Harvest – An opportunity to give thanks to our Lord for the good things we receive from him.
We are thinking today about giving thanks and that’s one of the good things of harvest. It gives us an opportunity to give Thanks. Harvest is quite traditional in British history as being a time of celebration. It goes back to a time when we all relied on agriculture and farming for our food and so landowners would have a massive celebration for all the workers for all the hard work that’s been done in gathering in the harvest and giving Thanks for all the food. In biblical times there were 2 types of harvest mentioned where there was specific celebrations in the faith of the Jewish people to remember God as creator and provider of all the things that people had been given at the harvest times. The celebration was about recognising Gods provision and praising his name.
I wonder how thankful we after for what we have.
As as it’s harvest time, I thought I would think about some of our favourite food or maybe not so favourite foods and how easy it might be to give thanks for things that we don’t always or might not always appreciate. I have here a lucky dip so I need help to select an item to share what that is, and then I want us to say whether we like it or not so let’s play this kind of game. So let’s look at what we have and cheer if you like it and boo if you wouldn’t appreciate it.
It’s sometimes hard to be thankful for things that we don’t always appreciate, but I wonder how good we are at even showing Thanks for the things that we do enjoy and are grateful for and when we say thanks is it just because of habit or is it because we really truly appreciate what we’ve been given and are grateful and thankful.
Our reading today was about 10 lepers, who encountered Jesus. Jesus was going about his business, and he’s been doing miraculous things and teaching them amazing truths about who he was and what he’d come to do, and he’s walking along this this way, and there’s some lepers that are approaching him, but they keep their distance because leprosy was a really contagious disease and it was a disease that meant you were an outcast, so you didn’t live with your family. You lived in communities with other people that had this skin condition and in the Jewish faith, it was a condition that meant that you were unholy, so you couldn’t go to worship in the synagogue or be in society.
These lepers stand before Jesus and ask him for mercy, ask him to have pity on them. They don’t outright ask for healing, but they obviously want something from Jesus. Yes, I’m going to heal you. He doesn’t immediately heal them on the spot. He tells them to show yourselves to the priests. In the book of Leviticus, there are things that you need to do if you’ve been healed from leprosy, you have to show yourself to a priest and they would say whether you were clean, able to enter society again and worship God with everybody in the Jewish community or whether you had to remain an outcast.
So Jesus tells these 10 lepers to go and show yourselves to the priest, and were told that on the way that they were healed by faith, and it says that they heard what he said, they went, and showed themselves to the priest, knowing that in the state of leprosy that they wouldn’t be accepted his book, trusting that something might happen and it does on the way, they were cleansed.
This happened to all 10 lepers but we then only hear about one of them. We are told that one leper saw that he had been healed and seeing that he’s been healed. He returned to Jesus where we’re told that he bowed down. He praised and thanked Jesus, and then we’re given this little footnote that he was Samaritan and Samaritans were actually quite despised by the Jews. They were kind of rivals. In saying this one was a Samaritan, it’s assuming that the other nine were Jewish. They’d kind of experienced the same healing but they carry on on their way and show themselves to the priests and re-entering society, but it was this Samaritan that had seen he was healed and went back to the source of the healing to show his thanks and his gratitude.
When he is on his knees before Jesus, Jesus said were not all ten cleansed?, where are the other nine, has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner!.
We are quite challenged, there’s so many things that we can give thanks for, the good food, for the ability to have choice and variety for friends, for family, for colleagues, for our health. We put this in the big context of giving thanks for all these things, because of Jesus is Love and provision for us, and for the entire world. I wonder whether sometimes we just carry on with our every day and we forget to thank Jesus for being Jesus. Do we see him in the provision of our friendships and relationships and food and health.
Do we give thanks because of Jesus, because we know him?
Do we give thanks for everything in every circumstance, our opening verse said in everything give thanks in other versions it says in all circumstances, even in the good the bad and the ugly that there are things that we can give thanks for in those situations and we told to do it because that’s what we have been commanded to do.
So let’s be like that one leper who saw what Jesus had done for him, he came back to him and gave him the praise and thanks that he was due.
Let’s make efforts to look at our own lives and circumstances, and to see God in that, giving him thanks for who he is and for all that he has done and will continue to do for us.
St. Luke's Church Ramsgate 