Luke 17:11-19      “Increasing Our Standard of Giving”

     How easy it is to take our blessings for granted.  Take health for instance.  If you’ve ever had a potential health problem, we a lot of times think the worst.  We just know we have cancer.  We just know we’ve got a heart condition.  And then we go to the doctor, with our apprehension and fear, only to find out everything is just fine.  Or maybe we find ourselves in a tight financial situation in our personal lives because we’ve overspent.  But the terrible thing we think is going to happen doesn’t.  And we go back to living our lives as they were before, and begin taking things for granted as before. 

     In the Gospel reading this morning, we discover this attitude of taking things for granted in the lives of nine out of ten lepers who are healed miraculously from the terrible and disfiguring disease called leprosy.

     Now we don’t know a lot about leprosy today.  We tend to think of it as a disease that happened only in the ancient world.  But you might be interested to know that in 2005 there were nearly 296,500 new cases of leprosy detected in the world.  

     In Bible times, unlike now, there was no cure for leprosy.  This terminal disease was in reality a death sentence that took a long time, as long as 10 to 20 years to claim the lives of its victims.  But not before not only destroying a person’s body, but isolating that person from all of society.

     Those 10 lepers who approached Jesus long ago did so knowing that they were totally unable to help themselves.  These outcasts of society weren’t even supposed to approach other Jews.  But rather, being considered unclean, they were required by Jewish law to stand at a distance and declare themselves to be unclean.  That’s what these men with no hope of cure, these men desperate for an answer to their dilemma did – they stood at a distance and pleaded to Jesus to have mercy on them.

     They had undoubtedly heard of Jesus, for his fame had spread throughout the land of Israel.  They had probably heard that many people had been healed simply by Jesus’ touch or word.

     I would suggest to you that all of us, as sinners, are people who are very much like the lepers in this story.  In fact, leprosy is a perfect analogy for sin, especially as it was understood at that time.  We have no cure for sin available that can be obtained from human sources.  No amount of human effort can overcome the sin in our lives.

     Like leprosy, sin is corrosive.  It isolates us from God.  It deforms life as it was intended to be, and we end up having a misshapen image of life, that, in the eyes of God, is nothing but repulsive and unclean.  And without divine intervention we are condemned to eternal death.

     But today we can say, “Thanks be to God!”  Thanks be to God that our Lord has cleansed and healed us, very much as he healed those lepers on that day.  He has removed the punishment that we rightfully deserved because of sin.

     Like the lepers today’s scripture, we come without anything that would assist God with our healing.  Rather, we merely come into God’s presence, calling out to him that we are unclean and accepting God’s promise of healing. 

     God has indeed promised sinful men and women everywhere that in Christ he has come to take away the sin of the world.  He takes our diseases, including the diseases of these ten lepers, on himself and renders payment for our sins.  

     And now we can perhaps better realize what it truly means to rightly give thanks to God, as the Samaritan did.  Our sins were as grotesque as the leprosy, and just as incurable.  To know fully the mercy of God and the reality of that from which we’ve been cured is to know that we should respond in gratitude. 

     Therefore, as the thankful Samaritan, we should come before God, praising him in a loud voice every single day, recognizing what we’ve been given and giving back to God in return.

     When it comes to giving back to God, however, that’s something we oftentimes get wrong in the church.  We come up with all kinds of reasons why we should give.  We try the business approach, saying we should give because we need a certain amount or percentage more to meet next year’s budget.  We try flattery, trying to convince people that they have the means to give more.  We try guilt trips.  “You are wealthier than 95% of the world’s population.”  We even try greed – that we’ll get back more than we gave.

     We often talk about giving for every reason except the right reason – that we give because Christ supremely gave.  We give because it reflects the nature of a loving and gracious God who gives so generously to us.  We need to give.

     Some of you may know the story of Pastor Rinkhart.  Pastor Rinkhart was pastor of a church in Prussia from 1619 to 1649, during the Thirty Years War in Europe.  From the beginning until the end of that war, he was the pastor in the same walled city.  As all the refugees from the Thirty Years War flocked there to find safety as the battles raged around them, his town was overrun with poverty, the plague, and all the perils of war.  By the end of the war, he was the only pastor left in town alive; all the other pastors had died, so he alone was left to bury the plagued villagers and refugees.  But somewhere in the middle of all that suffering, he wrote one of the greatest hymns of the Reformation.  “Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices, who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices; who, from our mothers’ arms, has blest us on our way with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.”

     What an incredible sense of thanksgiving in the human heart.  You see, the greatest miracle isn’t to be healed of leprosy or cancer or coronaries; the greatest miracle is when our human heart is healed of ingratitude.  May our constant prayer be that God will heal our hearts of ingratitude and help us to increase our standard of giving him thanks and praise for his countless gifts of love.

                                                AMEN

071014  Proper 23

        Father in heaven, grant us thankful hearts.  Help us each day to kneel at your feet and to give you our praise and thanks for having redeemed us lost and condemned creatures.  Move us by the power of your Spirit to bring ourselves in every respect, with all that we are and all that we have, to be your faithful servants.