October 9, 2016 : May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
The Lord be with you! [and also with you]
Lift up your hearts! [we lift them to our God]
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God! [it is right to give God thanks and praise]
These are the words of our Sursum Corda – the dialog that opens our Great Thanksgiving, our Eucharist.
Lift up your hearts!
That type of thanksgiving – lifting up our hearts – is truly Great – it is a joy filled, Christ centered, THANK YOU to the God that gives us so very much.
And it is gratefulness of that magnitude we hear about in this gospel passage. Jesus is traveling in the land between the lands – the area between Galilee and Samaria. Ten lepers see him and ask to be healed, and Jesus tells them to go to their priest to be pronounced clean. On the way they are healed of their disease and they praise God for what has been done for them. And what was done for them was far more than a physical healing. It was a restoration of belonging, a return to community, a respite from alienation. Lepers were considered impure and contagious. As we now know, this is not really the case except in rare circumstances – yet even today, our Bishop spent time in a leper colony while on Sabbatical a few years ago – they are still a people living on the margins.
Jesus goes to the margins, sees them, heals them, sets them free from the bondage of isolation, and they lift up their hearts in praise to God.
But…there was one. One who returned.
Nine continue on to the priest, but this one returns to Jesus. He returned to offer his body and soul in humble thanks. And the verb that is used for “thank” in this moment, the moment when the leper, now healed, lay prostate before Jesus, is the same Greek verb used by Jesus when he thanks God before giving the bread and wine to his followers at his final meal with them. It is the word that is the basis for our word Eucharist.
The leper was lifting up his heart, and giving thanks to the Lord, his God in his heart, body and soul – with everything that he had!
And Jesus identifies that one as a Samaritan.
Yup – those pesky people that Jesus keeps using to flip our view of the world upside down. Jesus is always doing that isn’t he – challenging to move beyond our borders, challenging our assumptions, challenging our inertia. And in this setting, the Samaritans and lepers were those who were considered not good enough, unworthy of welcome into the community, the “other” to be feared, derided, kept at a distance. And the Samaritans and lepers of today? Oh, there are a host of them, aren’t there. So many on the margins. So many living in land between lands. The poor, the hungry, the transgendered, gays, women in some countries, people who look, speak or worship differently, the disabled, the elderly.
And this leper, this Samaritan of our gospel, the one who is doubly an outcast – he is the one who turns back, who returns to give all that he had – himself – in gratitude for all that was given to him. And it is this gratitude, this giving over of all he had to Christ, that heals his weary soul.
I am reminded of a French Marian legend about a simple storytelling man who gives up his life of imagery and dance and enters a monastery. But the life of the monks remains strange to him; he knows neither how to recite nor chant a prayer. He pours out his lament to the Virgin Mary and she tells him to serve God with what he can do, namely to dance and leap. From that moment on, he skips the divine offices and dances during those times. He is called to the abbot and believes that he is about to be expelled. But the abbot only says, “With your dancing you have glorified God with body and soul. But may God forgive us all those lofty words that pass our lips without coming from the heart.”
Thanking God in body and soul. That is what we hear today. That is what the leper gave. That is what the simple man gave to God in his dance. Gratitude in abundance.
But, so often we can hold on so tightly to what we have that we offer gratitude, not of abundance, but of leftovers. Like the woman who called The Butterball Turkey Company several years ago to ask about cooking a turkey that had been in the bottom of her freezer for 23 years. That’s right—23 years. The Butterball representative told her the turkey would probably be safe to eat if the freezer had been kept below zero for the entire 23 years. But the Butterball representative warned her that even if the turkey was safe to eat, the flavor would probably have deteriorated to such a degree that she would not recommend eating it. The caller replied, “That’s what I thought. We’ll give the turkey to our church.” You can’t make this stuff up – seriously.
Thankfully today, there are also people just like the Samaritan, who topple our preconceived notions of how the world works, and that many do show their gratitude for God’s grace in far better ways.
There was an NPR program a few years ago, that was covering the Federal Government’s modifications to the poverty line – that line in the sand that determines if one is economically poor. The interviewee was mentioning recent studies that found that on average, those who earn less give more to church and other charities than do those who earn more. Those who have less, give more.
I wondered about that.
I wondered about why.
And I got to thinking about another story – one recounted by Mother Theresa…
“One night,” she said, “a man came to her house to tell her that a Hindu family, a family of eight children, had not eaten anything for days. They had nothing to eat. She took enough rice for a meal and went to their house. She said, “I could see the hungry faces, the children with their bulging eyes. The sight could not have been more dramatic!” The mother of the children took the rice from Mother Theresa’s hands, divided it in half…and went out.
“When she came back a little later, Mother Theresa asked her: ‘Where did you go? What did you do?’ She answered, ‘They also are hungry.’ ‘They’ were the people next door, a Muslim family with the same number of children to feed and who did not have any food either. The mother of starving children herself, saw the other family – saw them, though they were not of the same faith – saw them, though they could not help her – saw them, though she had worries of her own. And with the gift of rice, she gave out of her abundance.
Maybe the answer to why is that those on the margins, those with less of what others desire, they have a deeper understanding of true abundance, of what really matters, and that enables them to dance, to leap, to live and give of their rice, in gratitude.
And maybe that is why the Samaritan did too, because he lived on the margins.
Our gospel reminds us that Jesus sees, most especially those we have cast aside, those on the margins – the ones willing to be seen and to see…and the ones most grateful for all that is given them. And he is calling us to do the same – to see, to be seen, and to be thankful to God for all that is given to us.
“[We] may not have Jesus’ power to cleanse and make whole as we hear in the gospel today, but we do have the power to step into those in-between places in people’s lives where one can no longer deny that what once was whole is now broken – and that perhaps it is we who have been a part of that brokenness. We have the power to go into those places where the lepers of today live – cut off from all that they once loved and took for granted. You and I can walk into those places and maybe, just maybe that is the beginning of cleansing, of healing, of restoration”1 – not only for them, but for us.
Jesus calls us to transcend borders. And, in the scarcity of the margins we might also encounter the parts of us that are hidden in the borderlands deep within our hearts – where we may least want to be seen and most need to be touched. Jesus, who is not afraid of borderlands, does not mind meeting us in those places, and it may be that by recognizing him there, we will find in our deepest selves a new outpouring of the grateful love that makes us and others well – really well, spiritually well. We may come to feel his love, and to know that we actually have far more than we ever need, and are blessed beyond measure. And, we also will hopefully discover that we are stewards – not owners – of all that we have, because all of it is God’s – every part of this world is for us to care for, but it is God’s to own.
That is what stewardship is all about – it is about recognizing that all that we have, and all that we are, are God’s, and have been entrusted to us to care and nurture. It is recognizing that we are called to love one another, ourselves and God. It is understanding that in this temporal existence of ours, our time, our talent and our treasures are meant not to build up more, but to offer more, and to be grateful for all that we have.
Perhaps Eckhart Tolle was right when he said “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” But I prefer Piglet…yes, Piglet the dear little friend of Winnie-the-Pooh who “noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
In our baptism, and this joy filled community we call Christ Church, we encounter the Jesus that walks with us, that sees us, and that heals us with his body and blood. Like the Samaritan, we are given new life – restored in body, mind and spirit. We are transformed.
And it is here…here…
…where we turn back.
Where we, like the Samaritan, turn back to God. It begins with our offering of our life and labor – the giving of all that we have to the one who gave it into our care. And it continues with our Great Thanksgiving – our Eucharist – our joyful thanks to God for the risen Christ that is here in our midst. In this moment we are made whole, just like the Samaritan. In this moment, we know that the truth is everyone is like the Samaritan, and we are freed from alienation and separation from others in the kingdom of God that loves all unconditionally and without measure. In this moment we are freed from fear and able to joyously feel the abundance that is ours, and to respond with gratitude that is unbounding. In this moment, like the caterpillar in the cocoon, we are transformed into something beautiful, ready to fly to those living on the margins, symbols of God’s grace and love.
We are in our stewardship season, and like years past, each of you will be given a gift today, blessed at the altar, when you come to receive communion. Today, it will be a foam butterfly. Take it home with you to remind you of the ways in which God has been a transformative presence, and the way in which this church has been a place in which you have been able to turn back to give your thanks.
Jesus is calling us to see those who we have made invisible – to be good stewards of our neighbor and all that God has created – to be the body of Christ in the world today – to let go of fear and to live in the joy of abundance. And when we do, may we return again and again to this place lifting up our hearts in gratefulness to God. Filled with love in body and soul and dancing with joy in thanksgiving for our abundance.
Truly, “Praising God from whom all blessings flow”!
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click here:
1 This is a quote from another source, but was pulled a long while ago, and I no longer know the correct citation. Please feel free to contact me at rector@christchurchepiscopal.org if you know the source, and I will properly cite it. Thank you.
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
October 9, 2016
Pentecost 21 – Year C
1st Reading – Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Psalm 66:1-11
2nd Reading – 2 Timothy 2:8-15
Gospel – Luke 17:11-19
