Give us grateful hearts, O God of love, that we
might receive your grace ☩
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The English poet and priest George Herbert wrote, “Thou hast given so much to me / Give one thing more – a grateful heart; / Not thankful when it pleases me, / As if thy blessings had spare days; / But such a heart whose very pulse may be / Thy praise.” When it comes to life and faith, grateful hearts make all the difference. When we receive as a gift, we are opened to the transformative power of God in our lives. And, when we are not grateful we end up with a lot of resentment, entitlement, and fear. Gratitude is a forgotten virtue, but it is one of the ways in which Christ makes all the difference.
Brother
David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk who grew up in Nazi-occupied Austria. A
few years ago he gave a TED Talk with 9 million views called “Want to be happy?
Be grateful.” He says that gratitude, or gratefulness, happens when we
appreciate something, affirm its goodness, and recognize that the source is
beyond us. This can be something as simple as being grateful when someone buys you
a cup of coffee, when someone forgives us for something we’ve been feeling guilty
about, or when we thank God for the gift of Jesus Christ.
Steindl-Rast
notes that gratitude is not circumstantial or conditional – we can be grateful
in any moment. Gratitude does not mean that we have to be thankful for all
things; it does not mean that we accept the unacceptable. Rather, he has found
that there is transformation awaiting us when we accept the invitation to give
thanks. He founded the Network for Grateful Living to help people in making
gratitude the frame for our lives.
At our Mental Health 101
event last Saturday, Mary Plumley gave us the helpful metaphor of a picture
frame. We cannot always change our situation, what a photo would capture. But
we do have a say in what frame we use – do we use one with vibrant colors, or a
cheap and dreary one? Gratitude is a frame that we can always have with us; and
with that frame, we encounter the grace and love of God more profoundly.
This
is what this morning’s passage from Luke is getting at. Jesus is heading to
Jerusalem, the city of his Passion, and is in the region between Samaria and
Galilee – a region we might call the borderlands. Samaritans and Jews have a
long and difficult history. Each side saw the other as “less than,” as responsible
for the problems of the nation, and as religious heretics. Samaritans worship on
Mount Gerizim and Jews on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. So it is in this space
between these two groups that a group of lepers has made their sanctuary. They
were exiled by their disease from both Jews and Samaritans. As they say, misery
loves company and they had each other.
As
Jesus approaches, they beg for mercy, trusting that he could do something for
them. I know that when we talk about Jesus and God we can have very big
thoughts that include things like Church history, the Bible, and libraries full
of theology books. And those things all have a place, but Jesus is also intimately
personal. Jesus is the Good Shepherd of the entire flock, yes; but Jesus is
also my Good Shepherd, just as he is yours. Jesus is the lover of our souls,
our companion, and as he tells the disciples at the Last Supper, Jesus is our
friend. Who knows how much of this these lepers knew – but they knew enough to
call out to Jesus in mercy and Jesus responds with compassion. Jesus longs to
do the same for us. When we call out to him, “Lord, have mercy,” we can trust
that our plea is heard and is taken into the very heart of God.
Jesus
tells the lepers to go and show themselves to priests. As much as people these
days like to talk about Jesus as a rebel and a revolutionary, and he was in
some ways, he also was not in the deconstruction or demolition business. Priests
were given the duty of inspecting such diseases and declaring whether someone
was ritually clean or not. Jesus could have said, “I make you clean, no need to
go back to that religious system that declared you unclean.” No, it’s just the
opposite. Jesus heals them for the purpose of restoring them to the community.
God
is bringing us through this pandemic, a time when we all had a small glimpse of
what these lepers must have known. It was not that long ago that stores,
restaurants, and churches all shut down. We were exiled from one another as we all
stayed at home. And through the God-given gifts of science and dedication, virologists
and epidemiologists sequenced the DNA of the virus and made vaccines that have
been tremendously helpful in preventing serious illness and death. And now that
we’re coming out of the pandemic, are people returning to the communities from
which we were kept? Largely, no.
Counselors
report the rise of loneliness and we seem to have missed one of the very
obvious lessons from the pandemic – that we are made for one another. It is as
the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it: “I am because we are.” When
Jesus sent these lepers to the priests, he was sending them back into
community. We are made for community and healed so that we can be in communion
with others.
While
I deeply believe that those who have not come back to church are missing out on
the joys and blessings of being a part of the beloved community and of
partaking of sacramental and intentional worship, we also have to acknowledge
the fact that we are diminished by their absence. Those people missing from the
pews – it’s not “too bad for them,” it’s “too bad for us.” We are missing their
voices in our prayers, their contributions in our ministries, their insights in
our discernment, their smiles in our hearts. We cannot pretend that we are back
to normal, because we are not and probably never will be. This does not mean
that there will not be healing, but we need to be honest about the ways in
which the pandemic fractured community. And, if it’s not too late to learn the lesson,
we can remember that we are made for one another.
What’s
interesting about the healing is that it’s missing from the text. Jesus does
not say a word or touch them as their leprosy disappears. It was along the way
to the priests that they were healed. This tells us two things. One is that sometimes,
healing takes a while. As much as we want an immediate solution, that isn’t
often what we get. And secondly, the way the events unfold shows us that
sometimes we have to trust something to be true before we know it to be true.
Imagine
being one of these lepers. We are told to go and show ourselves to the priest,
but we look at our skin and see that we are still, very much, leprous. Why in
the world would we go to the priests and show them that we’re still outcasts?
But they go and along the way, they were healed. As much as I’d like to promise
you that every time you pray, every time you give, every time you serve, every
time you come to church that it will be an amazing, transcendent, and holy experience,
I can’t make that promise. But I can promise you that through obedience and commitment,
God will do more than we can ask or imagine. And this happens not because God
demands or rewards our obedience, it’s just the simple fact that it’s awfully
hard for the current of the river to move us when we’re standing on the shore.
Nine
of the lepers, when noticing their healing, continue on the journey to the
priests. But one turns back to Jesus. Notice that Jesus does not retract the healing
of the nine. It’s all about grace. Though we will fall short, God is not an exacting
God of punishment, but rather a gracious God of reconciliation.
One
former leper does come to Jesus though, and Luke notes that he was a Samaritan.
When it comes to God, there is no such thing as a foreigner. In the love of
God, there are no outsiders. No matter our past, no matter our doubts, no
matter our mistakes, no matter our party affiliation, no matter our identity or
orientation, no matter our worldly status, God’s love is for us all.
He
then bows at Jesus’ feet and gives him thanks, the Greek word being eucharisto.
When we celebrate the Holy Eucharist, we are assuming the same posture as this
healed leper – we are recognizing God’s gift of healing in Jesus, we are
intentionally stopping to give thanks and praise for this mercy, and we are
brought into a deeper relationship with Jesus. This is the transforming aspect
of gratefulness – it connects us to Jesus and brings us into the fullness of
salvation. Jesus tells him to get up, and the word that Luke records is noteworthy.
You know how when you’re reading an article online and you find something underlined
and in blue – that’s called a hyperlink. You click it and it takes you to
another webpage. Hyperlinks connect two ideas. Well, that’s what is going on
here, and Luke is hyperlinking us to Easter because word used for “get up” is
the same word to describe the getting up that Jesus did on Easter morning; it
is the word for “Resurrection.”
It’s
not that God rewards us for being grateful or polite, but rather through
gratitude, we enter into the way of Jesus. Gratitude becomes a doorway into the
Kingdom. All ten lepers were healed, but something distinct happened with the
Samaritan. Jesus says to him, “Your faith has made you well” and the more
direct translation of “made well” is “saved.” Now, I realize that when Christians
in the South talk about being “saved,” it conjures up all sorts of thoughts.
Instead of chasing all of those ideas down, let’s just stay with what Jesus
says.
In
praising God and giving thanks, the Samaritan is saved. Note that he hasn’t
died, so salvation is obviously not about where he spends eternity. No,
salvation is something more beautiful and transformative than that. Salvation
is encountering the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Salvation is partaking in the peace that is true now because we are assured
that all things shall be well. Salvation is the awareness that we live in a
world in which something as grand and impossible as the Resurrection happened.
Salvation is not limited to what happens after death, salvation is about entering
into freedom, empowerment, and joyful service of being God’s beloved.
This
is what we heard being referenced in Second Timothy in what was likely an early
hymn or creed – “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” One of
the most common phrases that St. Paul uses to describe salvation is being “in Christ”
and that’s what these verses are pointing towards. Salvation is when we come
and see that our story is not what we make for ourselves, our worth is not what
we can earn for ourselves, our value is not determined by how much we accomplish,
our purpose is not to save the world or be the best person we can be. Instead,
our story is that we are in Christ. Our meaning and value are secured by Christ’s
Death and Resurrection. Our mission and purpose are not to do or accomplish
anything, but rather to come and see just how much we are loved, and therefore
how much we have to be grateful for, and to then participate in this love by
sharing it with those around us. Salvation is to be enjoyed.
Because
he recognizes that he has been healed by the One through whom the cosmos were
made and loves him as if there were no other, the Samaritan responds with gratitude
and enters into the salvation of being loved. Gratitude, which we all have the opportunity
to practice in our stewardship campaign, opens us to more fully received the salvation
that has been gifted to us by Jesus. In addition to generosity, we can also practice
being grateful by noting each day what we are thankful for, what gifts we have
received, and responding with thankful hearts. And we do have to practice this –
gratefulness does not come naturally, especially in our fast-paced lives when
we don’t take enough time to pay attention to the world around us. In
gratitude, we are awakened to the depths of God’s love and are transformed to
live in a Resurrected world.
Dear
Lord, “Thou hast given so much to us / Give one thing more – a grateful heart; /
Not thankful when it pleases us, / As if thy blessings had spare days; / But
such hearts whose very pulse may be / Thy praise.”
