Thankfulness, eh?

Friends in Christ: Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

My name is Cody Cooper and it is my privilege to be able to share God’s Word with you on this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Now, one day on his way to work, a man came upon a young teenage boy sitting on the steps of a downtown building with a sign in his hands and an old upside-down ball cap at his feet. As the man got closer, he noticed the boy wasn’t looking up or even around at the people who walked by. The man paused as he got near and he looked at the sign the boy held which read, “I am blind. Please help.” Sadly, there was at that point only a few coins that had been placed in the tattered old cap, spare change from folks as they hurried by.

The man thought for a moment and then said hi to the boy and took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then asked if he could see the boy’s sign for a moment. He read the sign again and then took it, turned it around, and wrote some words on the other side. He then put the sign back in the boy’s hand so that everyone who walked by would see the new words the man had written. Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people began to give money to the blind boy sitting on the steps. Some even said, “Thank you” or “God bless.” That afternoon the man who had changed the sign was returning from work and he stopped by to see how things were going. The boy seemed to almost recognize his footsteps and after the man said hi again, the boy asked, “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? Please, tell me, what did you write?” The man paused for a second and then said, “I only wrote the truth, son. I said what you said, but in a different way. I wrote, ‘Today is a beautiful day, but I cannot see it.'” Both signs spoke the truth, but the second sign conveyed to everyone walking by how marvelous the gift of sight is and reminded them not to take it for granted.

Dear friends, today is Thanksgiving weekend. Well, here in Canada it is, at least. It’s a time that we set aside as a holiday even, for us to show gratitude and thankfulness, eh? We gather with family, friends, at church, or even just by ourselves and say thank you for the many blessings that we have. But sometimes I wonder. I wonder who we are thankful to and why can’t I be a bit more thankful each and every day for what I have or to the One who has given it to me.

Now the Gospel reading for today is from the book of Luke 17:11-19, which reads,

On the way to Jerusalem, He, that being Jesus, was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as He entered a village, He was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When He saw them, He said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. And he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered. “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And He said to him, “Rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well.”

Now friends, I want us to step into the sandals, as it were, of those lepers and the reality they faced. I want you, if you will, to imagine with me that you are a leper. You had once been a sandal maker, spending your days with your father and cousin mending and making sandals. Your wife and the other women in the family helped to sell the sandals as well as cook and to clean. Your children would often get in the way and were always underfoot, but it was such a joy to spend the evenings together and to journey to the synagogue on Sabbath. Now at first you didn’t notice the numbness. You’d prick your finger with a needle or awl, but you wouldn’t notice it until a drop of blood would appear. “It’s just the callouses I’ve built up over the years,” you would think to yourself. Then began to have trouble holding the needle or smaller pieces of leather. You couldn’t feel your work and began to lose feelings in your toes and feet as well.

Soon the numbness was accompanied by white patchy lumps on your skin. You tried to hide it with the sleeves of your cloak or wrapping your hands like you had a cut, but slowly people noticed. It was your wife who said the word first, “Leprosy.” She whispered in disbelief as if trying not to wake or invite the disease in. Your father noticed next. He had lost his temper a few times when you would drop a sandal or a tool. Initially he had wondered if you had been drinking wine in the mornings, but then one day he grabbed a piece of leather from your hands and he saw the spots and open sores. “Leprosy,” he said. Then the rumor spread. Soon your neighbors and in-laws knew. And the word people used changed from “leprosy” to “leper.” Your wife had tried to set up a small corner of the house for you to stay in that was a bit separated from the rest of the family, but it wasn’t enough.

A priest was called who came with a group of townspeople and demanded to see you, at a distance of course. As soon as you appeared and they saw your hands and feet, the pronouncement was made: “Leper,” followed by the designation, “unclean.” You had to leave, and the only place you could go was a small encampment of lepers outside of town. Here it didn’t matter if you were a Jew or a Samaritan, you were only known as a leper. Soon just wrapping your hands and feet was not enough. It spread across your body and onto your face, disfiguring and shaming you. For a while your family came to see you and check in. They would stay back, but they would smile at least and say they missed you. But that slowly faded and stopped.

Sometimes when begging near the gate, you would see family or an old friend, but if they noticed you, they would quickly look away. After a time, neighbors stopped recognizing you and you were no longer a person. You were simply a leper. The open sores continued to spread. Infection set in, but that wasn’t even the worst part. It was the loneliness, the emptiness inside. The numbness now felt both in your limbs and in the pit of your very being. People would curse you or mock you. They would assume you had done some terrible thing and God was punishing you for it. This is what you deserved they would think. Most wouldn’t look at you and those that did, quickly looked away. Until one day, you overheard some men as they entered the village gate mention a rabbi named “Jesus.” You didn’t hear much more, but later you overheard that name again.

Then another group of people passed and you heard the word “leper” and “healed” used in the same breath. And there it was. A small flicker of emotion you hadn’t felt in years: hope. Over the next couple of days that name was on everyone’s lips. In the evening, several of the lepers gathered around a small fire and began whispering the stories that they too had heard. Then one day you saw Him;—you and nine other lepers off to the side of the road in your usual place when a crowd crests a hill and there in the front was Jesus. You don’t know how you knew it was Him, but you did. A quiet fell over each of the bandaged, hurting, unclean lepers as you watched Him get closer until you suddenly heard yourself cry out, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

The others joined in too. “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” And then He looked over and He sees you, really sees you. He doesn’t look away. His gaze doesn’t glance off, and there’s no disgust or pity in His eyes. There’s love. He cares. And in that moment you know that He knows who you really are. Now consider what Christ says to these men, these ten lepers. They cry out for mercy and Jesus then tells them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” Can you imagine those words? At first, this must have sounded almost cruel to their ears. “Go? What do you mean, Jesus;—Go? We’re lepers. We don’t go. What is left of our feet and limbs are at best numb and infected, at worst no longer there. And show ourselves? Do You know who we are? Again, we’re lepers. Our existence is built around not showing ourselves, not being seen, not infecting others. We wrap ourselves to hide the wounds, hide the damage, hide what we are. We haven’t shown ourselves for many, many years, and You want us to go to the priests, Jesus? The priest whose job it is to declare a person clean or unclean? The priest whom people have to see just when they come within close proximity of us to make sure they too haven’t become unclean like us? The priest who has the authority and duty to bar us from the synagogue and temple and worship and community and for what feels like God Himself? You want us to go to that priest?” But there is something different, something different about this Jesus. He sees you, seems to know you and he has given you something no one else can;—hope;—and so you go.

Now from Luke 17, we know what happens as they go. They’re healed. The ten set off and as they are going, they are healed, cured, released, freed, cleansed. Jesus’ words, “Show yourself to the priest” are suddenly as sweet as honey. They become blessed words of good news because now you are clean. The priest can declare you clean and able to rejoin your community. You can rejoin your family. You’ve been given the gift of life, your life, back once more.

So now here’s the question I want to pose to you today. If you were one of those lepers, what would you do? Once you’re healed, where would you go? What would you feel? Who would you see first? Would you go first to the priest and then to your family? Maybe go to your family first, then go to the priest. Go see your friends, your parents, your kids now grown. I cannot imagine what all I would be feeling, but I am sure that thankfulness would be one. And this is where this passage and perhaps at times our interpretation of it gets interesting. The account of Jesus healing the ten lepers is a very familiar one. Jesus heals all ten but only one, a foreigner, a Samaritan, returns to give Him thanks. The other nine were ungrateful louts who couldn’t be bothered, or so it is often said. But that’s hard to believe, isn’t it. After all, leprosy was such a terrible disease, a slow, painful death, surrounded by others who were also dying slow, painful deaths. Separated from family and society with seemingly no hope.

To be healed of such a disease suddenly, to be given your life back, to be able to go back to your family, this was no small thing. I imagine that such a healing, such a gift, would bring forth feelings of thankfulness in even the hardest of hearts. Are we to think out of the ten who are given quite literally their lives back only one is thankful? I wonder if perhaps the difference between the nine and the one Samaritan isn’t something a bit deeper, something beyond simple thankfulness for what we have. Perhaps it is that this Samaritan leper was blessed to realize just who it was that had healed him and that saying thanks to God is a bit more than a simple six-letter word. This Samaritan man, now healed from the pains, isolation, suffering, loneliness, and stigma of leprosy, by faith sees that to thank God for this gift of healing he had to go back to Jesus;—Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.

This man sees that this Jesus isn’t just a prophet or a teacher or a miracle worker. No, He is God Himself: the Word who became flesh, the promised Messiah and Savior to all sinful, diseased flesh. It is, as Jesus Himself would later tell His disciples, that “no one comes to the Father except through Me.” And so this cleansed Samaritan leper turns back, praising God with a loud voice and falls on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks.

This reading from Luke 17 invites us to see ourselves as this Samaritan man healed of leprosy, to see just what it is that God has done for us in Jesus Christ. That we are blessed with life and that there are many physical gifts and blessings like sight, our bodies, and health. But Jesus gives much more than that, too. He heals our soul. By His death and resurrection He has won for us salvation and eternal life with Him.

When the Samaritan man turns back, it is not just that he is thankful, but he knows the One to whom his thanks is to be given: Christ Himself. In turning back, falling to his face in worship and thanks, he receives another gift, an even greater healing, as Jesus says to him, “Rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well.” Not just well physically. He was already made well physically and so too the other nine. But made well spiritually and given the gift of faith. See the word translated here as “made well” is the same word that is used elsewhere and which can be translated “saved.” In other words, Jesus says to him, “Rise and go your way. Your faith has saved you.” Not just the healing from his leprosy, but a healing from his sin.

So now let’s talk about thankfulness, eh? And not just thankfulness for our house or for our health or our family. Indeed, we should be thankful for these things as well as sensitive to the fact that not everyone has these blessings to be thankful for. But for us up here in the Great White North at least on this Thanksgiving Day weekend, we also are given the opportunity to consider to whom we are thankful: Christ. Thankful, yes, for the things, for the abilities, the blessings that come to us, but thankful to Christ and for Christ for the blessings that He alone gives, for the blessings He alone has won for us on the cross and gives freely. Thankful for the blessings of faith and hope that even in the midst of suffering, of loss, of pain, that we can come to a God who loves us and from whom we cannot be separated (see Romans 8:38-39). For it can be easy on Thanksgiving to be thankful for the things, thankful for what we are and have, but thankfulness in faith cries out to God, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on me!” and falls on its face at Jesus’ feet, giving thanks to Christ.

See, the Samaritan man healed of leprosy is our story for we too struggle with the leprosy of sin and like the leper, it is a death sentence. There’s nothing that we or any other human being can do to change that. Sin hurts, destroys, isolates, and pains us until suddenly one day we hear of this Jesus who can cure us, able to turn our death sentence into everlasting life in heaven. And we cry out, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!” It is then that through this repentant faith He declares to us, “Your faith has saved you.” We are cured from sin’s curse and are free to live lives of thanksgiving to the one who has made us whole.

And in faith in Jesus Christ, we, like the healed Samaritan leper, recognize that part of our life of thanksgiving is done in the worship and giving thanks to Christ, to God. For He is the One who has created us, redeemed us, forgiven us, and saved us. He is the Author and Perfector of our faith, the One from whom all good things flow. And that leads to thankfulness, eh? Thankfulness to Christ and in Christ. So whether it be Thanksgiving weekend or any other day of our lives, let us give thanks to the One who gives us forgiveness and faith, who heals us from all our sins, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Let us pray. Gracious, loving God, You are the Source of every good and perfect gift. And we give You thanks for the many blessings You pour out freely upon us. You have created us and You continue to breathe life into us through the power of Your Holy Spirit. Allow us, we pray, to worship You with thanks and praise. Give us eyes to see the beauty in the blessings You provide. May You move us to use our hands to reach out in loving service, our feet to walk the path of forgiveness, and our words to proclaim thanksgiving and Your praise. In the Name of Jesus we pray. Amen.