Here is my sermon for Thanksgiving.
I hope it is helpful and a blessing to you.
John 17:11-19
Day of Thanksgiving
November
20/21, 2012
Redeemer, Olathe, KS &
Good Shepherd, Fremont, NE
Grace, mercy
and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus
Christ. Amen
“Thanks for
Nothing!” I’m sure you’ve heard that
phrase before.
And, very rarely, is it a good thing to hear.
Not only is it sarcasm,
but it almost always is an unveiled display of displeasure
concerning your contribution or input to a given situation.
But when we see ourselves as God does through Christ, we can thank our savior
that because of Him God sees NOTHING wrong with us.
Let me repeat that:
God sees nothing wrong with us!
Therefore we can pray, “Dear God, thanks for nothing…thanks
for holding nothing against us.”
Our Gospel
lesson today tells the story of the 10 lepers.
And, as I have spent the last 6 ½ years in Olathe, I think I might now
know where the story for the Wizard of Oz may have come from.
Jesus was traveling in the country between Jerusalem and
Samaria when these 10 lepers approached him and asked for his mercy.
This could have been alms to help them buy food,
Or, possibly, a place to find shelter, or salve for their
wounds
Or, perhaps, they might have heard about Jesus and his miracles
and hoped that he would actually heal them of their disease.
They were just as hapless and helpless as Dorothy, the Lion,
the Scarecrow and the Tin Man
Well, Jesus simply told them to present themselves to the priest
(the wizard?)
There was a law banishing lepers from within the city walls
as a way to prevent epidemics from spreading to the general populace
Therefore, there had to be someone who would determine who
could and could not be considered part of
the community fellowship
And the priest was the only one in town who had that authority
to declare a person healed—who could allow them to go back home.
Because, as we all know, (click your heels three times)
“there’s no place like home”.
And, so, it made sense to these men when Jesus sent them away
with these words.
If they wanted to be accepted back inside the city walls,
they had to see the priest
If they wanted their old life back they had to prove they
were clean.
And maybe, just maybe, this Jesus had enough clout that the
priest, when he heard they had been sent by Jesus, would let them go back home.
Well, along
the way, something amazing happened; they were cleansed! Healed!
However, the only one who returned to thank Jesus was the
Samaritan leper.
At first glance it would seem that the other nine were not
thankful for being healed
But I don’t think that this was the case.
Most people can be thankful about the good things in their
lives, even those other nine lepers.
But being full of thanks wasn’t what made the Samaritan leper
special to Jesus
What made him special was that he returned to give thanks
to the one who made him whole again
He didn’t keep his thanks to himself. He gave it back to the one who had filled him
with such a blessing.
We can apply this concept to our lives as well.
These next few days the vast majority of households in this
country will be celebrating a day of thankfulness
They might be saying to each other, “We don’t have
everything, but we’ve got enough.”
Or, “We’re sure glad
we aren’t as bad off as “those” people.
But that feeling of thankfulness is not what is so special
about any of those celebrations.
What will make our day special to us and to God is not our
being full of thanks (or turkey and stuffing, or anything else, for that
matter)
But our giving of that thanks to God
That is, we are aware of, acknowledge and express appreciation
to the one who is the Giver of Good Things
The Samaritan leper was the only one of the 10
who gave thanks
as a result of his being full of thanks
And this, I think, is what pleased Jesus so much.
It’s not that Jesus needed the recognition or the appreciation
It’s not even that they were required to offer it—for they
were all still healed
But Jesus does want to hear that we know our freedom from sin
and our healing comes from God
Just as a mother and father desire the love of their child,
God desires our worship and thanks.
In their
eyes, the lepers’ very lives were in the hands of the priest
Only he could declare them as clean or unclean.
But this Samaritan didn’t go to the priest
to prove and receive his bill of good health
and restore his newly “clean” place back in the community of
the Jews.
Because, despite how healthy he might appear, he would always
be “unclean” as a Samaritan.
As a Samaritan, the words of the Wizard, I mean, the priest,
were worthless to him.
Being declared physically unclean by another man who detested
him for who he was held no value to him
But giving thanks to the one who made him whole and gave him
back his life, well, that “was a horse of a different color!”
Surely, the
other nine were excited as they realized they were healed
I’m sure they ran all the way to the temple so that they
could get the official word as soon as possible
They had families and livelihoods to tend to.
They had lost time to make up for
They had lots of living to catch up that they were sure they
had missed out on while they were banished from their friends and family, left
to rot outside the city walls.
But then what?
The
Samaritan, on the other hand, was moved to action
Upon realizing he was well again, his first thought was not
about himself,
He didn’t go around bragging about his newfound wellness.
He didn’t try to make up for lost time.
Once he was healed, he knew that Jesus was the reason
And so he returned to the one who gave him his life;
Who performed the
miracle by which he knew that no matter what others thought of him,
he was clean, and well
and whole by the miracle works of Jesus
He wanted to go back to Jesus and say, “Thanks for nothing!”
Thanks for taking away all that made me unacceptable
Thanks for taking away all that kept me from earning my way
in life
Thanks for taking away that which kept me from those I love.
Thanks for taking away that which gave me continuous
reminders of my wretched, stinking, scar covered and scabby self.
Thanks for making sure there was nothing on me which makes me
objectionable before the sight of others.
“Thanks for nothing!”
You and I
are that Samaritan.
In the Old Testament God told the Israelites to shun those
who did not follow his commandments,
especially his desire that they should remain a pure race of
people.
Because his promise of a Savior would be fulfilled through
that special nation.
But in the New Testament Jesus points out that since he had
fulfilled that prophecy, there is no longer Hebrew or Gentile
Now, there are Children of light
and children of darkness
Before we became part of the Body of Christ, we were like the
Old Testament Samaritans
We were unclean and unholy and infected with sin, instead of leprosy
Like the Samaritans who could not come to God in his temple,
we too had no ability to know God
We were just as grotesque to God as those lepers appeared to
the other townspeople.
We were just as separated from God and his Church as those
lepers were from the people of Jerusalem.
And we too were outcasts, because
God hates sin and is not found where sin pervades
The apostle
John writes in his first epistle, “Everyone who commits sin is a child of the
devil; for the devil has been sinning from the begging. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose,
to destroy the works of the devil.”
And, by implication, the children of the devil.
And just like those four hapless souls who trekked down that
yellow brick road, our salvation cannot not be found in anything we do.
It’s found in what we believe;
It’s found in the faith that has been placed within us from
the Holy Spirit.
It’s too bad
that sin doesn’t leave a physical mark on us like leprosy does.
If those who live in sin and separation from God showed on
their bodies the result of sin,
they would be grotesque and ugly, indeed!
And then, perhaps, one could see more clearly the need for
cleansing and healing.
And we could know for certain who was and was not saved.
But, thankfully, we are not separated from God, nor
grotesquely maimed by sin.
Because Jesus took away our sin by his excruciating death on
the cross,
only the perfect Son
of God could live through that separation
and make atonement for all sin.
Because, through our baptisms,
we are Christ’s Body here on earth,
we are seen by God as that sinless person born of God
and not the sinner born of the devil.
And instead of telling us to go to the priest,
he tells us to go to
the Father to be declared righteous.
We go to Him to ask for his forgiveness,
to ask for him to declare us as clean
and free of the sores and scars of sin
And as we are on that trip to go see the Father and ask for
his forgiveness, a wonderful thing happens to us;
We notice that all those sins are gone.
We notice that they have all been washed away by that great
act of redemption Christ carried out on the cross for us.
And you and I become pure, healthy, and presentable to God
the Father as his Children of the light.
We can be thankful because there is NOTHING evil for the Father
to see in us any longer.
Instead of going to the Father to beg for mercy as leprous sinners,
We show up at this throne as perfect in his sight; sinless
and saintly.
As people who
are perfected in the sight of God, what then is to be our response?
Quite frankly, as Christians, even we have a common tendency
to overlook the obvious, just as the lepers did.
We sit in church and thank God for his forgiveness and for
making us his children,
but we forget at what great cost that kinship cost him; the
loss of his very own Son.
We forget to thank him for his sacrifice in addition to the
gifts he gives
As we think about giving thanks this weekend, just about
everyone in our country will come up with a laundry list of things they are
thankful for
But very few will actually give thanks for them or for the
most important gift they have been given:
Forgiveness by grace through faith
Which was won by Jesus on the cross at Calvary
At this time
of national Thanksgiving we are given the privilege of not only giving thanks
to God for all the good things he has blessed us with, but also for the things
we no longer have
We can give thanks that we have nothing to feel guilty
about
In Christ we can give thanks that we have nothing
blotting our record before God the Father for which he would require penance or
satisfaction.
We can give thanks that on Easter morning a tomb with nothing
in it sealed our fate as ransomed souls who one day will be with God in heaven.
We can give thanks that on the last day, when Christ comes
with trumpets sounding and an army of angels at his side, our graves will be
found to have nothing in them as well
Because we will have been raised from the dead
And placed at the seat of honor on God’s right hand side.
And in the midst of all that earthly nothingness, we will
finally realize the complete fullness, the “everything” that God has in store
for us in heaven.
And now you
know what it means to faithfully say to God, “Thanks for nothing?” no, “Thanks
for everything!”
In Jesus’
name, Amen.