A Grateful Life (Part One)
A Grateful Life (Part One)
Luke 17:11-19
Today, I want to begin a sermon series on gratitude. This may seem like an odd choice at a time when so many people are disoriented and saddened and anxious about the state of our nation. It feels to some of us like we’re in exile. Here’s the thing, though: anyone can be grateful when everything is going your way. What if it is possible to be a grateful person, whatever comes our way?
As Meister Eckhart suggests in the quote in our bulletin today, “If the only prayer that you said was thank you, that would be enough.” I absolutely believe that the heart of Jesus’ message about how we should live is that we should love—love God, love one another, love ourselves. However, the mark of living that loving life may well be gratitude. If you walk through life with a grudge, feeling like you’ve been robbed, then that will block you from loving. If you realize what a gift life is then you won’t waste your time lodging every possible complaint. What if on the challenging days or even on your worst day, the foundation on which you stand while everything around you shakes is gratitude? “Well, no matter how hard this is, I do have loving people to go through this with and a loving God who will help us find our way!”
So, how do we learn to live gratefully? I’m pretty sure that Jesus would tell us to look first for the least likely teachers. That’s why I’m going to introduce you to a group of lepers in a minute. First, though, I have to tell you where those lepers and Jesus are…
Jesus is in the land between Samaria and Galilee. Most of the time, when you read those words in that text, it just seems like a “geo-location.” It feels like we’re putting a pin in on the map. What I want to suggest to you today is that the meaning runs deeper than that, at a couple of different levels.
First, consider this. The land between Samaria and Galilee is…neither. What do I mean? Galilee was home for Jesus and the disciples. It was their landscape. It was a land where they were comfortable, where they knew the customs and the ways. It was considered “Hicksville” by the rest of the nation—backwoods and backwater—a place where the people spoke with a certain, recognizable twang. Galilee was comfortable. On the other hand, Samaria was not home for them. Samaria was full of…well…Samaritans, who were kind of Jewish but not Jewish in a Galilean’s eyes, who were mostly different and mostly despised. So, Jesus and the disciples weren’t home but they weren’t strangers in a strange land either. They were in the middle of nowhere. They were “in-between.” They were in a place where no one feels at home and everyone feels disoriented. Sound familiar, anyone?
So, how do we connect to this? I think pretty easily if you open your mind. Who feels at home in an emergency room? No one…except maybe the staff. Who feels at home in a funeral home? No one…again, except maybe the staff. Who feels at home stuck in traffic on the Kennedy Expressway? No one, except maybe the “Minutemen” who drive the tow trucks and save us when our cars break down. I may have a reason for going to the “in-between” places in life but the goal is to get in and get out. You get what you need and move on. We don’t spend much time connecting to people in the “in-between” spaces. Most often, the folks who live in those spaces—doctors, funeral directors, state highway workers—are treated as a means to an end: “Can you just write the prescription? Can you just get this funeral over? Can you just tow my car and get me out of here?”
Here’s a second layer of meaning to this setting. Centuries before Jesus time, the nation of Israel was torn apart. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed first. Then, the Southern Kingdom—Judah—was destroyed and the people were carried into exile. Centuries later, everyone still blamed each other for that terrible time. That history made this “in-between” space a place where grudges grew, where no one was quite sure who belonged and who didn’t belong. The tendency would be to trust no one, to feel uncertain about a lot of things, and walk with fear in your heart. In an “in-between” space, you run into people you can’t stand.
People step gingerly in “in-between” spaces, acutely aware of what’s going on. By contrast, when we are walking in a familiar place, we may be sleepwalking our way through life, assuming we’re fine, assuming we know what to do, assuming all we have to do is follow the rules. In the land between Samaria and Galilee, everyone is on their toes.
So, conjure up your ‘in-between” places where you don’t know what’s coming, where you don’t know the rules, where you don’t know how to feel secure and self-assured. You are incredibly awake and aware. You are paying attention. And that…that…is precisely the point. Before you can learn how to walk gratefully in life, you have to learn how to wake up and pay attention. That usually means going to places we’ve never been and meeting people we’ve never met before.
It is in this disoriented, attentive, vigilant space that the disciples’ worst nightmare unfolds. Here’s what you need to know. Every effort was made in Galilee to eliminate any chance that anyone would run into a leper. Lepers, in that day, were people who had skin diseases that disfigured them. Their disfiguration made them different and clearly ill and made everyone worry about whether they would contract the disease, too. Theologically, an explanation was developed that they had these diseases because they had offended God: “So just don’t offend God and you’ll be okay!” Culturally, the lepers were banished from social contact and forced to wear bells to warn others of their approach. In Galilee, the whole “leper problem” was resolved, but the disciples and Jesus are not in Galilee anymore.
In the land between Galilee and Samaria, no rules applied. So, it is reasonable to expect that you might run into a surprise leper or two. This happens in wild places, after all (like the business woman in Manhattan that I saw shooting heroin on the sidewalk.) What no one would have expected—not even if you were hyper vigilant and on the tips of your toes—was a group of ten lepers, standing right in your path. The group kept their distance. (“Thank God” thought the disciples!) However, they cried out in one voice: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
Jesus does something no one does in the in-between places: he takes a good look at those lepers almost as if they were actual human beings. How long had it been since anyone had looked them in the eye? How long had it been since they had seen anything but disgust on someone else’s face? How long had it been since anyone even gave them the time of day?
What happens next is kind of surprising. Jesus doesn’t lay a hand on them. He doesn’t say a prayer on their behalf. He doesn’t pronounce them healed. He just says to them, “Go show yourselves to the priests.” The implication is not that they should go be healed by the priests. Rather, they should go show the priests their fresh scrubbed, baby pink skin. The lepers leave, without hesitation. Along the way, they are healed. In the “in-between” places, there are no customs and rules, even for healings: “Just do what the man says and get out of this uncomfortable space.”
Ten lepers are healed. Ten people who were considered absolutely cursed by God and doomed to a God-forsaken life were given a new life and allowed to move back into the land of the living. They got what they were looking for. When they realized this, they did what any self-respecting person would do, they ran! They ran to to tell their spouses and friends and their children. They ran to parade past anyone who had ever tormented them. They got out of the “in-between” space as fast as possible.
One person, though, returns. Before he’s ever even near Jesus, he starts yelling out his gratitude and praise, his thanksgiving for having been healed. “Thanks be to God who has shown me mercy today! All praise goes to Jesus of Nazareth! Look at my skin, my beautiful skin!” Tempting as it must have been to run for his life, instead he lingers in the in-between space long enough to make his way back to Jesus and thank him.
The former leper does find Jesus and throws himself at Jesus’ feet. Jesus can’t help but point out the obvious: “Weren’t ten healed? Where are the other nine? And this man is a Samaritan?” Talk about two strikes against you: a leper and a Samaritan. Even as a former leper he was still a Samaritan, still hated by a lot of folks. Jesus, though, lifts up this Samaritan as the very example of faith. The Samaritan is the hero! Why? Because despite whatever else was going on, he took time to be grateful. Jesus healed the man’s leprosy. Grateful living made the man whole.
If we are truly following Jesus, we will find ourselves in all sorts of “in-between” spaces. We may not be comfortable in those spaces. We might never choose to go there on our own. We are led into these spaces because they are precisely where we are needed. Someone needs to be treated as a full-fledged human being. Someone needs a healing word or touch. There might be something that we need that brings us to an “in-between”space but whatever else is going on, we are there to value and care for and lift up the people we meet along the way.
When we end up in an uncomfortable, in-between space, we don’t panic. Rather we learn to linger a while and treat the people we meet there as God’s children. We connect to the E.R. nurse as a person and offer a heartfelt thank you. We care about the funeral home worker, even as we carry terrible grief. We tell the guy who tows our car that he’s a lifesaver and we mean it. And as we practice gratitude, we spend less time waiting for everything to go our way and more time living in a way that makes us whole.