will never forget all that this meal symbolizes and the fact that it has changed our lives forever.  This truly is our thanks-giving feast. 

There is a traditional prayer frequently included in the liturgy around communion.  It goes like this: “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.  It is right to give Him thanks and praise.  Eternal God, holy and mighty, it is truly right and our greatest joy to give You thanks and praise. 

Let us thank God for the gift of faith as we stand to say what we believe.