Written by Gordon McPhee

                                             John 6: 25-35

LUKE 17:11-19 [MSG]

It happened that as he made his way toward Jerusalem, he crossed over the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten men, all lepers, met him. They kept their distance but raised their voices, calling out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Taking a good look at them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.”

They went, and while still on their way, became clean. One of them, when he realized that he was healed, turned around and came back, shouting his gratitude, glorifying God. He kneeled at Jesus’ feet, so grateful. He couldn’t thank him enough—and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus said, “Were not ten healed? Where are the nine? Can none be found to come back and give glory to God except this outsider?” Then he said to him, “Get up. On your way. Your faith has healed and saved you.”

“WHAT’S IN A LITTLE ‘THANK-YOU’”

INTRODUCTION:

Welcome to Harvest Thanksgiving at St. Simeon’s and a beautiful, picture-perfect fall Sunday. I looked on the Anglican resources website and in the BAS with the expectation of finding a special Thanksgiving Day service loaded with prayers, liturgy, and canticles for this day, but I discovered that, although there are many thanksgivings for saints and occasions, the traditional harvest Thanksgiving Day gets no more than a brief nod. I suppose the echoes of pagan harvest festivals like the Scottish Lughnasadh (LOO-nuh-sah) dampen the liturgical lustre of the occasion. So today, although our scripture readings all reflect the theme of thanksgiving to God, it is, in fact, a regular service of Morning Prayer, so we’re going to have to “Thanksgiving it up” for ourselves this morning.

To rightly focus our hearts, I’d like to draw your attention to a short excerpt from our Old Testament reading in Deuteronomy 8. God has just reminded the Israelites of all they have to be thankful for and says,

If you start thinking to yourselves, “I did all this. And all by myself. I’m rich. It’s all mine!”—Well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today.

Which pointedly reminds us that if God removed his grace poured out on the whole world, Christian and not alike, by the power of the Holy Spirit, everything we have and even man’s ability to accomplish good, to care for this creation, as terrible a job of that we are doing anyway, to provide for ourselves, our loved ones, yes, even the needy in the world, would simply vanish like smoke. “If you start thinking to yourselves, ‘I did all this’,” then we are unseeing, ungrateful, and above all, most to be pitied.

So I’m going to get us in the Spirit of Thanksgiving by singing for you a song by Don Moen called “Give Thanks.” I hope it will help us embrace what’s in a little thank you.

Give Thanks

Give thanks

SERMON:

Thanks to Google AI, we now know that “Harvest Thanksgiving is a holiday that expresses gratitude for the blessings of the year, particularly an abundant harvest, and involves giving thanks to God or for community blessings.” To aid us in expressing our thankfulness, we can tap into helpful websites like “110 Best Thank You Messages to Express Your Gratitude,” or “5 Tips for Writing Meaningful Thank-You Notes,” and don’t forget that AI can write the thank-you note for you, yes it can, and it will be very sincere, in an artificial kind of way.

I also came across a Christian site called Crosswalk that suggests ways to give thanks and maintain an attitude of gratitude in our busy, everyday lives. They recommend keeping a blessing journal, developing morning and evening habits of giving thanks, and even setting an alarm on your cell phone to remind you to give thanks at various times throughout the day. Oh, and by the way, listening to appropriately sweet worship music, of the modern evangelical sort, will help prompt your thanksgiving.

I wouldn’t disparage any of these efforts to make this world a better place to live, a place where gratitude and thankfulness are more commonplace; however, there’s a certain hollowness in such practiced expressions of appreciation. We evoke the pleasant, fuzzy feeling, the rehearsed smile, and everybody feels better, but it seems to me there is a thing we see in Scripture, that this is not, but which is central to our relationship to God. I think it is something the Holy Spirit does in us that we cannot do for ourselves, and it is this that moves us to give thanks to God, like the Samaritan in our Gospel reading today did.

Luke packs so much into each story that it’s easy to get lost in arguments about the details or to miss the best parts altogether. Why were there ten lepers? It’s an awfully round number, and why tell us how many if it’s not significant? Would not a group of lepers serve as well as ten? Well, we, like the Jews hearing the story in Jesus' day, might consider that a Samaritan is one of the displaced ten tribes of Israel. The suggestion being that all the lepers were Samaritans, and particularly that Jews considered Samaritans, the people of Judah and Benjamin who occupied the territory around Jerusalem, unclean, or in a sense, all lepers.

Jesus is right at the border of Samaria and Galilee, so a group of Samaritan lepers is probably more likely than a mixed bag of Jewish and Samaritan lepers, and particularly unusual would be one Samaritan. The text says, “between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten men, all lepers, met him.” Luke is considered to be the Gospel writer for the Gentiles. He’s making this story, as he does with so many, about a Jesus who reaches out not just to the marginalized in society —a social gospel —but to the most ostracized of the Gentiles, the Samaritans —a universal gospel.

Luke, in telling this story in this way, ensures that we understand the cry “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” is for everyone and will meet with the same compassionate response that these ten lepers experience. They became clean. Now, as we know, there is only one of the nine who returns to give Jesus thanks; in fact, he “came back, shouting his gratitude, glorifying God.” And Luke significantly points out that “he was a Samaritan.” At which point our understanding of the passage takes a detour.

We want this to be about the nine supposedly good Jewish people, just unfortunate enough to be lepers, who were healed but ungrateful versus the outcast, gentile Samaritan, like us, who returned to Jesus to give thanks and who was not only healed, a temporal blessing, but was also saved, or as we like to think, his sins were forgiven and he, like us, attained eternal life. Or as I like to call it, he and we all lived happily ever after. Hogs wallop!

When Luke points out that the man is a Samaritan, his audience would have had confirmed what they already guessed and supposed, that they were all Samaritans; making this story instantly not about whether you’re good or bad, deserving or undeserving, Jew or Gentile. We can, as Luke’s audience could, paint ourselves onto any of the ten quite successfully. Which effectively turns the tables on how we understand what Luke is telling us Jesus is doing.

Whenever we read the Gospel of Luke we should be asking ourselves what in this passage was important to Jesus and what is Luke telling me my response to Jesus should be. As New Testament scholar Dr. Meda Stamper aptly puts it, this story offers us an image of who and what matters to Jesus and, therefore, should matter most to us. So first, who mattered to Jesus?

We could simply say, “Obviously, the lepers who needed healing.” But that would be to gloss over who the lepers represent. Jesus didn’t just heal everyone because they were sick. The lepers garner special attention because they are the outcast, the unclean, the marginalized and rejected. They are the ones the rest of society would prefer just not to be there. And before you do what comes so naturally to us, put the lepers in the ‘they’ group and yourself in the ‘us’ group. I’d ask you to remember what we said at the beginning about thankfulness and God’s provision by the Holy Spirit. Except for the compassionate overflowing grace of the power of the Holy Spirit, we would all be exactly who the lepers were.

And in fact, because all this grace and prosperity we enjoy is not of our own strength and doing, but by the gracious hand of God at work by the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are, most emphatically, the lepers. Marginalized and outcast but healed and redeemed by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, just as the lepers were.

If I told you your very next breath was God’s gift to you, given by the compassionate grace of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit, you might understand and say amen. But if I suggest that your pleasing disposition, your successful career, home, family, and provision is the not yours to own and wear with self-sufficient pride, but a gift of Jesus saying to you, “Go, show yourselves to the priests” you would, and probably downstairs at the coffee hour will, have words with me on that regard.

The good news is, if you are willing to hear it, Jesus' focus and concern, out of all the people he could have sought out to heal, was for the lepers —the despised and marginalized, us. And also as we said at the beginning, his grace is both sufficient and abounding because it was not limited to just the one who returned. All ten were healed, all ten experienced God’s grace. I’ll remind you of Matthew 5:45, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Also, Luke 6:35, “you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”

So that answers ‘who’ mattered to Jesus, now we ask ‘what’ mattered to Jesus. Well, you might reply, “Giving thanks for what the Holy Spirit has done,” and that would be fair. But Jesus asks a different question. Were not ten healed? Where are the nine?” Jesus' concern is for the nine who did not return. “Can none be found to come back and give glory to God?”

The Samaritan who returned “shouting his gratitude, glorifying God [kneeling] at Jesus’ feet, … grateful” was in the right place doing the right thing. His faith had both healed and saved him. The others were healed as a matter of God’s mercy, but it did not create in them a gift of faith. Most assuredly, they were healed. Jesus is Lord, and the power of the Holy Spirit is more than sufficient. It was the tiny gift of faith that brought the one leper back to Jesus.

I imagine and am quite sure the other nine lepers were just as grateful as the one who returned. But their gratitude focused on themselves. Certainly, they raised voices of elation and possibly even gratitude to God and called after the one returning to Jesus, “Hey, he said, go to the priests, where are you off to?” Their hearts were still absorbed by their own needs and concerns, and their gratitude didn’t translate into humble thanks to Jesus. Only the one returned. And this is what astounded and I imagine sorrowed Jesus. Just as he said in Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34 when thinking of Jerusalem, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

“So what’s in a little thank you?” Well, I don’t think it’s just the words and the sentiment, or all those excellent AI programs and websites would be all that we need. The one leper who returned seems to have been driven, impelled to return and give thanks. He didn’t wait. As soon as he realized he was healed, he “turned around and came back, shouting his gratitude, glorifying God.” He didn’t care if the others were going on or jeering at him, reminding him that, healed or not, he couldn’t get on with his life till the priest had seen him. Every fibre of his being was enslaved to this one need, to worship Jesus.

And that is what shows the difference in him. He didn’t decide to return and be grateful. He was overcome with gratitude for what Jesus had done. His focus was on Jesus, the giver of the blessing, not the blessing per se, nor all that it portended for his future. It wasn’t that he was healed, but that Jesus had loved him enough to heal him. He returned to worship the one who loved, because he loved him, not because he was healed.

When Jesus says “except this outsider,” he’s not speaking of the leper's status, either as a former leper or as a Samaritan. Jesus is making the point that he is the only one who recognized who he was. The other nine, sadly, thought that the only thing wrong with them was the leprosy, and once that was healed, as grateful for that as they were, that was the end of it. They were free. Only the one saw that he was an outsider, in need of Jesus for his whole life. And this is what Jesus cares about.

Jesus cares about the outsiders, the Samaritans, the lepers, us, and he cares that we come to see and know that it’s not enough to have a little blessing and grace and feel like we’re healed. Only when we return to him with truly thankful, penitent hearts, impelled by gratitude, do we show that faith by which Jesus can say, “Your faith has healed and saved you.”

We hold the tradition of saying grace before a meal to thank God for his bounty, but our reading from Deuteronomy 8 says, “After a meal, satisfied, bless God, your God, for the good land he has given you.” When we see how God, by the Holy Spirit, has healed us and blessed us, may we be moved by gratitude in the very depths of our being to kneel down and worship our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. In a little thank you, is the grace to heal and the faith to save.

Amen