You guessed it — these lessons all focus on giving thanks. Thanksgiving Day is both a national holiday and a day of religious observance for most churches in the United States. It is a day when both civic and religious leaders exhort us to be thankful. Our own reactions may be decidedly mixed. If we’re not thankful already, how will any exhortations help? We may also feel a sense of dread at forced family gatherings. We may even be wondering if it is appropriate to celebrate the beginnings of European colonization. Can we be fully honest about all this and still be genuinely thankful? Or is gratitude one of our fundamental “drives,” something that seems to well up in us even when we have every reason to feel resentful? Can we be fully honest without giving thanks?

	How do you react to this holiday? Is it one of your favorites? Is it something you dread? Is it a mixture of both? Where do you find God on a day like this?

Luke 17:11-19 recounts a remarkable story of thanksgiving. Ten “unclean” people are made clean as they follow Jesus’ instructions, and one of them, still an outsider in other ways, remembers to give thanks. Holly Hearon feels obliged to interject: “OK, let’s be clear that this is not a text about healing homosexuals.” It is more about thanksgiving than healing.

Charles Allen and Helene Russell find more of a parallel between LGBT people and this other “good” Samaritan. Samaritans told the story of God’s covenant with God’s people in a way that did not match the story that nourished Jesus and his own people. In the eyes of many, this so-called “lifestyle choice” would have made the Samaritan “unclean” even after his leprosy was healed. And yet Jesus commends this man’s different way of being faithful as filled with the wholeness of God. Like the Samaritan, LGBT Christians also “return and give praise to God” (verse 15) in a faith community that argues over welcoming them.  They find themselves commended by God for their own varieties of faithfulness.

The story, according to Holly Hearon, reminds us all that sometimes the best examples of faithfulness may be among those who are least like us, however we describe ourselves. It also reminds us, according to both Helene Russell and Holly Hearon, that God cares equally for those who are grateful and those who are not. Jesus marvels at the Samaritan’s gratitude without condemning the nine who did not return. All were healed. Helene Russell points out that Jesus is also affected by the Samaritan’s reaching out in relationship.

	How do you envision the wholeness toward which all healing aims? Can you be whole if you suppress what makes you different from others? Can you be whole if you suppress what makes others different from you? Can you be whole without being grateful? Where does wholeness ultimately come from?

Deuteronomy 8:7-18 is, unfortunately, precisely the sort of passage that inspired Europeans to colonize the world: “Let us thank God for putting us in charge of this wonderful land!”  Charles Allen wonders, “How would we hear this text if we invited Native Americans, Palestinians and Israelis to our Thanksgiving table? Is there a way for all of us to celebrate God’s generosity and providence when all of us can tell horror stories of violence done to us in the name of the sacred?” We must also be honest about the author of Deuteronomy’s terrifying agenda: Obey God, exterminate other faiths, and you will prosper; disobey, or practice indifference, and you will fail.

But does prosperity reflect God’s blessing and adversity God’s judgment? Recall Christians who blamed Hurricane Katrina in part on a LGBT festival in New Orleans over that Labor Day weekend. Other biblical writers denied this “prosperity gospel” in the name of the same God who prompted Deutoronomy’s author to write, and so must we. The God who led Israel in its journey from captivity into a new land of promise is the God who will not allow us to be satisfied with our own prosperity if it comes at others’ expense. This is the God whose generosity must not be forgotten. On that point, Charles Allen acknowledges, the Deuteronomist is right.

Holly Hearon also insists that there is no prosperity gospel in this passage and that, until everybody knows justice, “we have not yet arrived in the ‘land’.” She observes, furthermore, that those of us in the LGBT community who now have it easier than before can never afford to forget what life was like before Stonewall.  Life is still like that for far too many of us. Helene Russell also rejects the prosperity-gospel reading of this text and insists that it is about Israel’s relationship to the God who is with us regardless — in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer.

	Where is God in your life when things go well? Where it God when they don’t go so well? What is the best way to thank God in a world where too many still lack the abundance that God has promised?

Paul instructs us, in 2 Corinthians 9:6-15, that God never blesses us for ourselves alone. God gives to us so that we can give to others. That is how we best show gratitude! Psalm 65 seems to see nothing but goodness in God’s creation. God is bringing good out of all things. Even when we are overwhelmed we can still say, “O you who answer prayer! To you all flesh shall come” (verse 2).

	How often do you share what you have received? Do you find joy in that? How often have you been on the receiving end yourself? Try to imagine a world where all are given what they most need? How can we bring that world closer?