Faithful Living,
Grateful Living
Luke 17:11-19
October 13, 2013[1]
This
morning, we continue to journey with the Gospel of Luke as Luke describes
Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. You may
remember that last week, we spoke about stepping forward in faith and identified
it as the key to being able to forgive those who have hurt us. Today, we look at how stepping forward in
faith leads to wellness, to wholeness, and how that wholeness is reflected in
our gratitude.
We
often give a simplistic interpretation of this story. Ten lepers were healed; one returned to say
“thank you.” Is the moral of the story simply
that we should mind your manners and say “please” and “thank you?” Those words certainly are good things to say;
but if that is all we draw from this story, we might as well learn it from our
mothers, our kindergarten teachers or from “Miss Manners.” We don’t need to take up Jesus’ time for that
lesson.
There
is a much deeper lesson here. The leper who
returned to say “thank you” demonstrated a thanksgiving that went far beyond
good manners.
We
can draw the inference from the story that all ten of the lepers knew and obeyed
the Jewish law--even the one who was a foreigner, a Samaritan. How can we draw this inference? All knew, during the time of their infliction,
that they were banished from society in accordance with the Levitical law:
The person who has the
leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be
disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as long as he has the
disease; he is unclean. He shall live
alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.
(Leviticus 13:45-46).
Further,
all ten understood very well the instruction that Jesus gave to them—to go show
themselves to the priests. The Levitical
law was just as strict, if not more so, about the procedures to be followed when
the lepers were cured from their disease.
The law established an elaborate process for washing both the body and
the clothing of the healed person, as well as a requirement for a sin offering
and guilt offering for the one to be cleansed.
You can read these very detailed instructions in Leviticus 14:1-32.
There
were ten who were healed and told to report to the priest. It is possible that the nine were from Judea
and had to travel to Jerusalem to see the priest. The Samaritan would have to go to Mt. Gerizim
in Samaria.[2] This one, who knew all his life what it meant
to be separated, was the one who would return to Jesus and would lie down prostrate
before him, to praise God and to give thanks.
He was the one who could recognize the source of his healing. He was the one who could recognize that
healing meant more than a mere physical cure; it meant that he was restored to
new life. He would not only comply with
the letter of the law; he would give thanks and praise to the God who touched him
and made him whole.
It
might not jump out at you, but there is an interesting ambiguity built into the
scripture. In verse19, where Jesus says
“your faith has made you well,” the Greek word that Jesus uses can be
translated three different ways: to be
healed; to be made whole; to be saved. Is
it possible that Jesus was telling this Man that his faith transformed his
life? Could it be that the act of
listening to the instruction of Jesus, turning to go to the priest, discovering
that he has been a changed man on the outside led to him being changed on the
inside?
As
we discussed last week, the step of faith—the step out into the unknown, the
step of relying totally on God—is one of the hardest steps to take. It is a step of trust, even when the evidence
seems totally against us. It is a step
that changes the way we see the world.
It is a step that can lead us to be forgiven people. It is a step that can help us become
forgiving people. And it is a step that
can transform us into grateful people.
What
does it mean to become a grateful person?
Does it mean that we deny reality as we look at life through
rose-colored glasses? No.
Does
it mean that we adopt an optimistic overview of the world expressed by
Alexander Pope that “whatever is, is right”?[3] No.
Does
it mean that we deny our pain and pretend that it doesn’t exist, hoping that if
we ignore it, it will go away? No.
Does
it mean that we engage in the “Power of Positive Thinking,”[4]
and see the world differently? No.
Does
it mean that if we learn to step forward in faith that bad things won’t happen
to us? No! Even the Apostle Paul prayed three times for
healing, for a “thorn in the flesh” to be removed, but it was not (2 Corinthians 12:7).
So
does it mean that we give thanks for the good things that happen and simply put
up with the bad things that happen?
That’s not quite it, either.
Living
a life of gratitude means that we live trusting that we are in God’s
hands. The Apostle Paul was not healed
from the “thorn” in his flesh, but he received instead an assurance from God “My grace is sufficient for you,
for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9, NIV). In the
words of an old hymn, we remember that “though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet. This is my
Father’s world …”[5]
Last
Sunday evening, Laurie Baker asked me to give a “short version” of last week’s
sermon to the youth who were not present to hear it. I recapped as best I could what I have
learned about faith—that it isn’t something we possess or something that we can
measure or quantify; it is something that we do. When we trust, we get better at
trusting. One of the youth asked me if
faith was like a muscle—the more you use it, the bigger it gets. I have thought about her question quite a bit
this week. I think that she is close to
getting it, but I think another analogy might be better. I don’t think that it is a matter of
size. I think of it more as a matter of
practice. Think about someone learning to
play an instrument. When someone learns
to play the piano, they don’t begin by playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.
1; they begin with something that sounds more like “Three Blind Mice.” They practice and practice and practice. They make mistakes. They practice some more. They take lessons. They study with a teacher who has lived
through the same mistakes that they are making.
Over time, the talent that God has given them develops. It doesn’t become larger in a way that you
can measure; but the budding pianists become more capable of demonstrating the
talent that they have. If they didn’t
practice, they would remain stuck forever playing “Three Blind Mice.”
So
it is in faith. If it is true that faith
is a verb, if faith is something we do—then it must be that through practice,
our ability to trust increases. If faith
is a way of seeing what cannot be seen, then how, in the words of the Apostles
last week, how do we increase our faith?
We increase our faith by exercising the faith that we have—not to make
it bigger, but to make it stronger. Yet
even here, we find out quickly that we cannot do it by ourselves. So we join those disciples in pleading
“increase our faith.” One of the key
ways that we practice our faith is through gratitude—recognizing that it is
God’s grace that has brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.[6] We remember, and then we trust some more.
In a few moments, we will celebrate Holy Communion, the
sacrament of the church which sometimes is called the “Eucharist.” The word “Eucharist” comes from the Greek,
and means “Great Thanksgiving.” That is
the name by which we identify the sacrament in our bulletins; but I like to
think of it as “Sacred Remembering.” Did
you ever notice how much of the prayer in our Holy Communion liturgy is a
prayer of thanksgiving?
Lift up
your hearts. Let us give thanks to the
Lord our God. It is right, and a good
and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Almighty God,
creator of heaven and earth.[7]
We remember, and we give thanks for God’s acts of
creation, re-creation and salvation.
This week, as you come to the Table, I invite you to
engage in some sacred remembering of your own.
Remember: what has God done in
your life? Remember how God has
accompanied you through the tough places in life. Remember who you are as a child of God. Remember, and be thankful.
May
it be so!
Copyright
© 2013 by Thomas E. Frost. All rights
reserved.
[1] Preached at Cunningham
United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia.
[2] Amy-Jill Levine, “Notes,
The Gospel According to Luke” in Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible
Translation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 136.
[3] Alexander Pope, “An Essay
on Man,” viewed on the internet on October 13, 2013 at https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/11b7b90a9fa8e19585256c76000ed30a/a41ea6f017abe5b485256db100676048?OpenDocument.
[4] Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New
York: Fireside, 1980).
[5] Maltbie D. Babcock, “This
Is My Father’s World,” in The United
Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: The
United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 144.
[6] John Newton, “Amazing
Grace,” in The United Methodist Hymnal,
(Nashville, TN: The United Methodist
Publishing House, 1989), 378.
[7] “A Service of Word and
Table II” The United Methodist Hymnal
(Nashville, TN: The United Methodist
Publishing House, 1989), 13.
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