THE MIRACLE OF GRATITUDE
Psalm 107 (selected verses), Luke 17:11-19
First of all, let me begin by thanking Jeff, Anne Wiley, and the other members of the Consecration Sunday Leadership Team for inviting me to preach on stewardship in the midst of America's worst financial situation in seventy-five years! I must say that this is a rare and beautiful privilege!
In all seriousness, though, I do find it an honor and a blessing to be with you as together we listen for God's Word and prayerfully consider how to respond to God's grace in our lives. We seem to be living through "interesting times"--in the Chinese sense of that term. The economic situation of our country and of our world changes literally by the hour these days. Businesses collapse or are absorbed into larger ones. Banks are purchased. The federal government commits hundreds of billions of our tax dollars to save the economy from slipping into the vortex of complete collapse. People are losing their jobs. Homes are being foreclosed upon. Food pantries are running out of supplies. Retirement savings suddenly shrink down in a way that causes significant rethinking and reordering of priorities. On top of all of this, our country continues to fight two wars: one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. In a little over two weeks time, we will all go to the polls to participate in one of the most important presidential elections in decades...probably the most momentous election in my lifetime.
In the midst of all this, it does not come as a surprise that many voices around us today counsel caution and self-preservation. "Look out for yourself. Pull back. Be cautious and prudent. Tighten your belt and cut expenses." Such are the words of wisdom on the street and across the digital media these days.
Like many of you, I feel the anxiety and the uncertainty flurrying about. I can do enough of the math to figure out that extrapolation of certain trends will likely spell ruin and disaster. And, frankly, it worries me. I keep looking for signs and sources of hope in the news and in the papers, but I mostly come up with precious little that inspires real hope. Until, that is, I turn to Scripture and to the Lord.
I don't turn to the Bible and to the Lord out of some desire to escape from the difficulties of the present; rather, I turn to Scripture and to Jesus Christ in order to find real help and reliable wisdom for the living of these days. Like you, I listen carefully and often a bit anxiously for a "word of the Lord." I eagerly seek a basis for hope and strength, especially when most of the voices swirling around me offer little in the way of good news.
Thanks be to God that the leading indicators and the over-hyped media are not the only reliable sources for thinking about the future! I am so thankful that we in the Christian community have additional resources like the Psalms and the Gospels to help us gain some much needed perspective in the midst of all that is going on around us these days. This morning, I am particularly grateful for the message of Psalm 107 and for what it offers us as church in the uncertain times.
In the verses from Psalm 107 that I read to you a short while ago, we find a rather remarkable recounting of the community of faith in times past who faced a variety of extremely difficult circumstances. In times past, the Lord's people found themselves in danger from having lost their way through hostile territory, from being imprisoned in dark places, from making themselves sick with spiritual misdeeds, from engaging in risky business practices, and from the evil doings of rulers. When these people of old did the math and extrapolated from current realities into the future inevitabilities, they faced certain destruction, ruin, and even death. But for those who knew and cried out to the Lord, the expected disasters and the apocalyptic cataclysms did not overwhelm them to the point of death.
This Psalm teaches us that time after time in difficult and dire circumstances, the Lord comes to the aid of people who cry out to him for help. The text says repeatedly that "they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress" (107.6). Because of the Lord's intervention, utter ruination did not engulf them. God showed up and provided the very help that was needed in their hour of need. The Psalm ends by saying that there is wisdom to be gained from the recounting of the multiple stories of God's help in dire and fearful circumstances: "Let those who are wise give heed to these things, and consider the steadfast love of the Lord" (107.43). The events recounted in the Psalm were meant to have a life well beyond their immediate referents. This Psalm is meant for us. It bears bold witness that even today God hears our cries and promises to intervene in unexpected ways to help us and to prevent us from slipping into ruin and destruction.
Let's be honest with one another. This Psalm does not promise that simply crying out to the Lord will result in a magical fix, making everything somehow to go back magically to the way things were before. We have to be careful in our listening Scripture not to mistake promises of divine help for magical incantations. We are not told how or in what specific ways the Lord helps those who cry out in the midst of difficulties; we are told only that the Lord will and does help those who cry out to him. Even if we don't or can't know exactly what the help will look like, passages like Psalm 107 assure us that the Lord does hear us and will give us the help very we need. If there is one thing that you can count on as reliable wisdom from the Bible, it is that God never abandons those who seek him or who cry out to him, especially during trying or perilous times. Such time-tested wisdom makes it possible for us to get up each day and to live with radically counter-cultural hope.
The Gospel story for this morning from Luke provides a vivid account of the very thing that Psalm 107 portrays so poetically and pastorally. The story of the ten lepers in chapter 17 gives us a New Testament instance of the kind of divine aid born witness to the in Psalm; but it also gives us something more. To understand something of power of this story we need to reckon with the fact that lepers in ancient times not only feared ruination, they lived it on a daily basis. Thought by everyone--including themselves--to have been cursed by God, lepers were forced to live in shacks and hovels outside of normal village life. In this story that takes place during Jesus' determined march to the cross in Jerusalem, we encounter a small band of lepers who lived beyond the margins of respectability in the nether zone between the Jewish and the Samaritan social worlds. Both communities from which they came required them to cry out "Unclean! Unclean!" whenever normal people came near. Today, that would be like someone yelling out "I stink! I stink!" as they walked down the street or passed us in the mall. What humiliation and degradation went with being a leper in those times! On top of the social and personal humiliation, this small, marginalized community was financially ruined and had no prospects of ever digging out and reestablishing themselves. Their physical condition made any hopes along those lines completely and perpetually impossible. No matter what they did, there was simply "no exit" from their wretched situation. They were serving life sentences of misery with no possibility of parole.
This leper colony located somewhere in the hill country that linked Galilee and Jerusalem had caught wind of the fact that Jesus was about to pass through the area. Hoping against hope and going against all social rules and religious statutes, the group of ten made an audacious and transgressive public appearance. In the words of the Psalmist, they dared to raise their desperate voices. With the Psalmist, they cried out to the Lord in their distress. And as promised, the Lord heard their cries and delivered them. Solely at the word of Jesus, these lepers went off to be examined by the priest. According to Leviticus 13 and 14, that was what one had to do in order to be certified as cleansed from leprosy and fit to reenter society. Jesus gave these desperate people the help that they so desperately needed and never thought they would ever find.
We should note carefully in this story that the Lord's help did not depend upon their following or obeying the Law. The Lord helped them out of sheer compassion and grace. They cried out for help and the Lord helped them. First comes grace, then and only then comes doing what the Lord commands. Obedience follows having experienced God's amazing grace, not the other way round.
To be sure, we could easily bring our reflections on this passage to a close right here. We could find Psalm 107 graphically illustrated by the Gospel story, move into the singing of a nice hymn, and call it a day. This is exactly the sort of "word from the Lord" that we really need these days. But startlingly, we find that the Gospel story does not end with the giving of divine help in the midst of hard circumstances. Rather amazingly, the story only gets more interesting at just this point. For it is precisely here that something even more astounding happens. It turns out that in this story, there are actually two miracles. The first is pretty much what we would expect after having listened carefully to the wisdom of the Bible in places like Psalm 107. We should come to have a kind of holy audacity that makes it possible to hope or even to expect God to help those who cry out to them in their distress. It is the second miracles in this story that is jarring and that has the power to shake up our thinking in the midst of these days. It seems to me that the second miracle in this story is as important as the first. Let me tell you what I mean.
The story affirms that Jesus made it his business to help people who were in desperate need. That is absolutely wonderful, but, as I said, not entirely shocking. What is so utterly astonishing in this story is the behavior of the one man out of the ten who, once he realized that he had been healed, turned around and came back to Jesus in order to express his gratitude for the grace given. The other nine cried out to the Lord, received help, and went on their way rejoicing...and we never hear from or about them again. We presume that their lives were forever altered for good by the Lord. That is a good and great thing. But this one man, he takes my breath away. He does something that goes against the grain of everything and of everyone around him, even of the company of those who cried out to the Lord and received divine intervention. This lone man comes back to Jesus, falls on his face at Jesus' feet, and says "Thank you!" His act of gratitude and praise is an absolute showstopper. Even Jesus himself is stunned and amazed by this man's actions. His act of radical gratitude even caught the Lord himself off balance. It is a miracle of gratitude.
I believe that this man is a poster child for us of what it means to be both Christian and Presbyterian. Our whole tradition is premised on the miracle of gratitude expressed as the twin acts of praise of the Lord and generosity toward others. We Presbyterians are people of profound gratitude; we are called to be a people who live for the praise of God and the resultant and concomitant life of generosity toward others. When reading Luke we know that grateful love for God always goes hand in hand with generosity and love toward one's neighbor. This is the reason that we find the story of the Good Samaritan followed immediately by the story of Martha and Mary: radical worship is always linked with radical generosity in Luke. Doxology and justice, praise of God and care for hurting neighbors are as close together as Mary's breath is to her words as she utters the Magnificat in the second chapter of Luke. The spiritually profound anointing of Jesus in Luke 4 in Nazareth has everything to do with his works of compassion for the poor and acts of justice for the oppressed. Particularly in this Gospel, we know that the grateful praise of God for grace given is always and at the same time a call to living the generous life in relation to human neighbors. I think that this man ought to be the shining example of what it means for us to live as disciples of Jesus Christ in the Presbyterian tradition.
At the beginning of my sermon, I joked a bit about being asked by Jeff, Anne, and the other leaders of the Consecration Sunday Leadership Team to speak to you about stewardship. If they had wanted me simply to ask you to give money to fund the church's annual budget, I would have rejected the invitation in the blink of an eye. I know that God has given me a number of gifts for ministry; but asking people for money is not one of them. Other people in the church have such gifts, but I do not. My gifts are about spiritual and intellectual growth in the faith. But when I heard them say that they what they wanted me to do was to invite you to go to God in prayer in order to discern what God is calling you to give to him and his ongoing work through this church, I said that I could and that I would do that. And when I heard further that the session was not even going to make a budget first, but that they were going to step out in faith by asking you first to go to the Lord in prayer and ask him what you need to give in order to show your gratitude and generosity, I said, "sign me up."
I want to be part of a church that actually gets it right about stewardship by seeing it as a spiritual priority and not as merely funding an annual budget of a religiously based non-profit corporation. When I heard that the Lawrenceville congregation was going to participate in what I see as the ongoing "miracle of gratitude" along the lines of the Samaritan leper, I couldn't get here fast enough because in the midst of these stressful and uncertain economic times, I want to support and be a witness to a church that intends to stand and up act like a church of and for Jesus Christ. I want to throw my hat in with a group of disciples of Christ that go against the grain of the culture through prayerful commitments to praise of God and the generous life. I want to stand with you as you step out in faith for God and for the compassionate mission of the church rather than going with the flow of our society these days by pulling back, looking out for self-interest, and being driven by naked fear. I want to witness the ongoing "miracle of gratitude" as it unfolds in your life between this Sunday and the next.
Parenthetically, let me share with you that I have already begun to urge my wife, the senior-pastor-elect of the Pennington Presbyterian Church, to do exactly what you here at the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville are doing with regard to your approach to stewardship. And regardless of what the Pennington Church does, Nancy and I will approach our stewardship this year in the very same way that you are doing it here in this congregation. We, too, want to be part of the continuing "miracle of gratitude" that this approach to stewardship makes possible.
In closing, let me ask you to do what I promised that I would do. I want to urge you in the strongest possible terms to go home this week and to pray about what you need to give to the Lord through this church. I want you to prayerfully ask yourselves and your loved ones two questions between this Sunday and next:
1) What do you need to give to the Lord through this church in order to express your gratitude to the Lord for blessings and help you have already received and for the promises of help yet to be given?
2) What do you need to give to the Lord through this church in order to live the generous life of helping others that grows out of and is appropriate to the grace you have been given?
As you do seek to prayerfully and faithfully answer these two questions in the week ahead, I want you to remember the story of the man who turned around and came back to Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning. This man embodies what it means for us to be Christian in a Presbyterian way today, even in the midst of the realities that we are facing. I believe that we are each individually and all together called by God to follow this man's example by going against the flow and giving gratefully, generously, and even sacrificially. Through the witness of this Samaritan leper, I believe that the Lord invites us to extend the miracle of gratitude by living the generous life.
Amen.
October 19, 2008
The Reverend Dr. Gordon S. Mikoski
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