Homily for Thanksgiving Day

November 28, 2024
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Sirach 50:22-24
Psalm 145:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Luke 17:11-19

Amidst the violence and destruction of the American Civil War in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday. He wrote, “No human counsel hath devised nor any mortal hand worked out these great blessings. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged with one heart and voice by the whole American People … that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to God for singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”

The Gospel which we have just proclaimed and heard shows us ten lepers who need repentance and healing. We are familiar with the story because we have heard it before. Yet, this familiarity might lead us to come to a negative judgment on the nine lepers who did not return to Christ to express gratitude. Perhaps, the nine simply did not recognize the spiritual significance of their healing and simply obeyed Christ’s command to show the priests their newly cleansed skin for the customary judgment for reinstatement into temple worship. If we listen to the Gospel, Christ makes no such judgment.

Perhaps the Samaritan returned to Christ because he worshipped at a different temple at Mount Gerizim and not like the Jews at Mount Zion, so he did what he was able to do to follow Christ’s commands and display gratitude for the healing. This parable offers us a reminder of the importance of presuming the best about the intentions and actions of others as essential to living our Christian faith with authentic charity. Without this charitable presumption, we reinforce the false stance of original sin that each of us is autonomous and not in need of anyone else, not our neighbors, not our families, and not God. Sin is a rejection of our nature as created in God’s image and likeness for relationship and love. Gratitude replaces fear and suspicion and offers in their place repentance and love.

Pope Benedict XVI offered the following insight many years ago, “Human beings who consider dependence on the highest love as slavery and who try to deny the truth about themselves, which is their creatureliness, do not free themselves; they destroy truth and love. They do not make themselves gods, which in fact they cannot do, but rather caricatures, pseudo-gods, slaves of their own abilities, which then drag them down.”

The story of the ten lepers, nine Jewish and one Samaritan, the story of the pilgrims and native Americans at the first American Thanksgiving, and reflection upon the story of Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of this national holiday at the end of the Civil War between the States should give us spiritual renewal today to seek gratitude and repentance when so many among us have chosen not to share Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends because of allegiance to partisan tribes. We can only have peace with each other if we are in right relationship first with God, and gratitude is the heart of that right relationship.

In his proclamation making Thanksgiving Day a national holiday, Abraham Lincoln called on the nation to recognize God’s proper and principal place, restoring the covenantal nature of our nation’s founding that had been reduced to merely a contract among self-interested individuals. He was calling on citizens of a nation wounded by civil war and slavery to belong first to God, second to humanity, and third to belong to the United States of America — a sense of belonging fostered through gratitude and repentance for sins.

The Lord asks again in the readings and prayers of this Liturgy of the New Covenant, “Were not all ten made whole?” As imitators of the one Samaritan leper, we come together without presumption to offer and to receive the Eucharist that transforms us and makes us whole, that engenders gratitude within our hearts, that forgives our sins, and that heals us and sends us forth to presume the best of our brothers and sisters as children of God and to love them for no other reason.