Proper 23 (a week early in 2025)
Texts: Luke 11:11-19;
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Arc-V7vuE1w
Sermon Take-Home Notes
THE DEEP NEED FOR GRATITUDE IN RESISTING
THE DANGERS OF NATIONALISM
I begin with a story from one of my favorite books Diana Butler Bass’s Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks:1
On November 22, 2015, Pastor Jason Micheli stood in the pulpit at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and preached a sermon on gratitude. It was right before Thanksgiving, and it was the church’s stewardship season, a time when congregations are urged to consider gifts and generosity. In the autumn, a gratitude sermon was nothing out of the ordinary.
But this was not an ordinary day. Jason, a forty-something father with young children, was preaching for the first time in nearly a year — since being diagnosed with and treated for a rare and incurable form of cancer. He was better, and the cancer was “controlled,” but, as the congregation knew, he would have to do chemo every two months for the rest of his life. He stood in the pulpit, barely out of treatment, to preach a thanksgiving sermon for his community.
He began: “You all have done so much for us. You’ve fed us and prayed for us and with us. You’ve helped us with my medical bills, and you’ve sat with me in the hospital. You were there to catch me when I passed out in the chemo room, and you didn’t bat an eye when I puked in your car.”
But, he said, as much as he appreciated it, he actually hated all that help. “I’ve always been awful at receiving gifts,” he admitted, “I hate feeling like I’m in another’s debt. . . . I was a guy who kept score, which means I didn’t mind you being in my debt. I just didn’t want to be in yours.”
But he learned something: Gratitude is not about repayment of debts. It is about relationships. Through his cancer, Jason discovered that courage and hope could not be summoned magically; rather, strength and healing came through community. He spoke of the church’s greatest gift to his family in crisis: “We can endure all things because you’ve been with us. You’re with us. More so than all the stuff you’ve done for us, you’ve been with us.”
With no dry eye in the congregation, he continued, “It was kind of you to share my nightmare. It was kind of you to share in my pain and suffering. It was kind of you to share in Ali’s worry, in my boys’ fears and anxiety. It was kind of you to make my cancer — our cancer — yours too. Thank you,” he finished, “for being with me.”2
Butler Bass ends the story by concluding: “Gratitude is social. It is about, as Pastor Jason learned, ‘presence, participation, and partnership.’ It is about being with one another, in life together. It is the thread of nature and neighbor, the seemingly fragile strands of gifts and goodness that weave our lives together.”3
This reality of gratitude is the foundation of my sermons from August through November, as we navigate the middle section of Luke’s Gospel on God’s economics, where we encounter six rich men with Jesus, three in parables and three in-person. In encountering these wealthy persons, Jesus teaches us the dangers of wealth, how it has a tendency to lead us into foolishly hoarding it against our neighbors, creating an indebtedness to one another and a chasm of isolation that is destructive not only to the person but also to the moral fabric of our societies.4
Let’s be clear-eyed about our times: All forms of nationalism are based on deadly hoarding, on debt-keeping and not debt-releasing. In our moment in history right now, we are encountering such a nationalistic destruction that is taking lives as we speak. I cannot overemphasize how serious a moment we are living through. But I can properly emphasize how important it is for us to learn God’s economics of grace and gratitude with which to teach our fellow citizens.
One of the things I love about Diana Butler Bass’s book Grateful is that she started to write it back in 2015-16, when our history as a nation was about to change in drastic ways. When Donald Trump was elected that November, she was tempted to quit writing this book on gratitude, because she felt the opposite of grateful. But eventually it became even more urgent for her to continue writing, because gratitude is the basis of all healthy human living. We need to be able to cultivate gratitude in our lives no matter what, as the very key to being able to live into God’s reign that came into this world through Jesus. It becomes even more important to live in gratitude at times like this, not less. Otherwise, we are in danger of being consumed by the tide of resentment around us. Gratitude is not so much a feeling as it is a lifestyle choice. That’s what this book is about . . . so much wisdom . . . I highly recommend it. That’s why stories like Pastor Jason’s are so important. We learn to live into gratefulness no matter what, as a bulwark against the negativeness around us. It becomes our shield of faithfulness to God that helps us to not only survive such times but to find ways through it. We resist the divisiveness of nationalism by living into the social cohesiveness of gratitude, and we invite our neighbor-citizens to join us in real community, not the false community based on being over-against others.
We are just past half-way in our journey with Jesus to the cross, in which we encounter six rich men alongside him. Here, near the middle, we learn thankfulness from a Samaritan leper, who represents the polar opposite of most wealthy, powerful men who ascend to leadership throughout our human history. In the first five encounters with rich men in Luke’s Gospel, the lessons are negative. We are to learn how not to follow the paths of such rich men. We do encounter positive examples along the way, but they are from ordinary people — like us perhaps, like the woman bent over for eighteen years whom Jesus, or like this Samaritan leper whom Jesus has healed. Just before our own Thanksgiving holiday, we will finally encounter one positive example of a rich man who repents, in the sixth and final encounter with rich men. It will be Zacchaeus the tax collector of all people. Another twist in the story, like the one of ten lepers who returns in thanksgiving being a Samaritan, a perceived enemy.
For now, let’s cement the importance of what we learn today, in the context of this journey with Jesus to learn about the economics of God’s reign. It is never based on hoarding wealth but rather on sharing it with your neighbor — and who your neighbor is may also surprise us. He or she may be someone we thought to be an enemy. Sharing wealth is the true foundation to faithfully living in community with the human family and with our earth home. And the basis of sharing wealth rather than hoarding it is to live into gratitude.
Can you and I learn to respond with gratefulness even when the circumstances seem to prompt anything but? We have no hope of doing so in isolation, living in silos of social media. But we have every hope of doing so when living in community with each other, with Christ as our head. He paid the ultimate price for living into God’s reign in the midst of this world’s nationalistic empires. He was tortured and executed, but on the third day rose again.
On the night of his betrayal, he left us this sacrament that we share as the basis for our life together. We sometimes call it the Eucharist, from the Greek work for giving thanks.5 We remember that on the night before his crucifixion, he took bread and gave thanks, “This is my body given for you.” He also took a cup of wine and gave thanks, “This is my blood poured out for you and all people for the forgiveness of debts. Do this in remembrance of me.” What is the do this? Certainly, to share the sacrament itself each week. But surely also to do gratitude. To give thanks with our very lives. To be like the one of the ten lepers, who happened to be a Samaritan, falling at our Lord’s feet so to speak, to live lives of gratefulness to God. Why? Because no matter what the nationalistic hoarders of wealth tell us, there is an abundance in God’s creation, not a scarcity, when we learn to gratefully share it with our neighbors. Let us do gratitude in remembrance of Jesus. Amen
Epilogue
One of the other themes this past few months is that the Jews were an indigenous people in other people’s empires. Jesus was an indigenous man in the Roman Empire. So if we want to learn God’s economics today, we would do well to listen to indigenous people like Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book The Serviceberry, which I’ve featured in recent weeks. Lo and behold, if you word-search words like “gratefulness, “gratitude,” and “giving thanks,” there are hundreds of references. It’s the center of her book and her “gift economics.” This week’s Sermon Take-Home Notes were not finished at the time of the sermon, but they will feature many passages from The Serviceberry and be made available later in the week.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, October 5, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Arc-V7vuE1w
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks: HarperOne, 2018.
2. Butler Bass makes the following footnote for the source of this story: Jason Micheli, “Primed for God: Gratitude,” Aldersgate United Methodist Church, Alexandria, VA, November 22, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWkw-dcu2o4. Jason tells his story in Cancer Is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016).
3. Butler Bass, Grateful, 98-99.
4. Once again, the guide for reading Luke’s Gospel in this fashion, around “Six Rich Men Sequences,” has been Ched Myers’ book Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025).
5. The Greek word in our Gospel reading in v. 16, in fact — “He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him” — is eucharisteō.
