Preached by Winton Boyd on February 28, 2010
For a devout Galilean Jew hearing this story, there would immediately be two points of dramatic tension…Jesus is on the road between Galilee and Samaria. They would have asked why? With conflict between sects, the hint that Jesus may have been going to or coming from Samaria would have caught their attention. Secondly, he comes across and interacts with Lepers. There were elaborate laws forbidding contact with lepers – partly for health reasons and partly for religious reasons. This story isn’t going as they expected or would have liked.
Upon seeing the lepers, Jesus empowers the priests to heal them (didn’t heal them himself, did you notice that?). Then, the story continues, ONE of ten went back to Jesus, prostrated himself and gave thanks. With a loud voice and a grateful voice -ONE of them shows gratitude. Where were the others?
- Were they scared – having lived so long as lepers that they were unsure what this new status would mean and who would or would not accept them?
- Did they have a sense of entitlement – they deserved this after all?
- Had they high tailed it back to their families, their homes and loved ones – not so much ungrateful but rather so much in a hurry that they just didn’t take the time?
We don’t know about the 9, just the one.
With all due respect to Miss Manners, Emily Post, and our mothers or grandfathers who tried to drill in to us to “say thanks,” it is easy to imagine that only 1 in 10 said thanks. How often have we given of ourselves to someone else – a loved one or a stranger – and not been thanked. Honestly, how often have we neglected to say thanks for small deeds, or large, done on our behalf or with our well being in mind by someone else? The fact that one in ten returned to give thanks is NOT the surprising part of the story.
As we think about gratitude as spiritual practice, might we consider how the gratefulness of another has touched us. In the language of the story – what is it like to be Jesus to whom thanks is given? What does a truly appreciative spirit do to our mood, or more importantly, to our worldview?
I remember Micah Musallem, construction foreman at the Mar Elias School in Ibillin. He’s a man with many skills and many opportunities, who has chosen to stay in Israel to help build a school for Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He lives 30 minutes away in Haifa. His home city has been bombed, he makes much less living in Israel than he could elsewhere. He works around the clock. He is also one of the hosts, one of the ‘faces’ of Mar Elias when visiting Americans and Europeans come to stay at or work at the school. Micah is so grateful for the hard work of Americans in his war torn land of Arab Israel that he took a “sabbatical” to build homes with Habitat for Humanity in Arkansas – to show his gratitude.
Like others you and I know, Micah’s attitude of gratitude is infectious. It not only lights up the lives of over 1000 young students at the k-12 school, it settles into the spirits of visitors and workers alike. It changes the world around him in a positive and tangible way.
For the season of Lent will be exploring various ways we bear witness to the power of the Spirit in our lives. That idea, bearing witness, giving testimony – isn’t easy for many of us.
- Some of us have so much baggage around the word or idea. Maybe God language seems forced.
- Perhaps ‘testimony’ sounds like something done in a tent revival to convert people.
- Could it be that testimony hearkens to starry-eyed religious talk that seems over the top positive in a world of hurt and pain?
- Then again, ‘testimony’ seems to suggest a notion of God that is too defined, to clear-cut, too certain when our faith is full of ambiguities and uncertainties.
Today’s story, however, reminds us that testimony, giving praise and bearing witness to the grace of God, can be done with a lifestyle of gratitude . Such a practice keeps us connected us with realities that are larger than us, evokes humility and wonder, and offers those around us a glimpse of the power and spirit present in the world.
In her poem, Primary Wonder, Denise Levertov reminds us that a life gratefully lived appreciates mystery, even when smaller problems jostle for our attention.
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
If we didn’t learn to live gratefully through the stern words of a parent or grandparent –– might attending to mystery in our lives help? How is it, with all that ‘jostles for our attention’ – do we connect with the “quiet mystery present to me?” Is it an early morning walk, a good cup of coffee staring out the window, reading an artful novel, doing yoga, lighting a candle and praying for our loved ones? Regardless of how, it seems that to live a life of gratitude, appreciation for the awe-ful grace of God is necessary.
Wendell Berry in his poem, Sabbaths 1998, VII speaks of the place or person that allows us to simply be – where we can go to live with no expectations so that when needed, we can restore our spirit and soul and see our lives gratefully.
There is a place you can go
where you are quiet,
a place of water and the lighton the water. Trees are there,
leaves, and the light
on leaves moved by air.Birds, singing, move
among leaves, in leaf shadow.
After many years you have cometo no thought of these,
but they are themselves
your thoughts. There seems to belittle to say, less and less.
Here they are. Here you are.
Here as though gone.None of us stays, but in the hush
where each leaf in the speech
of leaves is a sufficient syllablethe passing light finds out
surpassing freedom of its way.
For one relative, I’m quite certain this place is a golf course. For another, it was simply being in the presence of her mother. For some this restorative sanctuary comes in the form of a person, for some it comes in the form of a place. For Berry, it is clearly in the wilderness. Where is it for us? Who is it? How do we keep this Sabbath reality in our lives? How do we get there more often – realizing that such a retreat is not selfish, but restorative to our soul, allowing newfound freedom and gratitude to percolate to the surface of our lives?
Laura Foley looks at the bleakness of winter (how many of us are dreaming of warm places right now) and asks, can ‘we find beauty even in winter darkness?’
The Offering
These woods
on the edges of a lake
are settling now
to winter darkness.
Whatever was going to die
is gone –
crickets, ferns, swampgrass.
Bare earth fills long spaces of a field.
But look:
a single oak leaf
brown and shining
like a leather purse.
See what it so delicately offers
lying upturned on the path.
See how it reflects in its opened palm
a cup of deep, unending sky.
– Laura Foley
Even the fallen and dead oak leaf reflects a cup of deep, unending sky. She reminds us that a life of gratitude is indeed shaped by how we interpret what we see. Being present to the possibility of beauty even amidst the bleak helps us see more deeply into the truth of goodness around us.
A friend of mine once reminded me that long before 9/11, people in Germany talked about “grace at ground zero,” referring to their surprise that out of the horror of WW2, light and hope emerged within people and society. He came to use the phrase as a way of talking about the ability within any one of our lives to see goodness and hope, even at our place of the most pain. One person who embodied this was a young woman named Etty Hillesum; who wrote in her diary: “Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on earth, my eyes raised towards heaven, tears run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude.” This is not summer camp she’s referring to, but a Nazi death camp.
Little is known of her external life, other than she was a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and who died as one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust…
(From www.gratefulness.org)
From the day when Dutch Jews were ordered to wear a yellow star up to the day she boarded a cattle car bound for Poland, she … endeavored to bear witness to the inviolable power of love and to reconcile her keen sensitivity to human suffering with her appreciation for the beauty and meaning of existence.
Her entry for July 3, 1942, reads:
I must admit a new insight in my life and find a place for it: what is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation…. They are out to destroy us completely, we must accept that and go on from there…. Very well then … I wish I could live for a long time so that one day I may know how to explain it, and if I am not granted that wish, well, then somebody else will perhaps do it, carry on from where my life has been cut short. And that is why I must try to live a good and faithful life to my last breath; so that those who come after me do not have to start all over again.
For Etty, this affirmation of the value and meaning of life in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary became her guiding principle. In the midst of suffering and injustice, she believed, the effort to preserve in one’s heart a spirit of (gratitude) and forgiveness was the greatest task that any person could perform.
Etty worked for a while as a typist for the Jewish Council, a job that delayed her deportation to the transit camp at Westbork. Eventually she renounced this privilege and volunteered to accompany her fellow Jews to the camp. She did not wish to be spared the suffering of the masses. In fact, she felt a deep calling to be present at the heart of the suffering, to become “the thinking heart of the concentration camp.”
On September 7, 1943, Etty and her family were placed on a transport train to Poland. From a window of the train she tossed out a card that read, “We have left the camp singing.” She died in Auschwitz on November 30.
In the life of faith, attentiveness to mystery, Sabbath and beauty even in the harshest of places come together to infuse our lives with gratitude; and gratitude allows us to see mystery, to find Sabbath, to embrace beauty.
Suggesting we should live a life of gratitude is not the issue. We know that. Remembering how we foster it in ourselves, how it impacts the people we love and meet and the causes we care about – that is our gospel invitation. One in ten, it seems from the story, is enough. One grateful, healed leper is enough. Amen
Biblical Story: Luke 17:11-19
Jesus Cleanses Ten Lepers
11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus* was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12As he entered a village, ten lepers* approached him. Keeping their distance, 13they called out, 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 made clean. 15Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16He prostrated himself at Jesus’* feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ 19Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’
Amen
