THANKSGIVING, 11/27/2008

Sermon on Luke 17:11-19, by Samuel Zumwalt

11 On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. 12And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance 13and lifted up their voices, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." 14When he saw them he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went they were cleansed. 15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; 16and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. 17Then Jesus answered, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? 18Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" 19And he said to him, "Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well."

GRATITUDE

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I was serving my first parish, a blue collar mission in Lancaster (suburban Dallas) Texas, I bought every book about the practice of ministry that I could get my hands on. One was co-written by two pastors who were sharing all that they had learned in their combined twenty-five years of service. That sort of tenure seemed unimaginable then. Today, at twenty-seven and a half years since ordination, I smile to think about when I viewed anyone with ten years pastoral experience as a veritable fount of wisdom. To think today we Lutherans (and others) sometimes elect bishops with hardly more than that much experience, as if their intellect, charisma, and charm were what Christ's Church most really needed.

The one thing that stuck with me from that little book by such "wise" pastors was their take on the 80/20 rule (80 percent of the work gets done by 20 percent of the people). No, they said, the miracle was that 5% of the people doing the work actually do it for God's glory without wondering "what's in it for me."

Original sin is still the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Church. And, yes, because of sin our age-old rebellion, something like the 80/20 rule still applies in parishes. And, yes, those two "wise old" pastors were probably picking up on what the Lord Jesus was trying to tell us in today's parable: God is really good all the time, but most people most of the time take His goods and run, without gratitude and without thought that the goods are His!

DON AND JUDY

Don and Judy own a construction business in our area. They build mostly smaller homes for some of the many retirees that flock to coastal Carolina. Don and Judy are no strangers to adversity. They have fought some tough battles with health issues in their family especially in the last year. Like most places, the economy here has slowed down dramatically, and houses haven't been moving so well. It's been challenging for Don and Judy to keep their employees working. So, Don and Judy have sent a couple of their best employees to do some work at church, then to help build a Habitat house, and recently to help build a ramp at the home of one of our people with mobility issues.

It would be easy for Don and Judy to turn inward and complain that God hasn't been so good to them what with health issues in the family and the downturn in the building business. But Don and Judy are there every Sunday morning for Eucharist. Judy shows up along with a handful of others each Monday evening for Bible study and Evening Prayer. They remind me of the one leper who returned to give thanks.

SOME CHEESE WITH THAT WHINE?

My preaching advisor, the now sainted Morry Niedenthal, was famous for talking about embodiments of the Gospel, the people like Don and Judy in every parish. Morry used to say these were the people that didn't have heroic faith. They simply embodied the Gospel in such a way that the people next to them in the pew could say, "Well, if Don and Judy can do that, maybe I can, too!"

The opposite of that are the other nine lepers in the Gospel, the people in every parish that make up the 95% that those "wise old" preachers wrote about.

The nine lepers are still among us. At least one of them is usually staring back at us pastors in the mirror every day. God makes and owns everything. We're just the beneficiaries of His grace and mercy. We're just the managers of all His things. We draw breath, get up, and take nourishment daily. We rarely have to worry about the basic security that Abraham Maslow once put at the bottom of his hierarchy of human needs.

So freed from basic issues of shelter, clothing, food, drink, and even health care, we turn to all those things that are the source of our discontent. We whine about the difficulty of our work. We whine about the people that can be such a pain. We whine about the lack of appreciation or the lack of opportunity for advancement. We whine about the state of our pension portfolio. We whine about the folks that just don't get it and the ones that get it wrong. While Bach wrote on each piece: "To God alone the glory," we, like the nine lepers, too often whine an ungrateful tune.

So, when we pastors start whining too much about the 95% that don't do things to God's glory, or don't do anything at all, each of us probably needs to go back and look again in the mirror to see the ungrateful leper in me.

GETTING IT RIGHT

The real miracle of the Church is not that 5% of the people embody the Gospel some of the time. The real miracle is that, knowing everything in advance, God became human in the first place in order to rescue us lost and condemned creatures from sin, death, and Satan. He was the outcast, progressively abandoned, betrayed and rejected Son of God who took the weight of our sin upon Himself that lepers like us might be healed of our sickness unto death. He had mercy on us, while we were yet sinners. He died for us, though we did not deserve such grace and mercy. He rose that we might see the healing power in God's love as the promise that would sustain and encourage us through these years of illness and decay.

Each week as we come with empty uplifted hands, crying, "Lord, have mercy." He does indeed have mercy upon us. He fills us with good things, His own body and blood for the remission of sins. He gives us the medicine of immortality. The Lord Jesus comes as the once-for-all sacrifice that we might share in God's eternal life and love.

This Gospel is embodied in the Eucharist, so that we might embody the Gospel. The same healing touch that freed ten lepers reaches out to us in the Sacrament of the Altar, that we might return to God rejoicing daily for all His benefits to us.

Like Don and Judy, and countless others, some of whom you know, we could attend to the time lost to disease, to the pains we have had to endure, and to the daily aggravations and concerns that can really unsettle us and drag us down. But with the help of God, we can, to His glory, show our gratitude for all God's goodness and mercy. Service is a choice. Gratitude is a choice. Forgetting what is behind, and pressing forward is a choice we can make with God the Holy Spirit's help. He is working on us in Word and Sacrament to shape the choices we make to the glory of God the Father.

This Thanksgiving, let's take a moment to reflect on how it looks when we embody the gratitude of the one leper and become part of the 5% that count it all joy!

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Samuel Zumwalt

E-Mail: szumwalt@bellsouth.net

(top)