Sermon: Trinity 14 - 2019

22 September 2019

Text: Luke 17:11-19

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Last week’s Gospel was our Lord’s Parable of the Good Samaritan.  And it was a fictional story in which the hero was a Samaritan, that is, a man of mixed ethnic heritage that the Jews hated and looked down upon. 

This week’s Gospel is the Lord’s healing of the ten lepers, and once again, the hero of this account is a Samaritan.  But unlike last week’s Gospel, this is not one of Jesus’s parables.  This is an actual account.  This really happened – and even Jesus is amazed by it.

While He was traveling – and doing so in an area populated by Gentiles and Samaritans, Jesus is spotted by a small group of lepers.  Lepers are people suffering with a horrible, deadly disease called “leprosy.”  Today we call it Hansen’s Disease, and it can be treated.  But in the first century, it was a slow and painful death sentence.  And worst of all, since it was contagious, lepers had to be sent away to live in leper colonies.  Their faces and their body parts became disfigured as the flesh died on their bones and fell off. 

So this one day, while Jesus was passing through, ten lepers “stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.’”

In case this isn’t clear, this cry for help is a prayer.  These men who are dying, whose flesh is rotting because of our fallen and sinful world, cry out to the God who can cure them.  Maybe they don’t yet know that Jesus is God, but they have heard of His miracles, and they cry out together for help: “Lord, have mercy upon us,” as we sang together to the same God today.

Dear friends, this is why Jesus came into our world.  He came to cure, to fix, to heal, to raise from death.  He came to roll back the effects of sin.  He has come to rescue us and to re-create the heavens and the earth anew.

He did not come to teach people how to live a moral life (Moses and the Prophets had already done this).  He did not come to scold and punish (the Law does this already).  He did not come to encourage us to take charge of our lives, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and fix ourselves (in a very real sense, dear friends, we are all lepers: aging and dying day by day, and unable to stop the decay).  Jesus came to save.  Jesus has mercy, and He takes away their leprosy.  He encourages them, saying, “go and show yourselves to the priests,” – for the priests have the authority to declare them to be healed, so that they could return to their communities and reclaim their lives again.

Our Lord has given them their lives back!

Notice that Jesus did not tell them to start attending temple.  Jesus did not order them to read the Bible.  Jesus did not command them to pray.  He simply healed them, motivated by what the lepers’ prayer calls “mercy.” 

Sadly, when the ten left, they didn’t so much as say, “thank you.”  However, one of the lepers, “when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks.”

And this only grateful healed leper of the bunch “was a Samaritan.”

What is the Samaritan doing, dear friends?  He is thanking Jesus, of course, but this is not how we might thank a doctor or nurse or inventor of a cure for a disease.  Falling at Jesus’ feet is an act of worship.  The Samaritan is grateful, and He literally worships at the feet of Jesus, on his face, in the posture of humility before God.

Of course, the irony is that this man, the only one who was grateful, the only one who is worshiping Jesus, is a Samaritan – one who does not worship the true God.  Of course, He is now the only one who is worshiping the true God – the other nine have moved on to other things and chose not to worship the true God who healed them.

The Samaritan is worshiping Jesus, not because he wants something, but because he has already received something.  He is grateful, and because of this grace shown to him, he is motivated to worship.  Jesus did not command him to worship, rather he worships because he appreciates what Jesus has done for him.

His worship is not compelled.  He is not guilted into it.  He is not doing it to please someone else, or because it is expected.  In fact, the Samaritan’s worship is unexpected!  He is a Samaritan, after all.  But it is genuine worship, because it is motivated by the Gospel. 

Our Lord blesses this former leper, saying: “Rise and go your way.  Your faith has made you well.”

There is a close relationship between faith (which is belief) and gratitude (which is thankfulness for a grace received).  Jesus has saved this man by grace, through faith.  And this, dear friends, is Christianity.

Every Sunday and Wednesday, this congregation opens its doors to all who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  There are countless people who have been baptized at this font, and many more who have come here to this congregation to worship over the course of their lives.  But sadly, there are way more ungrateful people who do not “turn back” and return to this place to kneel before Christ our Lord – who is here physically and miraculously, curing us from the leprosy of our sins, and raising us from death and hell.  Jesus is here, and He has saved you, dear brother, dear sister!  So why are there so many empty pews?  Where are the nine?  Were not ten cleansed? 

Why is worship the first thing to go when we get busy or tired or other things pop up? 

Too often, the Lord’s beloved, whom He has saved by baptism and the Word, all by grace and through faith, carry on like the nine ungrateful lepers.  And often it is only when we are sick or terrified or in some kind of dire need that we turn back and cry out, “Lord, have mercy upon us.”

Because of our sinful nature, in a very real sense, it is more of a danger to be well than to be sick, to be wealthy rather than poor, to be secure rather than be filled with anxiety, because that, dear friends, is when we go our merry way and forget about the Lord who saved us by dying on the cross, by seeing to it that we were baptized, by providing for our pastoral care through an ongoing ministry of Word and Sacraments, by giving you the freedom and the opportunity to worship.

Thanks be to God for this saint whose name we don’t even know, for he has taught us how to be a Christian – which is, how to worship.  The Athanasian Creed puts it bluntly: the faith is “that we worship.”  That’s what we do.  We Christians are the tenth leper.  Christians gather and pray, “Lord, have mercy upon us.  Christ, have mercy upon us.  Lord, have mercy upon us.”  And He hears our prayer.  He creates in us a clean heart, and renews a right spirit within us – a spirit of gratitude, a spirit of worship, a spirit like that of the tenth leper.

Let us never take our Lord’s mercy for granted, or cease praying to be cleansed.  Let us never cease praising the Lord, hearing His holy words of absolution, kneeling before His very flesh with grateful hearts, and continuing to receive His body and blood in a renewal of our own bodies and souls.

Dear friends, “rise and go your way.  Your faith has made you well.”  Amen.

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