Year C, Proper 23: Living from Gratitude and Thanksgiving--Stop, Turn, & Praise

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Proper 23, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

In his reflection on the psalms as he was exploring his newfound faith, C.S. Lewis remarked on the connection between gratitude and personal well-being. “I noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced minds praised most: while the cranks, the misfits, and malcontents praised least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.”

In our Gospel for today, we have in Luke’s account of the ten lepers a powerful testimony to place of gratitude, gratefulness, thanksgiving, and praise in the Christian life. The story is a simple one. Jesus heads into uncharted territory as boundary-crossing love. The region between Samaria and Galilee should set off red flags for us. Observant Jews steered clear of Samaria and Samaritans. They were a despised group—culturally inferior, theologically inferior, and their liturgy wasn’t up to snuff either.

So Jesus, the embodiment of love in human form, from the very first sentence of the story tells us something of crucial importance. God’s love knows no boundaries. There is no one who can be declared insider or outsider, clean or unclean, deserving and undeserving. There are only precious children of God, created in God’s image and likeness, whose dignity is to be sought, seen, named, and celebrated.  Everyone, indeed all of creation—the mountains, the rivers, the trees, birds, animals, flowers, reptiles—in invited into the life of God, a life of full-flourishing that is God’s dream for the world, that is God’s greatest delight.

The ten lepers—outcasts in the truest sense of the word—recognize in Jesus something that all the insiders who think they know who and how God works cannot. In him is healing and wholeness. In him is a dignity that the human created structures of exclusion and hierarchy cannot see, to which they are self-assuredly blind. How often in the Gospels do we see this? It’s the ones who think they see who are actually blind. And it is the ones who know they don’t know who actually get a glimpse of the gift.

Anyways, the ten lepers have so internalized the shame their society has heaped on them that they dare not come too close. They holler to Jesus from a distance. That distance is a symbol of the exclusion they inhabit. They are prevented from human relationship except with each other—huddled up in a little band at the side of the road. Not too different from the homeless encampments that sprung up on our parking strip this summer. Jesus tells them to “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” and “as they went, they were made clean.”

Now all ten lepers presumably recognized that they were made clean, but only one stops, turns back, and praises God. He goes back and prostrates himself at Jesus’ feet and thanks him. That little sequence of events tells us a lot about the life of discipleship. This one healed leper who knows healing, salvation, and not just cleanliness—stops, turns back, and utters thanks and praise. Skin-deep cleanliness is different from salvation. Praise is a natural expression of wholeness experienced at the ground of our being. Let’s take those in order.

First he stops. He has to stop for moment to even let the miracle of his healing sink in. It would have been easy in the ecstatic recognition of his cleansing to just present himself to the priests, get his slate wiped clean, and go hand out with this family and friends. He finally gets to see his kids, his spouse, to enjoy Sunday Night Football with pizza and beer. But he pauses. He stops. He takes a moment to let what God has done for him to really take hold of his whole being.

In our frenetically paced culture where the 24-hour new cycle and social media keep us bouncing from one crisis to the next, pausing and stopping is perhaps one of the most radical acts we can engage. So often we are just swept along by whatever happen to come across the airwaves, or Twitter, that we find ourselves several miles downstream before we even realize that we’ve been swept away. The holy habit of pausing, of stopping, can serve as a stick in the spokes of a spinning wheel. We pause, we stop, and we being to recognize all the amazing things God is doing right under our noses.

After the Leper pauses, he “turns back.” That’s no small word in the Gospels. What is he doing? He is turning back to the source of his healing. He is remembering who and whose he is. His recalling for himself to placeless place where true healing, true happiness is to be found. When Martin Luther wasn’t busy throwing inkpots at the devil in his study he had an amazing daily holy habit he was famous for. Each morning upon waking he would look in the mirror and say to himself, “Martin!” “Yes!” he would reply. “Remember you are baptized!” Remember who and whose you are Luther reminded himself each day. Remember that the old self—the self that seeks happiness in power, possessions, prestige—has been buried under the waters and that you know life in the risen life of Christ Jesus. Remember that none of what other people say—their praise, their blame—changes who you are in God’s eyes. Remember that the powers and principalities of this world don’t have the last word. Remember that who you are at your core is the freedom of Christ.  So every day he would remind himself of that. Not just once a week on Sundays, but every day. Why? Because we forget so easily and find ourselves determined by what others say about us, by narratives of fear and exclusion, by stories that diminish or flat-out deny our dignity as children of God created in God’s image and likeness.

So the Leper turns back, turns away from all those old stories of who people told him he was and to the source of light and fountain of love that is Jesus. These days we might say he does a “hard reboot” on his operating system. He shuts down those old programs and turns again to the life-giving story of who he really is.

And what happens after he’s stopped long enough for the momentum of daily living to still, and turned back to the source of being? He’s overwhelmed with thankfulness and praise. He sees that praise and adoration are the proper end of all human beings. It is indeed a right and good to give God thanks praise always and everywhere.

So: stop, turn, give thanks and praise. It’s as simple as pausing throughout your day, remembering who and whose you are, and uttering what St. Augustine calls an arrow prayer—“Thank you,” “I love you,” or in the words of Ann Lamott a simple awe-struck, “Wow!” Earlier in the week I had the privilege of hearing the Very Reverend Tracey Lind, former Dean of the Cathedral in Cleveland, speak about her diagnosis with Frontal Temporal-lobe Dementia. She’s only 62 and has been given 7-10 years to live. She spoke of how she figured she had a choice. To be a victim, pass to the other side of life and begin the long goodbye, or to try to see how God was present in the midst of her illness. Needless to say, she chose the latter, and she’s discovered in what she calls her pilgrimage into dementia that she can even give thanks and praise there. She paused. She turned back to gaze into the depths of God and found that even in her illness there were gifts she could exercise. She found a freedom in not having to be in charge. She found a grace in stepping away from active ministry and opening doors for others to step through. She found that she suddenly got to see with the eyes of a child. Paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Fine Art are no longer exemplars of a particular art historical tendency to be categorized, and analyzed, but dances of color, line, and figure sweeps of oil, gestures of paint as paint. She found the power of the present moment, and the joy of dwelling in the eternal now of God. She found joy.

Now don’t get me wrong. This took a while for her to realize. There was shock, disbelief, anger denial, depression for a long while alternating like the different cycles of a washing machine. But today, right now, she can see with eyes of the gift. That even in her illness, even though the silver is tried, we’re in a net, burdens laid on our backs, and people riding over our heads in the words of the psalm—even now God is present. We are brought, even in the midst of bondage, into a spacious place.

One of the beauties of praying the Daily Office each morning and evening is that it always ends with the General Thanksgiving. Prayed over time it instills in us, especially those of us like myself with a tendency to see what’s missing or lacking, a basic appreciation for everything God has done for us. The General Thanksgiving creates what I like to call Generalized Thanksgiving Disorder—the ability to give thanks even in the most unlikely of places if we stop and turn and look with eyes attuned to the gift, to the hidden blessings that percolate just under the surface of our preconceptions.

Charlie Price, a priest and professor at VTS was one of the framers of the ’79 Book of Common Prayer. He’s the author of the alternate General Thanksgiving on page 836 of your prayer book. The astounding thing to know about this prayer is that it was written in the wake of the accidental death of his seven-year-old daughter. That line, “we thank you for failures and disappointments that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone,” is born of searing pain and piercing grief. “My friends,” he said at his first sermon after the death of his daughter, “I’ve hit rock bottom. And I can tell you that God is there too.”

Let’s pray it together.