This week we celebrated Thanksgiving in Canada. It’s not a day covered in myths of the past, it’s just a simple time of families and friends gathering together to appreciate the good things in life and the food from the harvest. It’s a celebration I look forward to every year.

This year I had the opportunity to preach at a church I haven’t visited in over a year and a half, and the welcome was overwhelmingly kind. I spoke to them about thanksgiving as an act of praise rather than a social contract that observed the niceties of appreciation.

Far too often we trip over that social contract. The expectation that we will receive some kind of acknowledgement for anything we do, from giving money and time to holding doors open. We have been trained up to expect a passing word of gratitude for simple things and and more complex offering of thanks for bigger things. If those thanks are not automatically given, we are put out, perhaps even insulted.

But why?

If we were only doing it to receive thanks, then why do it in the first place?

In the telling of Jesus healing the ten men with leprosy, Jesus recognized the man who returned to praise God, not for giving thanks to Jesus himself. It was that act of praise that mattered. Who knows why the other nine didn’t do it. Perhaps they were overwhelmed with being reunited with their families and that thanks came later, or in our expectations of the day, perhaps they ‘paid it forward’.

Jesus didn’t demand his healing back, he just acknowledged to the crowd who gathered that praising God was part of being made whole.

Perhaps it’s time to worry less about the social contract around the words “Thank you”, and think more of giving and receiving in terms of gratitude and praise to God.

We give because God first gave to us without exception or expectation. It is now our turn to have that attitude. Offering gratitude to God simply completes the circle.