October 13, 2013 – Luke 17:11-19
Luke 17:11-19
Ten Cured but only One Healed
21st Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 28] – October 13, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
This could be the shortest Thanksgiving Sunday sermon ever:
the moral of the story about Jesus and the ten lepers seems to be:
Don’t be a schmuck! Be thankful!
Amen! I can hear you saying.
But really: why should you be thankful?
I mean, all ten lepers were cured: what’s the point of being thankful?
One – a Samaritan – came back and said, “Thanks, Jesus.” Well, so what?
Unfortunately the translation we’re using masks the importance of what the Samaritan does.
In the end, Jesus says to him, “Your faith has made you well.”
But really what it says is, “Your faith has saved you.”
There is something amazing going on in the Samaritan’s thanksgiving:
there is actually salvation going on.
Somehow, the Samaritan in saying “thank you” has entered a realm that the other 9 haven’t:
the words “thank you” – so simple – take us on a big journey, right?
Gail and Melinda and I went to hear a speaker a few years ago who said,
When you teach a child to say thank you, their whole world changes:
in saying thank you the whole gift nature of life opens up for them:
suddenly everything is wonder, everything is gift.
All of the lepers experienced physical cure; only one, we might say, was healed, was saved:
the one who simply said “Thank you.”
Jesus is inviting us to consider this morning that physical cure is not the same thing as healing.
Being whole or well or healed has something to do with giving thanks.
And that’s something the Samaritan has, but the other 9 do not.
For one thing, the Samaritan recognizes that he has simply been seen.
He’s been seen by Jesus: Luke says,
“When Jesus saw them he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’”
The word that Luke uses here for “see” also has the meaning of “understanding.”
Jesus sees them on the surface, but he also sees deeply into the pain of these 10.
He sees what their condition has done to them.
Leprosy meant you had a disease of the skin in the ancient world,
and it excluded you from community: it cut you off from family and friends and
any social life whatsoever.
The only other people you could hang out with were, well, other lepers.
Oh: and you couldn’t live in town any more, either; did I mention that?
You had to live outside of town, outside of everything.
You couldn’t work and you couldn’t live, really: you were dependent on
the few coins passersby might throw you.
You were in a state of living death.
Jesus has that ability to understand this, right?
To really see all the implications of
their disease: they are cut off from everything, even from worshipping God.
They certainly were not allowed in the Temple.
So Jesus sends them to the priests at the Temple who would see that they had been healed
and who would give them the “all clear” to re-enter society again.
The Samaritan comes to recognize all this: that Jesus has seen him.
That Jesus has seen him in all of his pain and all of its implications.
Jesus almost always sympathizes with outsiders,
maybe because he himself is on the outs with his family.
For whatever reason, Jesus sees the Samaritan, and sees an opportunity to have mercy.
Jesus looks at this person in pain, and sees someone who is not just a Samaritan,
not just a leper, but a lovely child of God.
And that changes the Samaritan.
He falls in love with Jesus.
And that changes him.
And so he comes back to praise God and to thank Jesus
He falls in love with Jesus, because he, too, comes to see or understand something:
he perceives that God’s mercy has touched his life in Jesus:
that something big is going on in Jesus.
He becomes one of those who come to understand that God’s new world is breaking into
the old world through Jesus.
He comes to faith – to trust that this is so.
Through Jesus, the Samaritan is healed and restored: cured, sure, but more than physically cured:
restored to relationship.
Restored to relationship with the God whose designs are fully revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.
He falls in love with a God whose far far reach is breaking into this world and
who will not rest until everything in all creation is healed and made whole.
He falls in love with Jesus,
for he comes to trust that in Jesus God’s reign is breaking into the world.
And so he worships him, and in that worship finds wholeness, salvation, well-being, peace.
The Samaritan’s gratitude joins him to something much larger than himself.
And maybe that’s why gratitude is so powerful,
and so fundamental to Christian life.
Gratitude opens your eyes to the gifts of a very generous God that surround us
every moment of every day.
I have said many times that gratitude is the basic orientation of Christian life.
And at First Lutheran Church we are intentionally cultivating a culture of thankfulness.
Part of our council meeting time every month is given over to thinking about
who we need to be especially thankful for in the past month:
and then our council Secretary Diana sends them a beautiful thank you note.
It’s a way of calling to mind that Jesus has given us one another.
And that many, many of God’s gifts come to us through one another.
Forgiveness, delight, friendship, hope, caring, companionship, joy: the list is endless.
Oh, yes: these gifts come to everyone, for God is a generous giver.
God makes is rain on the good and the bad: All ten lepers receive their cure.
But gratitude for these gifts incorporates us into a larger story, God’s story, and is healing.
Gratitude takes us out of ourselves,
and makes possible the recognition that God is finally the giver of all gifts,
and that Jesus of Nazareth – who fully reveals the heart of this God –
seeks the healing and mending of all people.
Our central act of worship every Sunday morning is called the Great Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is at the heart of worship as it’s at the heart of Christian life.
The thanksgiving prayer is the largest, most expansive prayer of the day,
and it sweeps us into something much, much larger than ourselves: God’s story of
saving this world and every person in it.
In the Great Thanksgiving prayer we thank God for creating the world and all things in it.
We thank God for not leaving us to our own devices but sending us prophets to
call us back to God’s ways.
We thank God for sending us Jesus to feed us and heal us and forgive us and save us.
We thank God for raising Jesus from the dead, for sending us his Spirit, and
for promising to bring us to that day when all will be well and when all will be healed.
We thank God for making the divine heart and will known in Jesus,
for seeing us in our need, in our illness, in our pain, in our isolation,
and for taking the compassionate action of coming to us in
bread and wine and feeding us and forgiving us and healing us.
We thank God for raising us back to life.
And in that worship-filled thanksgiving there is a lot of healing.
We may or may not in this life be cured of the physical ills we suffer.
But the healing, the well-being, the salvation comes from being in a love relationship with
the one who sees, the one who understands, the one who can be trusted to bring blessing,
even when there is no cure.
When I visit you in hospital rooms, we worship, right?
We pray, and maybe we share communion.
And when I pray sure, I pray for cure, even if that cure may not come in this life.
But I definitely pray for healing, which is nothing less than
the salvation and well-being that rests in a relationship of faith or trust with
the Giver of all gifts.
I know that – like the nine lepers this morning –
healing does not necessarily follow physical cure.
Many years ago we prayed in worship for a woman who had had major surgery.
After the operation – which was successful – when she was getting better I went to see her.
She’d heard that we’d prayed for her, and was angry: I didn’t want everyone to know I was sick!
I apologized of course – I thought whoever had asked to put her on the list had her permission.
But what I was thinking was this: I think the words you are really looking for are thank you,
and thank everyone who busted their butts to get to worship and pray for me every week.
Sure: there was physical cure in this case, but there was no healing:
this was not a whole, well soul: healing does not always follow physical cure.
But I also know that the chronically ill can be among the most healed people I know,
who are in a love relationship with the God of all grace,
who has ultimately promised good to them,
who has given them countless gifts of family, and friends, and care,
even if one of those gifts is not physical cure.
I knew another person who knew he was going to die,
and every day I saw him was one great thanksgiving,
who knew whatever was going to happen to him would be good.
How did he know? God has been good to me and given me countless gifts throughout my life –
which I knew had not always been an easy life – and I trust God will continue to do that.
I’ve seen God bring life from death over and over again and I trust God will do it again.
Cure was not possible in this case: but this was a healed, whole, and well soul.
So: let us be healed in our gratitude to the giver of all gifts – and let us fall in love all over again.
Let us give thanks for the prime gift of the baptism of this beautiful child of God this morning,
Evelyn, who is incorporated into the people of God today and into
God’s mission to love, bless and heal this whole world and every person in it.
Let us give thanks for her parents and godparents and grandparents in faith.
Let us give thanks for being gathered together and given into one another’s care.
Let us give thanks for our long-time members who have stuck with this ministry through
thick and thin.
Let us give thanks for those who have taken the trouble to visit us this morning and
join with us in worship.
Let us give thanks for Chrystl, our choir, and for the wondrous miracle of music and
the ability to sing our thanksgivings.
Let us give thanks for Maria who has made us bread for Albert who has made us wine.
Let us give thanks for the children among us and for the elderly.
Let us give thanks for our many ministries and
the many people who support them with compassionate action.
Let us give thanks for the generous financial support of one another that
makes so much ministry possible here.
And may this great thanksgiving help us to see that God is powerfully at work for life in
Jesus risen from the dead – who lives right here, right now.
In the midst of our laments, in the midst of our loss,
but in the midst too of our love for the Great Healer of our ills, let us give thanks.
And in our worship together, may you – like the Samaritan –
on this day find healing: wholeness, salvation, well-being, and peace.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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