Gratitude

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Luke 17:11-19

    In high school, I played the trumpet in my church’s brass choir.  The people in that group were some of my greatest supporters and mentors, not only musically, but also spiritually.  Whenever I hear this story about the nine people forgetting to give thanks, I think of this moment after one worship service where we had played as a brass choir, and the lead trumpet player turning to me and said, “You did a really great job today.”  Keep in mind that I was a shy, awkward adolescent.  “Oh, it was pretty easy music, and I definitely messed up on that part and that other part…” I started to enumerate how I did not deserve any compliment.  My fellow trumpet player stopped me from going further and said, “Just say, ‘thank you.’”
    “Just say, ‘thank you.’”  Learning both to give AND accept thanks maybe is more difficult than we realize sometimes.  “Thank you” is one of those polite phrases we are taught to say at a very young age along with “please” and “you’re welcome.”  Probably all of us in thinking about it today would admit we could say “thank you” more often.  We forget to be thankful.  Or we struggle to accept thanks from others.
Why do we forget to be thankful?  Both our Old Testament lesson and gospel give us insight into the human reality that we tend to focus on what goes wrong in our lives, not noticing or paying attention as much to what goes right.  Maybe these other nine who don’t turn back to thank Jesus feel that they deserve their healing; they have been faithful, they have waited so long and experienced social and spiritual isolation- it’s about time they were healed of their skin diseases!  Maybe they’re caught up in groupthink and find it difficult to break away from the crowd, “well, if Joey over here isn’t going back to thank Jesus, I guess it’s OK if I don’t, either.”  Maybe they’re putting it off – those thank yous you have meant to send, but after you go to the priest for certification that you are clean – then you forget, then it seems too late to still send the thank you card.  Maybe, believe it or not, they do not connect what has just happened to them on the way to the priests as coming from Jesus or God at all!  Maybe they think their healing is just happenstance, coincidence, a new skin salve or lotion that actually worked!
    Well, the list could go on and on for reasons why we don’t “just say thank you.”  In our story about Naaman this morning, he tries to complicate his healing.  His attitude seems to be, “What, that’s it?  All I have to do is wash seven times in the Jordan and I’ll be healed?”  The servants convince him, “if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?  How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash and be clean?’”  When we lift up gratitude as a discipleship practice, this one is so easy, you might think it should be more difficult.  We complicate our prayer life, thinking we need to sit down at a set time each day or else, with flowery words like admittedly we have in our Sunday morning worship service sometimes.  Maybe we think we need to wait for the right time – hey it’s October, not Thanksgiving yet, we only have one day set aside for gratitude!  It’s too soon to say Thank you!  What should we do in response to God’s saving love and grace?  “Just say, ‘thank you.’”  It’s that simple. That is all that “practicing gratitude” requires. Can we simply acknowledge all these gifts from God and recognize God as the giver?  That’s what gratitude is.
    “Gratitude” is trendy in our secular world today.  In fact, when I was preparing my sermon for this Sunday, I came across a resource from a guy whose title is “gratitude expert.”  “Wow,” I thought. What does it take for someone to have a job where they get paid to research and advise people about gratitude? Sounds like a nice job!  Suffering from anxiety or depression? Try a gratitude journal!  Feeling isolated? Write some thank you notes!  Trouble sleeping? Focus on what you were thankful for about the day.  All of these ideas are good advice.  There are many studies about how effective practicing daily gratitude, or intentionally saying “thank you” daily, can be for our mental and physical wellbeing!  
    Let’s claim, though, from the Christian tradition, that gratitude is not just a health trend.  The point of both our story about Naaman and the one leper who turns back to give thanks to Jesus, is that they recognize the great Giver of the gifts that they have received.  We “just say thank you” to someone – namely, to God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.  God is the source and recipient of our gratitude.  So we say thank you in our prayers to God when we can’t sleep; we address God in our gratitude journals; and like in our children’s sermon, maybe we even write thank you notes to God.  Naaman, after his protests, gets over his sense of entitlement and comes to say in his gratitude, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.”  This is a big deal, because Naaman is an Aramean commander, of the foreign enemy of Israel – not a Jewish believer in God.  Similarly, it is the Samaritan, a non-Jewish foreigner, who recognizes that Jesus is the source of his healing.  Note that he is not only healed physically, but Jesus tells him that his faith has made him well – another very common translation is “your faith has saved you.”  In experiencing the healing mercy of Jesus, the Samaritan man receives salvation, and his heart overflows with gratitude.  He can’t help but praise God with a loud voice.  His gratefulness to God cannot be contained, and we hope, is even more contagious than his leprosy!
    So we also, like Naaman, like the Samaritan man, learn to just say thank you when we take a moment to reflect on all that we have received from God.  It doesn’t require much.  It’s not complicated.  Sometimes, still, it is difficult.  Nonetheless, cultivating a daily practice of giving thanks strengthens our relationship with God and becomes contagious.  Other people want to know about our sense of joy, peace, and hope.  When we begin by saying “thank you” to God, other discipleship practices like worship, prayer, service, and generosity easily follow.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.