Beyond Joy

This is the message given in the Wheatland Parish Sunday, November 10, 2013.  The Bible verses are Luke 17:11-19.

Last week we talked about joy.  We talked about how knowing that we are God's people, God's children, knowing that the perfect, almighty God actually loves each one of us and cares about each one of us, as weak and flawed and sinful as we are, is something that should fill us with incredible joy.

But here's the thing about that.  Joy is an emotion.  It's a wonderful emotion.  It's one that we all need to feel sometimes.  But the thing is that emotions change.  Emotions are momentary.  They are never permanent.  No matter how intense a feeling of joy is, there's going to come a time when that emotion fades.  So while it's great to feel joy, what we really want is not just a momentary feeling of joy.  What we really want is a feeling that we are one with God.  What we really want is a feeling that God is with us and that we are with God, and that there's no separation, no distance between us and God.

So today, as we reach the second week of our sermon series called “Thank God”, we're going to look at how being thankful can give us that feeling of oneness with God.  And the example we're going to use is the ten people Jesus healed in our Bible reading for today, the ten people who were suffering from leprosy.

Now, understand that leprosy is a very serious illness.  It’s an infectious disease that causes severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms and legs,  It's not necessarily fatal, but what it would do is put you in a position where you could not do any physical work.  And as we've talked before, since everything people did back then involved physical work of some kind, and since there were no welfare or disability payments at that time, if you could not work you either begged or died.  So, even though the disease itself was not fatal, it pretty much amounted to the same thing.  It was not a highly contagious disease, but people were scared to death of getting it, and so they would have nothing to do with people who had leprosy.

So these ten people with leprosy approach Jesus, but they keep their distance.  They did not know how Jesus would react to them.  They also did not know how those with Jesus would react to them, either.  Still, they call out to Jesus, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Jesus responds, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”

We’re not told what the ten people expected Jesus to do, but I’d guess that this was not it.  I'd guess that they probably expected Jesus to lay hands on them, the way he did with other people.  They probably expected Jesus to call on God.  But Jesus did not do any of that.  In fact, as far as they could tell, Jesus did not do anything.  He just said, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.”

They must have really been disappointed.  After all, Jesus was probably their last hope.  No doctor had been able to cure them.  No priest had been able to help them.  They were probably thinking, “Show ourselves to the priests?  The priests are the ones who declared us unclean in the first place.  They won’t even let us into the temple, because they’re afraid we’ll ruin it for everyone.  Show ourselves to the priests?  The priests won’t even talk to us.”

Still, they went off to show themselves to the priests.  Maybe they had faith in Jesus and believed that something was going to happen.  Maybe they just figured they had nothing to lose.  Whatever they thought, they did it.  And on the way to show themselves to the priests, they were healed.  We don't know how that happened.  We don't know how far they'd gone when it happened.  But at some point, on their way to the priests, they were healed.

And one of them came back to Jesus.  We’re told nothing about the one who came back, other than that he was a foreigner, a Samaritan.  He praised God with a loud voice and threw himself at Jesus’ feet, thanking Jesus for healing him.  Jesus tells him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

We don’t know what happened to the other nine.  We’re told all ten were healed.  There's nothing in the Bible that says they paid any penalty for not coming back to thank Jesus.  Nothing says they got their leprosy back or anything.  Maybe the other nine went to the priests, were pronounced clean, and then went on to live their lives the way they wanted to.  We don't know.

So maybe you’re thinking, “Now, wait a minute.  You said we were going to look at how giving thanks to God helps us.  It does not seem like it helped this one leper at all.  After all, the nine who did not thank God were healed just the same as he was.  Seems like they all got the same thing, the thing they wanted.  It seems like this story says it does not matter whether we thank God or not.”

Well, yes and no.  It’s true that all ten of them were healed from their leprosy.  In that sense, the same thing happened to each of them.  There was no physical difference at all.

There was no physical difference, and yet there was all the difference in the world.  Because when the Bible talks what happened to the other nine, the scripture first says they were “cleansed”, and then that they were “healed”.  Jesus says the other nine were “cleansed”, too.  At the end of the verses, though, Jesus says to the one who came back, “Your faith has ‘made you well.’”

Your faith has ‘made you well.’  See, it’s one thing to have a physical healing.  That’s important, of course.  Anyone who’s suffering from a serious illness, or who ever has, or who has a loved one who is or has, knows how important physical healing is.  Every Sunday there are people for whom we ask God to bring about physical healing, and it’s important that we ask God to do that.

Still, it’s one thing to be healed physically.  It’s another thing to truly be made well.  To be well means to be healed in body, in mind, in soul, in spirit, all of it.  It means that things are pleasing, that they’re good.  It means that everything is in a proper and satisfactory situation.  In short, to be made well means that things are as they should be in every way.

That’s what Jesus was saying to the one who came back to say thank you.  When that one person came back to say thank you to Jesus, he showed that he had faith in Jesus as his Savior.  Jesus told him that because of his faith, he was not only physically healed, he was well.  He was well in every way:  physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  Everything about him was right.  He was who he was supposed to be, he was where he was supposed to be, and he was doing what he was supposed to do.

When the nine had their pain go away, when they were healed, I'm sure they felt joy.  It may have been the greatest joy they'd ever felt in their lives.  But eventually, that joy went away.  Eventually, the joy faded, and they had to figure out a new way to go on with their lives, to deal with whatever the rest of their life was going to hold for them.

I'm sure the one who thanked Jesus felt joy, too.  But he felt more than joy.  And after the joy faded, he was still happy.  Because, when he felt thankfulness in his heart, he had been made well.  God was with him, and he was with God.  He was one with God.  He did not have to worry about what the rest of life was going to hold for him.  He knew that, whatever it held, God would be with him.  He knew that, whatever life held for him, it would be all right.  He knew that because he had not just had his physical problem taken away.  He had been made well, in every possible way.

Have you ever felt that way?  Have you ever felt, even if just for a little while, that everything was right, that you were who God wanted you to be, that you were exactly where God wanted you to be, and that you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do?  It’s a pretty incredible feeling.  In fact, it’s pretty much the greatest feeling in the world.  To know, in that moment, that you are who God wants you to be, that you are exactly where God wants you to be, and to know you are doing exactly what God wants you to do.  There’s really nothing like it.

That’s what the one person who’d had leprosy felt when he came back and thanked Jesus.  And he did not just feel it for that moment, he felt it for the rest of his life.  He had been made well.  And we can be made well, too, if we truly live our lives giving thanks to God.

It's a great thing to have moments of joy in our lives.  I hope we all do, and I hope we have a lot of them.  But when we live our lives with the awareness of what God has done for us, and truly being thankful for it, we get something even better than joy.  We are made well.  We know that, no matter what life holds for us, it will be all right.  Because we are one with the all-loving, all-caring God.