PROPER 23, YEAR C

Sunday 9 October 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Luke 17:11-19

 

Saying “thank you” is one of the lubricants of the wheels of social interaction. When a stranger performs some courteous gesture, such as holding open a door for us, we instinctively acknowledge their kindness with a smile and a “thank you.” In traffic, when another driver yields the right of way to allow us to make a difficult left turn, we acknowledge them with a friendly wave of the hand.

 

Even more so, in our workplaces, homes, and indeed our churches, when people make an extra effort in the performance of some helpful task, if we’re smart, we remember to say, “thank you.” We do so because we care about their feelings and want them to know that their efforts are valued and appreciated, and not taken for granted.

 

One of the pitfalls of church life is that those who feel that they haven’t been thanked appropriately can be prone to grow resentful and bitter. Ideally, we shouldn’t need such recognition because we offer our gifts of time and talent to God; but not everyone is at that level of spiritual maturity. So, saying “thank you” to the right people at the right times is always wise and prudent, as well as courteous and considerate.

 

Today’s Gospel reading, however, takes us deeper into the true meaning and significance of thanksgiving. In our relationship with God, saying “thank you” is far more than just a social convention. We can even say that gratitude and thanksgiving to God is at the heart of all authentic Christian spirituality.

 

As Jesus enters a village, ten lepers call out to him.  They’re standing far off because according to the Law they must remain outside the towns and villages where people dwell.  So, from a distance, they cry out, "Jesus, master, have mercy on us."  Jesus answers simply, "Go and show yourselves to the priests."  For only a priest of the Temple can pronounce a leper clean of the disease.  

 

The text says, “And as they went, they were cleansed.” That wording implies that even though they aren’t healed yet, the ten lepers have the trust to obey Jesus and start out on the journey. Their faith in the Lord’s word is immediately rewarded. In the blinking of an eye, the scabs, scales, running sores and painful itching are gone.  At the Temple in Jerusalem, they can be certified as leprosy-free. Then they’ll be able to rejoin the community life from which they’ve been ostracized and excluded on account of their disease. So off they go.

 

All, that is, except one.  He's a Samaritan.  Unlike the other nine, he won’t be going to Jerusalem in any case but, if anywhere, to the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim. Still, his first priority is simply to say thank you to Jesus. He runs into the village shouting God’s praises, and throws himself prostrate at Jesus’ feet, gasping out exclamations of gratitude.

 

When the other nine lepers present themselves before the priests outside the Temple, they’ll sacrifice doves and lambs as part of the ritual of being pronounced clean of leprosy. But here in a dusty street in a remote village, the Samaritan leper is engaging in a new form of worship.  Instead of doves and lambs, he’s offering a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

 

The Mass is similarly a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.  The very word "Eucharist" comes from the Greek verb meaning to give thanks: the same verb that occurs in the Greek text of today's Gospel where it says that the Samaritan "thanked" Jesus. The Holy Eucharist is literally the Holy Thanksgiving.

 

So, this Samaritan leper teaches us about the true nature of Christian worship.  He falls down at Jesus’ feet to offer praise and thanks for all that God has done for him. We come here to offer praise and thanks for all that God has done for us. The point is not that God will be miffed at us if we don’t thank him properly. Instead, a basic disposition of gratitude is what we need to cultivate a right relationship with God. It’s not that God needs to be thanked, but rather that we need to be thankful.

 

Saying “thank you” to God transcends all social conventions and niceties because it expresses a basic acknowledgment that all we have is sheer gift, unmerited and undeserved. From the moment of conception, we owe our very existence to God’s goodness. Sometimes it’s salutary to reflect that none of us had to be here; God could just as easily have left us uncreated, in which case we wouldn’t even exist. But he did create us, so we do exist, and that’s cause for thanksgiving right there.

The practice of regularly thanking God reminds us that despite everything that’s wrong with this world, God’s creation is nonetheless fundamentally good. Nothing God has made is intrinsically evil; on the contrary, evil has no real existence of its own, and remains instead what Saint Augustine of Hippo called “a privation of the good,” that is, the disorder and corruption that distorts what remains at bottom God’s good creation. Life in this world is well worth living, both on its own merits, and because it contains the promise of eternal life. Moreover, just as God is the good creator of a good creation, so he’s ultimately the redeemer and healer of all that’s gone wrong with that creation, as the ten lepers in today’s Gospel experience first-hand.

 

As we engage in the proverbial discipline of counting our blessings, then, we realize how much we have to be thankful for. By cultivating the virtue of gratitude, we acknowledge our status as creatures, and God’s status as our Creator and Redeemer. And by continuing to say thank-you to God, we open ourselves up to a new and ever-deepening relationship with him.

In our Revised Standard Version translation, Jesus says to the Samaritan leper, "Rise, go your way, your faith has made you well."  But an equally accurate translation of the Greek would be, "Rise, go your way, your faith has saved you."

 

Today's Gospel shows us that we have a choice. The nine lepers forget about Jesus as soon as their prayer is answered, and they hasten to advance their own lives and agendas. By contrast, the Samaritan leper returns to offer the Lord thanks and praise without seeking any advantage for himself. Of the ten, he models the truly Christian posture of thanksgiving – for which, again, the Greek word is Eucharist. As we learn to emulate his disposition of gratitude, then at the conclusion of this and every Eucharist, we can hear our Lord saying the words, "Rise, go your way, your faith has made you well; Rise, go your way, your faith has saved you."

 

PROPER 22, YEAR C

October 2, 2022

(Christ Church, Woodbury N. J.)

 

Habakkuk 1:1-6,12-13, 2:1-4

Psalm 37:3-10

II Timothy 1:1-14

Luke 17:5-10

 

When we read the Sunday Scripture lessons, a useful question to ask is: What underlying problem, question, or complaint is this reading is setting out to solve, answer, or address? Answering this question sometimes requires us to read back, between the lines.

 

And sometimes it doesn’t. In our Old Testament reading today the Prophet Habakkuk has a definite complaint to make. The wonderful thing about the Hebrew prophets is that they usually have no reticence whatsoever about complaining to God. 

 

So, Habakkuk makes his dissatisfaction clear: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and thou wilt not hear? … The wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted … Why dost thou look on faithless men, and art silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?”

 

It's a familiar complaint. If God is a God of justice, why does he permit such flagrant injustice on earth? Psalm 37 similarly speaks of fretting over those who prosper and succeed in evil schemes—and warns that the anger and rage brought on by such fretting leads only to evil.

 

In the reading from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy, the implied question is why God allows his chosen servants to suffer. Paul exhorts Timothy not to be ashamed of him as a prisoner but to share in suffering for the Gospel—for Paul suffers as he does precisely as a preacher, apostle, and teacher of the same Gospel. But the question lingers: Why does God permit those who’re doing his work to suffer so?

 

In today’s Gospel, the story of the master who doesn’t thank his servants when they come in from the fields but instead has them prepare his dinner seems to address an implied complaint about why the work of discipleship seems never-ending and often thankless. The disciples are impatient for the messianic banquet of God’s kingdom when they can finally sit and eat—but there’s all this interminable work to be done first.

 

In each case, the Lord answers: The Day is coming when everything will be put right. But that Day is not yet. In the meantime, we’re called to persevere in faith.

 

So, the Lord promises Habakkuk that his just judgment is indeed coming. “Look among the nations and see; wonder and be astounded … For lo, I am rousing the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation …” Here, “the Chaldeans” refers to the Babylonian Empire, which in due course will conquer the kingdom of Judah as God’s punishment for the people’s sins.

 

Habakkuk gladly accepts the promise: “O Lord, thou hast ordained them as a judgment; and thou, O Rock, hast established them for chastisement.” But—the Lord tells him—not just yet: “For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” In the meantime, the prophet takes his stand upon the watchtower to await the fulfillment of God’s promises.

 

The Psalmist similarly reassures those tempted to fret over the wicked who prosper: “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him … For evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait upon the Lord shall possess the land.”

 

Again, Paul reassures Timothy that despite present sufferings God is able to guard what has been entrusted to them both until the Day of Christ’s return. In the meantime, Timothy is to follow the pattern of sound words which he has learned from Paul “in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.”

 

The key to such perseverance, moreover, is faith. Thus, the Lord tells Habakkuk: “he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail, but the righteous shall live by his faith.” Notice the double-meaning here: having lived by faith in the present, the righteous shall in the end gain their lives.

 

Such persevering in faith is not a human achievement but a divine gift. Hence, Paul reminds Timothy to rekindle the gift that is within him through the laying-on of Paul’s hands, and he exhorts him to guard the truth entrusted by the Holy Spirit who dwells within them. In other words, we’re not in this alone. God is with us.

 

In today’s Gospel, when the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, he commends them for asking for the right thing. With faith even as small as a grain of mustard seed they could tell a sycamine tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea and it would obey them. The point of this vivid image is that by faith we can do even what seems utterly impossible to us.

 

So, in their different ways, each of today’s readings presupposes a human complaint to God about some present state of affairs that seems disordered and wrong. God answers with the promise that the day is coming when he will put all things right. But that day is not yet. In the meantime, he calls us to persevere in the faith that only he can give, and which will enable us to accomplish miraculous things in his name.

 

Christ Church is the second parish to which I’ve been assigned as Interim Priest in this transitional period between rectors. And in both parishes the complaint that I’ve heard most often by far is this: Why must it take so long to call a new rector? Why can’t we have the new one arrive within a month or two of the previous one’s departure?

 

The temptation under these circumstances is to try to take control of the situation ourselves and move the discernment and search processes along as quickly as we can according to our own timetable. And that’s perfectly understandable.

 

But God has already chosen the next rector of Christ Church, Woodbury. At present, however, God alone knows who that person is. We don’t. As currently configured in this diocese, the discernment process is designed to open up the greatest room for us to recognize God’s choice as he reveals it to us. And so far, my observation has been that the process generally works well in doing what it’s designed to do.

 

What we need to understand is that this process will proceed according to God’s timetable and not necessarily ours. There may well be setbacks and disappointments along the way. For example, some parishes extend a call only to have the person turn them down, so they have to go back and start receiving names all over again. But that’s usually a blessing in disguise, leading to the realization that this candidate wasn’t the one God had in mind after all, and there’s more work to be done.

 

Whatever happens, we do well to remind ourselves of God’s promises as set forth in today’s readings. Our calling is to persevere in faith, confident that God is bringing us to where we need to be: in his own way, in his own time. In the words of the Prophet Habakkuk: “Still the vision awaits its time … If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”