Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Thanksgiving Eve Eve
watch this service online (reading starts around 16:13; children’s sermon starts around 17:41; sermon starts around 27:58)
Reading: Luke 17:11-19
For the children’s message, I asked the kids about times that they have been kind to someone else or given someone else a gift, and about how it felt to be thanked (or not). I also asked about times that someone has done something kind for them. We’ve talked a lot about the importance of showing love to others through being kind, and gratitude and appreciation are another important way that we show love. In our reading, Jesus heals ten men with a skin condition, but only one of them turns back to thank him. This doesn’t mean that the other nine are then un-healed or that this guy somehow earned his healing. Jesus healed them because Jesus gonna Jesus. But this guy recognizes with joy that God has blessed him and he shows love back to Jesus, just as Jesus showed love to him. We then ended with a popcorn prayer about ways that people have shown love to us.
We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well over the last four months or so that I’ve been here. Wouldn’t you say? So tonight I want to start by getting a little personal. And by personal, I mostly mean kinda gross.
I recently started seeing a new doctor. I’ve had chronic pain in my back, knees, ankles, and feet for quite some time – since even before I mangled my knee back in October. But a conversation with my sister earlier this year made me start to wonder whether these aches and pains might actually be signs of something more than just getting older. See, my sister has a condition called psoriatic arthritis. It is an autoimune disorder that can cause chronic pain similar to mine.
As you might have guessed from the name, psoriatic arthritis is closely related to the skin condition psoriasis, which causes itchy, red, scaly patches on the skin. (This is where it starts to get a bit gross, lol.) In addition to chronic pain, I have also had some kind of skin condition on my feet for many years – the skin gets red and cracked and itchy, and even the nails and the soles of my feet are affected. I always assumed that it must be some sort of foot fungus, despite the fact that no amount of antifungal cream ever seemed to fully get rid of it.
But then my sister saw it; and she said, ‘Actually, I think that might be something else. That kinda looks like psoriasis to me!’ And it does tend to be genetic. So I got a referral to the dermatologist and I went in with hope! I went in thinking, ‘This is great; I’m gonna go in, get this quick diagnosis of psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis, and I’ll kill two birds with one stone! I’ll finally get adequate treatment for the pain and for this gross, embarrassing foot thing all at the same time!’ You can imagine my disappointment when the dermatologist took one look at my feet and said, ‘Oh, nope. That’s definitely fungal.’ *Crestfallen*. You rarely see someone so disappointed *not* to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, lol.
So he prescribed me some pills – and some more antifungal cream – and told me to come back in a month. I just had my follow-up with him last week, and, well, it looks like he was right – I don’t have psoriasis. It turns out, I’m just gross. My feet still aren’t totally cleared up, but they do look quite a bit better. But I had a hard time admitting that at my appointment. I had a hard time being relieved or grateful to the dermatologist, because I was still embarrassed that that actually did turn out to be the issue.
In our reading from Luke for today, we encounter ten men who are having some skin issues of their own – and many of them seem like they might be struggling with some similar feelings of embarrassment. Jesus is walking through a village in the border area between Samaria and Galilee when these ten cry out to him to heal them. In typical Jesus fashion, he’s like, ‘Sure, cool, no problem,’ and he tells them to go show themselves to the priests. All of these men clearly know who they’re dealing with, because without pausing to quibble about the details, they all do exactly as Jesus says and immediately start heading to find the nearest priest. And as they do so, they find themselves finally healed.
Now, there’s a lot more at stake in this particular situation than just embarrassment – and more even than just the illness itself. The reason Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests is because their condition made them *ritually* unclean as well as sick – which meant that they were excluded from the temple and excluded from the life of their community. The priests were the ones who had the authority to declare when someone was “clean” again; they had the power to remove someone’s status as an outcast and restore them to the fellowship of the community.
So you can imagine how eager all ten of these men were to find a priest and get the all clear. I’m sure that they were eager to put this whole terrible business behind them ASAP. And they probably didn’t want to draw a whole lot of attention to the matter, hoping that everyone else in the community would quietly forget all about it as well, and they could return to their normal lives.
So it’s actually a bit unexpected when one of these men, noticing that he has been healed, stops in his tracks and turns back to Jesus. He looks down at his miraculously clear, healthy skin, then starts lifting up praises to God at the top of his lungs, and finally drops to his knees at Jesus’ feet, overflowing with gratitude. He lets go of his shame and embarrassment and allows himself to get fully caught up in the joy of this awesome thing that has just been done for him. He fully receives and experiences the love of God that Jesus has poured out on him through this healing.
And it’s then that Luke shares with us that this man was also a Samaritan — meaning he was someone who would have been doubly marginalized among the people of Israel. For the people witnessing this healing, or for any of the people reading Luke’s account later, this was an extra little dig: the fact that the one person who fittingly showed praise and gratitude to God happened to be a Samaritan (dun-dun-DUNN!).
But by pointing this out, Jesus is also pointing toward another wound in need of healing. Galilee, Samaria, and Judea were all descendants of the tribes of Israel – but a history of conquest and colonization had left Samaria with a different culture and different religious practices from the other two. This had led to bitter division and enmity between them. And with Samaria sandwiched between Galilee to the north and Judea to the south, it was a wound literally right at the heart of the people of Israel – one they refused to acknowledge or to try to reconcile. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Jesus performs this healing in the borderlands between Galilee and Samaria, as he heals both Galileans and Samaritans together.
I see a great deal of hopefulness in this. It’s hopeful because Jesus is showing that he hasn’t just come to reconcile the ‘faithful’ people of God. He has come to heal the divisions between us all. He has come to redeem and heal the wounds of the whole world – especially those wounds that are hardest for us to reckon with.
And like these nations and these ten men, Jesus likewise meets us where we are most vulnerable. He meets us in the places within ourselves where there is brokenness and shame. And with great love, Jesus reaches out to touch us and to make us whole.
We do well to follow the example of the Samaritan man – to do as he does and humbly recognize our own deep need for God’s healing and grace and love. Because it’s from that same place of humility that we too will experience the profound joy of realizing what awesome things that God has done for us. Through humility, we too will overflow with gratitude for the love that God has poured out on us in all the gifts that God has given us.
And that is the thanksgiving we come together to celebrate today. We give thanks for even more than the blessings we might usually give thanks for – for our houses, our health, or our families. We give thanks for the profound and abiding love with which these things were given. We give thanks for the love of God, who has given us all that we have and all that we are. We give thanks to reflect that love back to the one who first loved us.
All praise and glory and gratitude be to God, both now and forever! Amen!
This is the Day 
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