Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + 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.
The four divinely‑inspired Gospel accounts together report several of Jesus’s miraculous healings of lepers. In one case, three of the different accounts apparently report the same miracle, but, the miracle we hear of in today’s Third Reading is reported only by St. Luke’s account, and it alone tells of ten lepers healed at the same time and of the one who turned back praising God with a loud voice and fell on his face at Jesus’s feet thanking Him. In Canada, this Third Reading lands nicely on the second Sunday of October, the day before that country celebrates its annual Thanksgiving Day. Similarly, we will hear the account again in a little more than six weeks when this country observes Thanksgiving Day. At that time, we will concentrate on the account’s emphasis on giving thanks. But today, the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, let us consider the Reading under the theme drawn from Jesus’s final recorded words to the leper who returned, “Your Faith Has Saved You”.
Of course, the English Standard Version read a few moments ago translated Jesus’s final words to that leper as “Your faith has made you well”, but that E‑S‑V translation and others miss the full sense of the Greek verb St. Luke records Jesus using. Jesus “heals” or “saves” the whole person, body and soul; the benefits of faith go beyond this physical life. Even though commentators debate precisely what is meant by “leprosy” in the Bible, our appreciation of Jesus’s miracle does not depend on precisely what afflicted the group of ten men, among whom was at least one Samaritan, the foreigner who, when he saw that he was healed, turned back to Jesus.
“Your faith has saved you”: When we consider Jesus’s final recorded words to the one leprous man who returned, we might wonder about the other nine, whether they also had faith and so whether they also were saved. Commentators differ on what they say about those matters, but we do better to wonder about ourselves. Do we have faith and are we saved? The ten leprous men were following the Old Testament’s proscriptions about leprosy, living outside the nearby village and keeping their distance from Jesus and those with Him. They together emphatically and emotionally lifted up a voice saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” They wanted physical healing, to be sure, just as we surely want physical healing whenever we or those we love and care about are afflicted in any way, and we likewise lift up a voice saying, “Lord, have mercy upon us!” In the Third Reading, Jesus’s cleansing the leprous men as they went to show themselves to the priests (according to the Old Testament proscriptions) served Jesus’s purposes. In our cases, not so‑immediately providing physical healing may likewise serve Jesus’s purposes. How many of us nevertheless praise God with a loud voice and fall on our face at Jesus’s feet thanking Him? Does our faith persevere despite afflictions God in His wisdom might even permit us to face for the rest of our lives? Do we recognize both that the decline of the body and the temporal death we experience are consequences of our sinful nature and its resulting sins and that the best benefit of faith is the eternal life that follows, the life that ultimately brings a resurrected body far better than these bodies could ever be healed?
As the Samaritan leper in the Third Reading, considered as good as dead and so unclean, turned back and was saved by faith in Jesus, so God wants us to turn away from our sins, to trust Him to forgive our sins, and to want to do better than to continue sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin. He forgives our sins of both ingratitude and doubting His mercy in the face of continued afflictions. He forgives whatever our sin might be, and He even forgives our sinful natures. He forgives everything, for Jesus’s sake.
You may recall from previous Sundays that, as St. Luke is reporting, Jesus is gradually but resolutely journeying to Jerusalem as God’s Savior, to suffer and die for all people. By praising and thanking Jesus as God, the Samaritan leper recognized and so confessed faith in Jesus. By cleansing the lepers, Jesus had revealed Himself to be the Messiah, and then, by acknowledging the Samaritan’s thanking Him as praising God, Jesus claimed to be God. The Samaritan leper, saw past the healing to the Healer. Instead of showing himself to the priests at the Temple in Jerusalem, he had returned to the Great High Priest, to God present and dwelling in the human flesh of the man Jesus. The Reading could even be suggesting that the Samaritan leper knew that the bloody sacrifices he would have made at the Temple were once and for all going to be fulfilled by Jesus’s blood, shed on the cross for his sins, as well as for your sins and my sins. As we sang in the Opening Hymn, “His blood can make the foulest clean; / His blood avails for [us].” Jesus’s greatest concern is freeing us from our sins, not temporarily healing bodies that will eventually still die in this world, if He does not return first. Through faith in Jesus—not on the basis of our faith in Jesus but because of God’s mercy and grace on account of Jesus’s suffering and death—we freely receive the forgiveness of sins and so we also receive eternal life, the resurrected bodies far better than these bodies could ever be healed here and now.
Today’s Office Hymn has been around for a while, although it is new to Missouri‑Synod hymnals with Lutheran Service Book. We sang that in days of old Jesus’s hand was strong to heal and save, that His touch then brought life and health. And, we also asked the Lord be near to bless now, and He is. The lepers in their misery came to Him, and so do we. Jesus healed lepers and charged His disciples to do likewise (Matthew 10:8), and their successors pastors today do more than that. As Elisha once pointed Naaman to the waters of the Jordan river to cleanse his leprosy (2 Kings 5:1-14), I point you to the waters of the Baptismal font for forgiveness of sins, deliverance from death and the devil, and for eternal salvation. As the lepers in the Third Reading expected the Jerusalem priests to play a role in their cleansing, so I as a called and ordained servant of Christ with His authority individually forgive those who come to me privately confessing the sins that trouble them most. As the Samaritan leper fell at Jesus’s feet thanking Him, so we likewise fall at this rail thanking Jesus as we in bread receive His body given for us and in wine receive His blood shed for us, for the forgiveness of sins and so also for life and salvation. (The Greek word used of the Samaritan leper’s “thanking” Jesus—and used only here of thanks given to Jesus—in fact is the origin of our English word “Eucharist”, sometimes used as a title for the Sacrament of the Altar.) In all these ways—preaching, baptism, absolution, and the Eucharist—Jesus is near, present, to bless now, with healing in some cases but salvation in all cases where the recipients, like the Samaritan leper, believe and confess Him.
Blessed with salvation, the believing Samaritan leper was sent by Jesus on his way, and Jesus likewise sends us out, according to our various vocations, to serve Him in the persons of our neighbors. As we reflect on the Samaritan leper brought from being a stranger standing at a distance to a believer at Jesus’s feet, we might reflect on strangers at a distance in our community and how we might serve them and so be an instrument of the Holy Spirit’s bringing them to Jesus’s feet. Today’s First Reading likewise speaks of the foreigner Ruth, who was brought into the family of God (Ruth 1:1-19a). The saving faith God gives us produces good works that serve our neighbors (James 2:14-17). When we see that our faith does not produce good works as it should, or when we again find ourselves, in the face of continued afflictions, being ungrateful or doubting God’s mercy, we all the more live every day with repentance faith and so we live every day in the forgiveness of sins. Living daily in the forgiveness of sins, we wait for the chief benefit of faith, the benefit that goes beyond this physical life. And, as we wait, we love and serve our neighbors.
Our unity in acts of love to our neighbor is mentioned in today’s Closing Hymn, a favorite of many, “Onward Christian Soldiers”. Sabine Baring‑Gould wrote that hymn late on the Eve of Pentecost in 18-65, the night before it was to be used for a schoolchildren’s processional. Later, after it was published, the author said that, given the great haste with which he wrote it, he was surprised by the hymn’s popularity. Today’s Second Reading is connected with the idea of Christians as soldiers of a sort, but in the Second Reading the idea is of sharing in suffering and pleasing the One Who enlists them (2 Timothy 2:1-13). And, the Second Reading’s “trustworthy saying”, apparently an early creed or hymn that St. Paul quotes, emphasizes our connection to Christ Jesus, most concretely through our Baptism into His death and resurrection, and the Second Reading emphasizes the certainty that, if we endure all our continued afflictions, we will also reign with Him. For, on this 21st Sunday after Pentecost, on American Thanksgiving, and always, despite those continued afflictions, His words to the Samaritan leper and to all of us who believe are truly trustworthy, sure, and certain: “Your faith has saved you.”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +