Get Real!

Homily for Thanksgiving Day (USA) 2025

When God gives he doesn’t give things, God always gives himself.

When human beings are grateful we give ourselves back in return.

Or, to put it another way:

Giving reveals God’s Divinity.

Gratitude reveals our humanity.

At the center of our gospel passage from Luke this Thanksgiving Day we read the line: “And one of them realizing he had been healed, returned and gave thanks.” I would like to suggest this line is at the heart of this gospel episode as it is also the lens through which we are invited to interpret the text.

The one who returns in gratitude is the one who has realized who God is and who he is in God’s eyes. What stops this man in his tracks is not that he has been relieved of some particular ailment, but rather that he has been made real and in being made real he is compelled to return to the truth of who he is by an act of gratitude. He experiences the reality of God in the gracious gift of healing given through Christ and in recognizing God he recognizes who he is before God and so he responds with that precious human cry of “thanks.” That simple movement of the human heart that awakens our humanity as it responds to God’s divinity.

Jesus’ healing didn’t just bestow renewed health on this man but the Gifting-nature of God pierced through the illusions that sickened the man in more ways than just leprosy, which was perhaps only a symptom of just how dehumanized he had become. And by the gift God awakened him once again to that unique glory that is his as a human being and all he could do, the only response possible, was to return and give thanks.

I don’t think it would be shocking if I said to you that we are living in a world increasingly fraught and freighted by surging cynicism, an encroaching callousness, a crippling crudeness, and a capricious cruelty. So much of the world seems to be sinking into Unreality and Inhumanity undergirded by the leprosy of an Ingratitude bent on dehumanizing. And, in the midst of this, we may be asking ourselves: What could I possibly do to stem the tide of such a surging force?

The answer, I would suggest, is simply this: Let us recommit ourselves to being people who realize and return. People who realize the gracious gift of God so our hearts in turn might offer the only remedy that can pierce through the illusions of cynicism, callousness, crudeness, and cruelty and in return make us human and humane again: that healing remedy is Gratitude!

God is made Real when we realize his gifts. We are made Real when, in return, we are grateful. And in the realization the illusions of cynicism, callousness, crudeness, and cruelty are crushed.

None of these can withstand even one single human being with a grateful heart. It is by simple acts of gratitude that we participate in the on-going salvation of the world. Reminding others who God is and who we are called to be.

It is Giving that makes God, God. And it is Gratitude that makes us human and humane. Let’s do our part to crush cynicism, callousness, crudeness, and cruelty by one simple act:

Let us give thanks!