Gratitude: It Might Just Save Your Life

Perhaps some of you remember the story of Aron Ralston. Aron was rock climbing in a remote desert canyon in Utah back in 2003 when he fell and his arm became pinned under an 800 pound boulder. He was stuck for five days with no sign of a search party, little water and only a small multi-tool with which to chip at the rock. Finally he made a difficult and desperate decision: his only hope of escape was to cut off his own crushed lower arm. To make a gruesome story short, he succeeded in doing so , improvised a tourniquet, rappelled down a 60 foot cliff, and hiked six miles until he was found by rescuers. Today he wears a prosthetic arm, has a son, and still climbs mountains.
Aron was a member of Hope UMC in Denver, CO at the time of his accident. His pastor later explained what had changed things for Aron on that 5th day, what had given him the strength to do the unthinkable and go on living.
As Aron lay there with his arm pinned, his water exhausted, and no way to escape, he realized he was going to die. And realizing this, he began to reflect on his life. He remembered all the wonderful things about his life and he was thankful; thankful for all the hikes, and all the mountains climbed. He was thankful for all the beauty in the world: the beautiful vistas and stunning sunsets, the moving music. Pondering his own death, he was not overcome by despair or fear. Instead, he was overcome with gratitude.
Aron was particularly grateful for his family and friends and the love that they shared. He later reflected that love helped keep him alive. He told an interviewer, "It was very much a spiritual experience…. For me … to go through this and realise, well, God is love, and love is what kept me alive and that love is what got me out of there."  In what very well could have been the last moments of his life, Aron Ralston looked back over his 27 years and was overcome by thankfulness for love, beauty and the goodness he had experienced. And that thankfulness filled him with a desire to keep living. That profound gratitude for life and the accompanying desire to experience more of life’s goodness and beauty of life, that was the source of his strength, the source of the courage necessary to cut off his arm and struggle down from the mountain.   As Martin Thielen aptly observes, “Gratitude literally saved Aron Ralston’s life.”              
In our scripture, Jesus is traveling through the “region between Samaria and Galilee,” what we today might refer to as “the borderlands,” something like the lands on either side of the U.S./Mexico border.  This “in-between” location is important for what is to come. As John Shea points out, “Although Jesus is a Jew from Galilee, he is never completely defined by his ethnic identity. He is God’s son who has been sent to all people [not just to his fellow Galileans or even only to all Jews]. Therefore, as he walks through this no-man’s land, he turns it into everyman’s land…. the place where God meets all people, and Jews and Samaritans meet one another.” This is typical of Luke’s account of the Gospel, in which Jesus repeatedly crosses boundaries and transgresses social norms to share God’s love, enact God’s mercy and draw people together into God’s kingdom—because God knows no borders and transcends all human social distinctions. No one is a foreigner, no one is an outsider to God. After all, as Aron Ralston recognized, God is love.    
In this particular case, the borderland between Samaria and Galilee, between Jews and Samaritans, becomes the place where a group of lepers will experience God’s compassion. Recognizing Jesus as he approaches a village, a group of ten lepers beseech him to show them mercy. He responds by telling them to go and show themselves to the priests and, as they go, they are healed. One man, overcome with gratitude, turns back so that he might thank Jesus, rejoicing and praising God as he went.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the other nine now former lepers. After all, they presumably do exactly what Jesus told them to do: go to the priest so that he could certify that they were indeed healed so that they could rejoin the community. That obedience is consistent with how they had addressed Jesus. The lepers had called him “master,” a term that is only used in Luke by disciples. They were acting like disciples by obeying Jesus. Further, we are told that they are healed “as they go” to see the priests. They obey before they are healed. They obey out of a belief that Jesus will have mercy, a trust that he will make him well. And he does. Their obedience is an act of faith, an act typical of disciples.  
In addition, the men were no doubt ecstatic to find themselves suddenly made clean. Leprosy encompassed a variety of different skin diseases, not just Hansen’s disease, the condition we normally think of when hearing the term. But in addition to the physical suffering of their disease, lepers were also outcasts, forbidden to enter human settlements, separated from the community of family and friends, so that they might not infect others. Surely, these men were anxious to return to the families from which they had so long been separated. It is easy in a moment of great happiness to forget to say thank you.
But one man did not forget, and in doing so, he shows us that discipleship involves more than just obedience. It is of no small import that this man was a Samaritan, a member of a deeply disliked ethnic group. Once again, a non-Jew, someone who was understood at the time to be outside of God’s chosen people, is setting an example of how humans should relate to God. This outsider, this “foreigner,” is demonstrating to the good religious folks—those of Jesus’ time, those Christians to whom Luke wrote, and all of us gathered here today—what faithful love of God should look like. This Samaritan reacted to being healed in the most appropriate of ways: he praised God. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth believed that gratitude is the most basic human response to God’s goodness to us. “What else can we say to what God gives us but to stammer praise?”   Indeed, how else can we respond to God’s great love for us, but to love God in return.
To give thanks to God is to recognize that life itself is a gift. God’s presence, God’s care, God’s help are all gifts. We have no basis on which to expect God to act toward us in this way, we have no claim on God, we cannot earn such graciousness. Rather, God’s care and help is a purely gratuitous outflowing of God’s loving nature. God is the giver of every good gift, because God is love. That is why Meister Eckhardt, the early 14th century German theologian and mystic, once said, “If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, it is enough.”  It is enough to sincerely say thank you, because those words contain a recognition of our great need for God, who is the source of our life, and of God’s great goodness and grace to us, for God is also our sustainer, our help and our hope. In other words, giving thanks reflects a recognition of the realities of the Divine/human relationship. Religious fear and guilt are born of a partial picture of God’s character. But when we begin to understand who God is and what God is like, then thanksgiving, gratitude, and praise are the most natural and appropriate human responses.
The appropriateness of such a response is illustrated by the derivation of a familiar Spanish word. In Spanish, if you want to thank someone, you say “gracias.” “Gracias” is derived from the Latin word gratia. Gratia can mean “thankfulness,” but it also means “grace” and can be used to indicate “friendship.” Here language mirrors the reality of our relationship to God. There is a close connection between thankfulness and grace: we are thankful, because we have received God’s grace; we are grateful because, in Jesus, God has freely and graciously chosen to befriended us. We say “gracias” because God has shown us “gratia.” And in doing so, we recognize the nature of our relationship to God. 
I think that is why Jesus tells the grateful Samaritan, “Your faith has made you well” or more accurately “your faith has saved you.”  The man has already been healed; his leprosy is gone. But his faith, expressed in thankfulness, lived out in gratitude, has made him well, has saved him, because he has been granted a new life. Not only is his body healthy, but so too is his mind and heart. He has been reconciled to God and now he has a whole new outlook on life. He is no longer living out of self-concern; now he is living out of gratitude. He is no longer trusting in himself; now he is trusting in God. He is no longer a foreigner; now he is a child of God. Gratitude is an expression of faith and it changes the way one views the world and the way one lives and acts in the world.
When the Rev. John Claypool’s ten-year-old daughter died of leukemia, he realized he was confronted with a couple of choices. He could simply accept her death as God’s will. But this didn’t work because he couldn’t believe that God killed children. Alternatively, he could seek to understand the reason this had happened. But, this didn’t work either because his daughter’s death just didn’t make sense. He could see no reason for it, no greater good that could not have happened apart from her untimely death. 
Ultimately, he chose a third course: gratitude. He realized that life is a gift given to us by God. It is not something we earn, something we choose, nor something to which we are entitled. Like Aron Ralston, Claypool came to see that life is a gracious gift of our loving God who desires others with whom to share that love. And so, John Claypool chose to give thanks for the 10 beautiful years he had with his daughter. He chose to be grateful instead of giving in to the negativity of bitterness or resentment. This was not an easy path to follow—his grief was very real and very strong. But ultimately gratitude proved to be the only way he survived. Gratitude for the gift of his daughter got him through, when nothing else helped. It is no stretch to say, “Gratitude saved John’s life—spiritually, emotionally and perhaps even physically.” [Martin Thielen, 135]
By changing the way we view the world, as it did for John Claypool, gratitude can change us for the better, not only as individuals, but as a people. Gratitude can transform congregations. Kimberly Bracken Long writes, “When Christians practice gratitude, they come to worship not just to “get something out of it,” but to give thanks and praise to God. Stewardship is transformed from fundraising to the glad gratitude of joyful givers. The mission of the church changes from ethical duty to the work of grateful hands and hearts.
When we as a congregation are grateful, it’s not all about us. Gratitude moves us to follow Jesus, who, as God’s Son, offered God’s mercy and demonstrated God’s love to everyone he encountered. As Jesus’ brothers and sisters, as God’s children by grace, gratitude moves us to show love, grace, compassion and mercy to everyone, just as he has shown them to us. When we are grateful our burdens become light and worshipping, giving, serving and praying become joyful, voluntary acts of thanksgiving.
So let us join with Aron Ralston and John Claypool and be thankful for God’s goodness to us. Let us praise God with loud voices and joyful hearts. Let us fall before Jesus and give him thanks. Let us live lives that are embodiments of gratitude, lives that enact our thanksgiving in gestures of grace, deeds of compassion and works of love. For God, who has given us the gift of life, is our good and gracious helper. Christ is our loving savior. We have abundant cause to be grateful. What else can we do, but join with the healed Samaritan and say, “Gracias! Thank you!”