Deuteronomy 8:7-18November 19, 2017
Luke 17:11-19Pastor Lori Broschat
THE MAN WHO HAD NO PRIDE
A woman named Pam worked in downtown Chicago. Every morning, she encountered a heavyset, middle-aged woman in a shabby coat, soliciting spare change in front of an old brick church. She greeted everyone with a smile and a pleasant “Good morning.” Pam almost always gave her something. After a year of this routine, however, the woman in the shabby coat disappeared. Pam wondered what had happened to her.
Then, one beautiful day, she was in front of the church again, still wearing the same shabby coat. As Pam reached into her purse for the usual donation, the woman stopped her. “Thank you for helping me all those days,” she said. “You won’t see me again because I’ve got a job.” With that, she reached into a bag and handed Pam a wrapped package. She had been standing at her old spot, not for a handout, but for the people she recognized so that she could give each of them a doughnut. She was thankful.
Gratitude is something we hear a great deal about during this time of the year, but its stay is brief and followed by the most consumer-driven, commercialized version of what otherwise is a holy event. A wise man wrote, “Praise is native, and men give thanks for the same reason that birds sing. Praise is man’s instinctive response to the creative love of God.”
Not sure how you feel about that statement, but in my case, I think we hear more complaining than praise. Sometimes I’m the one doing the complaining, sometimes it’s televised 24 hours a day, even if they must create something to be bitter about.
When we are small we are taught to say thank you, to say please, to acknowledge an act of kindness or generosity. Those are manners many take for granted, and you can certainly spot those who were not taught as children because they become rude adults. If these manners become merely a habit, just something we do without really thinking, then some of the meaning is lost.
Just like the practice of saying “I’m sorry” when the other person is in the wrong. Do any of you do this? It could just be my nature, but when someone bumps into me or cuts in front of me in line, I always say, “I’m sorry,” as if I had been the one in the wrong. Maybe secretly I’m hoping they will realize their error and apologize to me, but that’s seldom the case.
Just the other day I was in a crowded store aisle and since operating a shopping cart is like driving a car, with traffic flow going one way on the left and the opposite way on the right, I had my cart on the right side of the aisle. Another woman was pushing her cart on the right but in the wrong direction. I immediately pulled my cart over to the left and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I must be going the wrong way.”
Why would I do that? Why not just tell her she’s going in the wrong direction? I guess because in the big picture it’s not that much to be upset about. We all make mistakes. We have more to be thankful for than we do to be angry over. There will always be issues that deserve our greater outrage.
The theme of the recent issue of the UM Interpreter magazine was living in gratitude. Not surprising, since it’s November, but wouldn’t it be great if our thanksgiving became thanks-living? The magazine featured a quote from philosopher Meister Eckhart, “If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, it will be enough.”
So far this month we have learned that God wants to be worshiped, and in the final view from Scripture, the saints of God are doing just that. Last week it became clear to us that God also wants to be served by a people on their way to holiness. Our subject of saints showed us a sense of the future and the past, but today we focus on the present as we see how God wants to be thanked.
This brief episode of Jesus healing lepers holds an abundant lesson for us, a lesson about the way God works in our lives and how we respond to Him. Ten men whose lives and bodies were marred by the disease of leprosy, a disfiguring, debilitating condition that left them unclean according to the law. They lived in isolation, away from home, family, community, in a kind of living death.
They called Him Master, this healer and teacher who roamed throughout Israel helping people, challenging people, and changing people. They had to cry out from a distance because they could not approach others for fear of contamination. It seems the communication method was agreeable to Jesus, for He did not go to them or touch them, but gave a command to go and show themselves to the priest.
This was a religious as well as a physical matter, and only the priest could declare them healed and clean again. The key to their healing was their obedience, and we can imagine as they walked or perhaps ran to the priest, they began to see the restoration on their bodies. They had been outcast, labeled, and cut off from all they knew and loved. All that awaited them was death, but Jesus gave them life.
Perhaps the majority of them were in too much of a hurry to regain their lives that they failed to recognize who was responsible for giving them their lives back. Only one, when he saw he was healed, returned to Jesus to pay proper respect and show appropriate gratitude. There is a lesson here for us, that we must step out in faith before we see our problems resolved.
This is the nature of God, a God who loves you so much, He’ll give you the opportunity to be thankful when nothing about your circumstances gives you that motivation. That is the very definition of faith. If you praised God only on the good days, only in the best of circumstances, it would not be faith at all. That would be more like a business arrangement, and this is not about business![1]
How do we show our gratitude to the one who restores our lives? Do we wait until something devastating happens and then cry out for mercy? When Christ entered the world, He came prepared to take on the sin of the world. He came prepared to experience all the pain and frailty that comes with the human condition. He also came that we may have life and have it abundantly. The only way for Him to accomplish that goal was to die.
Jesus was not afraid of being around lepers. He risked contact with the unclean all the time. We shouldn’t think of this any differently than how God is willing to allow His Spirit into our hearts even when they are still tainted by the existence of sin, by the legacy of unfaithfulness.
There was more than healing at the heart of this story when we look at the words Luke used in his account. Jesus told the men to show themselves to the priest and as they went they realized they had been cleansed. This cleansing was what the priest would have witnessed and confirmed, and it was enough for nine of the ten men.
For the one man, however, there was more to his observation than cleansing. This man saw that he had been healed, and he went back to Jesus praising God. In the context of this passage, cleansing was the removal of impurities, which would suffice in religious terms. It was still a miracle, no matter what word we use.
Healing, on the other hand, is a complete turnaround of the injury or disease process. Think of it as the difference between getting over a cold and repairing a fractured femur. There was enough of a difference between cleansing and healing that this lone man had to return to say thank you.
This brought up questions from Jesus. "Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? No one returned to give thanks but this foreigner?" The Samaritan leper gave no answer, but because of his show of faith, Jesus gave him yet another blessing. "Get up and go. Your faith has healed you."
Giving thanks to God should be a daily event, as natural as breathing. We know that we owe Him great appreciation and gratitude, but as with our casual attitude toward our manners, we forget the importance and the necessity of telling God how much we appreciate what He has done and is doing for us.
In a manner explicitly His own, God gave the Israelites a command for their own benefit. He reminded them of what they were about to receive when they had arrived in the promised land. He took great pains to put them in a land that was rich with food and filled with generous amounts of copper and iron. Once they had their fill, they would bless God's name for HIs goodness.
Should they forget about God's work in their lives and begin to believe their blessings had come about through their own effort, they would likely forget all that God had done for them, and their hearts would become proud. It would be their downfall and in the end, it was what they fell into. Their pride would become the cause of their punishment and we should learn from their error.
It's possible that we fall victim to a misunderstood passage in the book of Job as we form our worldview of good and bad. During the time of his testing by Satan, Job lost his family, his property and his health. His wife thought he should take the easy way out, which was to curse God and die.
Job's response is one that has been held up as good biblical advice, but we should understand why it's misunderstood. Job told his wife, "The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away." This thought has been repeated for centuries as a way of explaining the ways of God, whether blessings or curses, when there was no other way of understanding loss or reward.
But is this just an escapist view of life, not cursing the bad things, but also not celebrating the good things? It's actually very bad theology based on the determination of a man to hold on to faith in the midst of great personal tragedy. It was not God, but Satan who was capriciously damaging Job's life in an attempt to destroy his faith.
Author Jon Bloom wrote, "The crucial thing for us to remember is that all that God does for us as His children is for our good. He is blessed in both the giving and the taking away because both are for the sake of our joy."[2] Even though the people of Jesus' day would have assumed or believed God afflicted people with leprosy as a punishment for sin, the reality is that sickness happens without regard for the one who suffers.
Do we really want to believe in a God who would give a two-year-old cancer or cause a bride and groom to die in a crash? It's more comforting to concede that our world is damaged, diseased, showing the signs of neglect and sacrifices made for the sake of progress and success. It's a far cry from the beautiful paradise God created, and this world can make us sick in many ways.
True faith says that God can allow us to overcome the pain, the disability, the isolation of illness or infirmity, and even if healing isn't part of overcoming, there is still God's love and mercy. Who can say why only one of ten men came back to thank Jesus? Surely, we realize the odds are not much better today; we enjoy the blessings, but we forget to be grateful. We forget to say thank you, and in doing so, we take God for granted, when really, we should take Him at His word.
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