+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the time since I arrived in East Texas nearly one month ago, I have very much appreciated both the warm welcome that you-all have shown me and the heartfelt thanks for my arrival that you-all have given to God. I myself also give thanks to God both for this congregation and for the privilege of serving here. The thanksgiving theme for the Installation Reception was both timely by the calendar and appropriate for the circumstances. After someone pointed it out, I even appreciated the subtle play on the word “pilgrim”, as referring both to those who travelled on the Mayflower and to the name of this congregation. And, as our Gospel Reading on this Eve of a Day of Thanksgiving reminds us, all of us “pilgrims” should be, as my theme for the sermon puts it, “At Jesus’s Feet, Giving Thanks”.
There is at least one “pilgrim” of a sort in the Gospel Reading, in which Jesus, while passing along between Samaria and Galilee on His way to Jerusalem, is met by ten leprous men. At least one of the leprous men was a Samaritan, from a line of people descended from the Jews but with whom no love was lost on either side. When Jesus, near the end of the Gospel Reading, calls the man a “foreigner”, Jesus refers to the man’s being sprung from another race, so an alien, or a stranger. (Different words are used in the New Testament to refer to “strangers” living among a group of people, and one of those is sometimes translated “pilgrim”.) Normally, Samaritans and Jews would not be caught dead together, but in this case their common leprosy had them regarded as dead, and so the leprosy broke down that barrier between Jew and Samaritan, while creating another barrier between the lepers and the rest of society. St. Luke’s divinely-inspired Gospel account, for example, implicitly tells us that the ten men were outside the village, and the account explicitly tells us that they stood at a distance as they lifted up one voice calling out to Jesus for mercy—mercy that Jesus He showed all ten, though only one was found “At Jesus’s feet, giving thanks.” At this point, we might ask ourselves where we see ourselves in the Gospel Reading.
One week ago today, in the annual presidential proclamation of Thanksgiving Day, President Obama referred both to President George Washington praising “a generous and knowing God” and to President Abraham Lincoln looking to “the divine”, but, for his part, President Obama did not specify to whom thanks should be given; he simply called for the people of the United States to come together “to give thanks for all we have received in the past year”—he specified no Divine Recipient of such thanks! Now, admittedly we do not know about the other nine lepers from the Gospel Reading; Jesus commanded them to show themselves to the priests, and maybe that is what they did, thanking their Jewish God at the Temple, if they thanked anyone at all. We do know that this Eve of a Day of Thanksgiving has found at least you and me here, in Church, though we also certainly know that some of our fellow members are either in church elsewhere tonight, will be in church tomorrow, are gone from the area, or have some other valid reason for not being here. (Even with our small numbers, our attendance is probably better than the 10-percent of the lepers who were found “at Jesus’s feet, giving thanks”.) But are those of us who are here truly giving thanks to God as we should?
The favorite hymn “Now Thank We All Our God”, which we will sing tonight as our closing hymn, was written by Lutheran Pastor Martin Rinckart in the 17th-century “during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War” that raged across Europe. His little town of Eilenburg, Saxony, “was sacked [once] by the Austrians and twice by the Swedes”, and “a ravaging plague took the lives of [another] 8,000 residents”, including Pastor Rinckart’s wife. At one point he was conducting “the burial service for as many as 70 people in [one] day”, but “he maintained his courage and trust in the Lord”, and his hymn calls all people to give thanks to God, even “in the midst of [such] calamities”. Are we so willing to give thanks to God in our lives? Or, do we have more of a victim mentality and complain to God about what He is letting happen to us? Even if our situations are not so bad, do we still give thanks to God even when we think He might be withholding something we want or think we need? The Israelites of tonight’s Old Testament Reading were blessed during the Lord’s discipline and directed to give thanks to God for those blessings. St. Paul, in tonight’s Epistle Reading, call us to give thanks in each and every circumstance. But, do we? Even if we think we do, are we willing to bear up under someone else’s ingratitude? In other words, when people we bless in some way are not grateful to us, if we do not get the thank you we expect, are we ready and willing to keep helping them? Most likely we all sin in some way related to giving thanks, either our own giving thanks or that of others. We are all sinful by nature, and, even if we convince ourselves both that we give thanks as we ought and that we bear up under others’ ingratitude, we must know that we sin in other ways. From all our sin, God calls to us to repent, to turn back to God as the Samaritan man in tonight’s Gospel Reading turned back. God calls us to cry out to Him for mercy, as all ten men had done earlier, despite their leprosy-affected voices, and as we have done tonight. When we turn in sorrow from our sin and trust God to forgive our sin, God does just that: God forgives our sin.
God forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake. As I studied the Gospel Reading to prepare this sermon I was struck by the sequence of events: the lepers’ initial cry for mercy; followed by Jesus’s response, which St. Luke refers to as both “cleansing” and “healing”; then the man’s giving thanks to Jesus; and finally Jesus’s telling the man that he is saved by faith. The cry for mercy leads to the cleansing, though, like other miracles (especially those in both the Old and New Testaments that involved leprosy) the healing comes from a distance. The showing of themselves to the priest would have involved the shedding of sacrificial blood, but Jesus as the Greatest Priest sheds His own blood—He sheds it on the cross, for the lepers, as for you and for me. The Jews expected the Messiah to be able to remove leprosy, and yet the non-Jewish Samaritan is the one who recognized Jesus as the Messiah, the presence of God among His people to save them. The Samaritan man fell on his face at Jesus’s feet, bowing low to the ground, and gave thanks to Jesus as to God, which is, of course, what and Who Jesus is. (This Gospel Reading reportedly is the only place in the New Testament where the particular Greek verb used refers to thanks given to Jesus!) No longer affected by leprosy, the Samaritan man thanks Jesus and glorifies God with a loud voice, and he was, like we are, saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus’s death and resurrection for you and for me, God forgives our sins—our sins of not giving thanks, of not bearing the ingratitude of others, or whatever our sin might be. Out of His great love for us, He forgives all our sin for Jesus’s sake.
God forgives all our sin in very specific ways. We know from elsewhere in the accounts of the Holy Gospel that Jesus charged His apostles to heal lepers as Jesus had done, and that reminds us that God instituted the Office of the Holy Ministry for preaching the Gospel and handing out the Sacraments so that God can create faith, which receives the forgiveness of sins, when and where God pleases in those who hear the Gospel. You all have called me here precisely to so preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments. As Old Testament rituals related to leprosy involved sacred water, so the water of Holy Baptism is probably where most of us first came to have our sins forgiven, be delivered from death and the devil, and receive eternal salvation. As Jesus at the end of the Gospel Reading sends forth the Samaritan man saved by faith, so in private, individual Holy Absolution the pastor sends forth the penitent in the strength, the peace, and the joy of the Lord, encouraging him or her to come soon to receive Christ’s body and blood in the Sacrament of the Altar. And, there, in the Sacrament of the Altar, cleansed by Holy Baptism and so restored to God’s community, we have both the greatest way of giving thanks to God and the greatest way of receiving the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, in bread that is Christ’s body and wine that is Christ’s blood, given and shed for you and for me. (Some of you have already caught on to and remarked about my penchant for words, so you may not be surprised as I point out to you that our English word “Eucharist”, which is sometimes used to refer to the Sacrament of the Altar, comes from the Greek word used to refer to the Samaritan man “giving thanks” to Jesus.) At this altar, at this Eucharist, we, who like the Samaritan man are saved by faith, fall at the feet of the crucified and risen Jesus giving thanks. As the ten lepers initially went to the priests to show themselves as if they were already restored, without at first seeing or feeling restored, we, too, leave this altar made holy, even if we do not see it or feel it anymore than they did at first.
Yes, like the Samaritan man, we rise and go, and, as we go on with our “pilgrimage” through this life, we should recognize and appreciate more and more what happened “at Jesus’s feet, giving thanks”. Truly God blesses us over our lifetimes much more than a cleansing from leprosy, as significant as that was. Day after day we receive the riches of God’s grace and mercy, though day after day we no doubt are slow to thank Him as we should, in thoughts, words, and deeds. Ever saint and sinner, we continue to seek God’s forgiveness for those failures, even as we pray that He would both enable us to recognize that He gives us our daily bread—and all that goes along with it—and enable us to receive that daily bread with thanksgiving. Such prayers we know that God hears and grants, for Jesus’s sake.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +