With a Grateful Heart
Luke 17:11-19
November 15, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: James Tissot The Healing of Ten Lepers
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/rmGEAxpLJHI
Let’s start at the end this time, shall we? “Your faith has made you well.” That’s the last line of today’s story. Jesus tells the man “your faith has made you well” or “your faith has saved you,” depending on which translation you read. The verb sozo means both to heal or make well and to rescue from danger or destruction. In a theological sense, it can mean to grant salvation from sin.
“Your faith has healed you and saved you” is what Jesus says to the tenth man, the one who used to have leprosy but doesn’t any more. He says it to the one who came back to say thank you, the only one who did that. The man has demonstrated his faith with his gratitude. Jesus’ words suggest that there is a close relationship between faith and gratitude and that there is something life-giving about gratitude. [1]
There is a good bit of empirical evidence for the relationship between gratitude and healing. You can find it on the internet. Let me describe just one study
In 2015, researchers at UC-San Diego and the University of Stirling in Scotland, looked at 186 people who had stage B heart failure. Using psychological tests to measure gratitude, they found that higher gratitude scores were associated with better mood, higher quality sleep and less inflammation.
They asked one group to keep a gratitude journal for eight weeks. Every day they were to write down three things they were thankful for. The control group was not asked to do that. They just kept living their normal lives. Both groups continued receiving the same clinical care. What they found was that the group who kept the gratitude journals had significant reductions in inflammation and improved heart rate variability. The control group did not show those improvements.
Dr. Paul Mills, one of the lead investigators said “It seems that a more grateful heart is indeed a more healthy heart, and that gratitude journaling is an easy way to support cardiac health.”[2] Who knew?
It turns out that saying “thank you” matters. That is often understood as the message of this story in Luke’s gospel. It often gets reduced to an object lesson in which the nine other men are the examples of what not to do. I’m not very fond of this story and I think maybe that is because of the way that interpreters have treated the nine.
When Jesus first encounters these men, Luke says “keeping their distance, they called out to him,” Keeping their distance – that jumped out at me, reading this in 2020. Keeping their distance – I wonder if it was six feet or maybe more. They kept their distance because they have leprosy, which could be any of a number of skin diseases in that time. They have leprosy which frightened many people. They didn’t know about germs, but they knew enough to suspect that some things were contagious and so, people with leprosy had to keep their distance.
These 10 men were rule-keepers. They kept the rule that protected the rest of the community from getting their illness. That’s a good thing. And they had some compassion. Ordinarily Jews and Samaritans didn’t have anything to do with each other. They were cultural enemies. But this group includes one Samaritan. The nine must realize how very isolated he would be, being a Samaritan with leprosy and so they allow him to join them, giving him the benefit of safety in numbers. That’s a good thing too. I’m pointing this out because, again, I think that we who read this story are not always kind to the nine.
The ten men with leprosy call out to Jesus. Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priest. The priest is the one who can certify them as leprosy-negative. They obey Jesus. They head down the road and somewhere along the way, they discover that their skin is clear; they have been healed. Almost all of them keep on going to the priest. Because that’s what Jesus told them to do. Because that’s what the rules say – the priest is the one with the authority to let them go back to their families and their jobs and their lives. Jesus told them to go. As they were going, they were healed – that’s probably a good indication that they should follow the rest of Jesus’ instructions and continue going all the way to the priest.
I don’t think it is fair to say that they are not grateful. We don’t know that. We only know that they don’t express that gratitude to Jesus.
But, as Paul Duke writes, “one of them drops back, stops, turns around. Something wilder than compliance comes into his mind. He is a new man, and that calls for a new voice. He runs back, ‘praising God with a loud voice,’ then falls at the feet of Jesus, pouring out the gladness of his thanks. It isn’t a tidy little thank-you speech but a stammering babble and a puddle of tears in the dust. It has been said that praise is ‘the jazz factor’ of faith. This man’s freedom has found its voice and is having its proper play at Jesus’ feet. Praise is love improvising its answer to Love.” [3]
This time he doesn’t have to keep his distance. This time, he falls at Jesus’ feet and his joy cannot be contained.
Monday was one of those 70 degree days. You remember, we had several of them in a row. On Monday, I met a friend at the Normanskill Preserve. I had never been there before. It was a perfect day to encounter it for the first time. Gail and I walked and talked for a couple of hours. We had seen each other only once since March and there was a lot to catch up on. At bedtime, I realized that I was feeling especially contented. I was feeling like I had just finished a really good book or like someone had given me a gift that was just what I wanted. I became aware that I was feeling like that and I wondered why. It took me a bit to realize that the feeling came because I had been writing in my gratitude journal. I had had a good day, for sure, but I felt it the most when I expressed my gratitude.
If gratitude is good for us and if it makes us feel good, then why don’t more of us do it more often? (Maybe you all do. Maybe I am just preaching to myself here. Or just to those of us who are like the nine men who kept on going to the priest.)
What keeps us from expressing gratitude?
1. Sometimes we don’t recognize the gifts we have received. We don’t perceive grace when it happens. We think that the daily blessings of our lives are normal. Nothing to write home about. Nothing to give particular thanks for.
2. Sometimes we think we deserve what we have. We worked hard for it. We put in the hours and sweat equity. We studied and practiced and developed our talents. The only one to thank would be ourselves.
3. Sometimes we forget. Life keeps happening. We do what is required or pragmatic. We keep following the instructions on the to-do list. We are grateful, but we rarely stop to express it.
A recent study by the Templeton Foundation found that 90% of Americans think that gratitude is important, but only 52% of women and 44% of men express their gratitude on a regular basis. There is a gap between what we say we believe about gratitude and how we act on it. Those statistics are a bit higher for religious people with 65% expressing gratitude regularly. [4] So, again I realize that many of you are probably in that category.
What I am learning is that feeling gratitude is good, but expressing it has even more power. Saying thank you out loud to another human being, taking the time to reflect on it and write it down, paying it forward – all of these are part of the discipline of gratitude. Like so many other disciplines, the more that we practice it, the more natural and spontaneous it can become. Paul Duke described it as the jazz factor of faith – praise is love improvising its answer to God’s love. What I know about jazz musicians is that they can improvise only because they have mastered the foundations. Choosing gratitude and expressing it are among of the basic foundations of Christian faith.
I am not fond of this story because of the way interpreters have treated the nine. That’s probably because I’m a rule-follower, an instruction-reader. Even after all these years of life and ministry, I rarely feel the freedom to improvise.
Which is probably why I appreciate Barbara Brown Taylor’s reflection. She thinks that she is like the nine. She thinks that most of her congregation are also like those who follow Jesus’ instructions faithfully, but are still missing something.
Taylor says, “ ‘Where are the nine’ Jesus asks, but I know where they are. ‘Where is the tenth leper?’ That is what I want to know. Where is the one who followed his heart instead of his instructions, who accepted his life as a gift and gave it back again, whose thanksgiving rose up from somewhere so deep inside him that it turned him around, changed his direction, led him to Jesus, made him well?’
“Where are the nine?? Where is the tenth?! Where is the disorderly one who failed to go along with the crowd, the impulsive one who fell on his face in the dirt, the fanatical one who loved God so much that obedience was beside the point? Where did that one go? Not that I am likely to go after him. It is safer here with the nine—we know the rules and who does what. We are the ones upon whom the institution depends. But the missing one, the one who turned back, or was turned away, or turned against—where did he go? Who is he, and whom is he with, and what does he know that we do not know? Where are the nine? We are here, right here. But where, for the love of God, is the tenth?”[5]
Beloved ones, let us give thanks. Thanks for the world, for each other, for grace in Jesus Christ, for daily gifts, large and small. Let us improvise our answer to God’s love with a gratitude so deep that it makes us well. Amen.
[1] John Buchanan in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010) p. 169.
[2] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/04/grateful-heart
[3] Paul Duke “Down the Road and Back,” The Christian Century, September 27, 1995
[4] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_grateful_are_americans
[5] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1993), pp. 112-113