sermon: "List of Thanks" (Luke 17: 11-19)

Thanksgiving is supposed to be an easy sermon. You count your blessings, 100 of them daily, remember God is at work in our lives and that Christ offers healing and hope for our spirits. Amen. Off to turkey and stuffing.

And if I actually thought that I could get away with this, we’d be done. But as with Jesus himself, nothing is every as straightforward and certain as it appears at first glance. When Jesus heals the lepers, he is upsetting the social dynamic, disrupting countless lives and generally kicking over the apple cart of society’s rules.

In the days of the Middle East 2000 years ago, having leprosy was a sentence to exile. Anyone exhibiting any skin irregularity was fearfully shunned and labeled ritually unclean. These people, whether they had Hansen’s disease or a rash, were forced to live in colonies apart from the uninfected population.

In this particular story of scripture, ten people were condemned to this banishment with little of hope of reintegrating into society. So their family, friends and neighbours would have grieved and mourned, but also would have moved on, adjusting to their new life without the leper.

So for the newly-healed, returning lepers to their old lives, there would be awkwardness and suspicion and stigma as everyone had to reshuffle their lives to accommodate these ten miracles. In the aftermath of what happens, we don’t know if anyone involved would have wished that they hadn’t been healed.

Even so, the lesson is pretty clearcut: you can’t go wrong by saying thank you. So we give thanks for many things, sometimes for contradictory things. We can’t list 100 items without some of them infringing on others. Here’s a quick list:

Give thanks for Samaritans. For those outsiders or foreigners that remind us of our common humanity despite the differences that arise from geography, slightly different religion.

Give thanks for listening and obeying. For the 9 lepers that heeded Jesus instructions and presented themselves to the priest, no questions asked. They followed through on what Christ asked them to do.

Give thanks for spontaneity and bending the rules. For the 1 leper that decided it was more important to say thank you and to praise God by returning to Christ. For trusting that the healing spirit is greater than any rule or regulation.

Give thanks for gratitude. For the expression of appreciation, for remembering that we need the work and support of others to get through life and that we value such connections.

Give thanks for ingratitude. For the reminder that we do not do good for the sake of reward or thanks. We do good because it is the right thing to do. That Christ taught us to love and serve out a desire to help one another, not for glory or attention.

Give thanks for leprosy. For how often is it that we take our health for granted until we are faced with disease or death? And we give thanks that medical progress has increased our knowledge and developed antibiotic therapies to cure leprosy.

Give thanks for community and common causes. That even in the most dire of situations, on the fringes and margins of society, we can find common cause with one another, that our common experience will bond us together. And we hope that it wouldn’t take leprosy to bring our church into genuine community.

Give thanks for faith. For the trust in something greater and beyond. Faith that makes us well. Faith that compels us to get up and go.
For these, and so many other things, we give thanks.