2025-11-24
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
“Transformed On the Way”
Psalm 65: 9-13; Luke 17: 11-19
Rev. JudithBagley-Bonner
You have probably all heard sermons about the tenth leper before, and I bet every clergy person has preached at least a few. So it’s probably not news to anybody here that this text shows us, first of all, Jesus' radical inclusivity. In healing all ten lepers without distinction, he treated the ostracized Samaritan the same as the other nine. Now, as lepers, they were all outcasts, don't get me wrong. All were exiled from the community and obliged to announce themselves by shouting "unclean" should any healthy people mistakenly wander near. But the Samaritan was an outcast among outcasts! Rock bottom of the pecking order, outside the circle. And in our story, Jesus not only heals him, but then praises him for being the only one to come back and thank God for the healing. Once again, Jesus is inverting things, lifting up the downcast and not so subtly chastising the others. And certainly, an important part of the lesson of this text for us is to follow Jesus's lead in reaching out to the outcast, the Samaritans of our day. And to follow the outcast in living out of gratitude rather than the misguided belief of the other nine: that we somehow “deserve” our privilege. But, this morning, I'd like to take a slightly different angle. And I’ll be suggesting two things: first, that spiritual healing, personal transformation, for most of us is a long, slow process. And second, that living in gratitude helps it along.
So first of all, in meditating on this text for the past week or so, the line that kept jumping out at me was the subtle and seemingly innocuous phrase, "as they went". You'll remember that the story tells us that the lepers cried out to Jesus, saying "Master, have mercy on us." And then, it says that "as they went...they were made clean". As they went? Why not instantly as they stood interacting with Jesus? "As they went"?
Well, the commentaries say that the phrase "as they went" could also be translated "in their going. "In their going they were made clean," implies that there was something to the process of the going itself, that was one ingredient in the healing. In other words, the healing was not an instant magic trick, unmediated and outside of the flow of normal life, it depended somehow on their walking that day's path. They were healed only when they integrated their encounter with Jesus into the ongoing business of that day. Indeed, it is in the midst of ordinary, daily life, that spiritual transformation, the healing of our lower natures, happens.
There is a passage in Deuteronomy that exhorts the people to "remember the long way that the Lord has lead you, through the forty years in the desert" In other words, remember that it’s the long years of daily journey, often rife with tedium, as we tend to each days obligations and details, as we deal with people, some of whom are difficult and drive us crazy; remember that it’s in all this, its "in our going" that we are being healed, that we are being transformed bit by bit into our best and highest selves, which is our life's work. The wheels of the gods do indeed grind slowly, but exceedingly fine...and it’s the daily stuff of life that make up the wheels of God. And it is the long way for most of us… We are given encouragement on the slow route by Teillard De Chardan, who said,
"Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything, to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediary stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. Yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability, and that it may take a very long time...Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
Now on to my second point which is that there is something we can do to help grease the wheels, to lubricate the whole mechanism of spiritual transformation, and it, too is unveiled in the lepers' story. It’s gratitude.
Cicero said gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. Alfred Painter said that saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality. And finally, Johannes Gaertner said, "To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live out of gratitude is to touch Heaven."
These are strong statements, and should compel us to look hard at the idea of living from gratitude, which is not just about adding the perfunctory "thank you" to a good deed rendered on your behalf. And it’s not just about going around the table on Thanksgiving to say what you are grateful for. It’s about really learning to notice, every day, and really learning to linger over the joys in life...the simple blessings and delights that God has tucked into the long way that we are being led. To realize that even when things are hard, as they are for many right now, that even in the hard times, God is working through it all to bring a greater good. On the first Thanksgiving, after all, David DeWitt points out that the Pilgrims had dug seven times more graves than they made cabins in Plymouth Colony. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving. And we need to cultivate it as we do other disciplines like brushing our teeth, by decision and effort, by training ourselves to look for specific things for which to be grateful, and then by turning back to linger in the savoring of them, as did the leper. We can't ignore the pain and suffering when it comes. It needs to be named and faced. But we can counter-balance it by learning to linger over the joy, by learning not to take it for granted, by learning to oil the machinery of life with this gladsome balm of Gilead. One of the simplest, yet most effective spiritual disciplines I have ever practiced is to take time at the beginning or end of each day to look for five things for which to linger in gratitude. It seems to pack more punch to be as specific as possible. So instead of naming "my family", I'd suggest ferreting out one particular moment or interaction with one particular family member. Instead of saying "my home", I might say "that ten minute interlude where I just sat by the fire and stared out at the falling snow." I know it sounds simplistic, even trite. But it is mindfulness of these simple moments, savoring these simplicities, that can most fill us with a fresh, new awareness of grace. It is amazing the power this simple practice has to change the way we perceive our lives. When I first began this, about a week into it, something happened and I thought to myself, "Oh, I know that will be on my list tonight...and I realized I was looking for things to make the list. Well, Seek and you shall find! And pretty soon you're finding a lot MORE of it than you used to, and your heart starts to get softer and your spirit more open and your vision more sharp, and you're less defensive and reactive.
One might say that to learn to live from a baseline of gratitude is, in part, to live in grace. So I close with a favorite passage from Ann Morrow Lindbergh. I know I’ve shared it with you before, maybe even recently, but it bears repeating: It’s what I pray for all of us this Thanksgiving:
“I want first of all…to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life…I want, in fact- to borrow from the language of the saints- to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in the strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which then translates into outward harmony to affect the world…I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God. Vague as this definition may be, I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be “in grace” and other periods when they feel “out of grace”, even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state, one can hardly tie a shoe string.”
Living in grace is in large part about living in gratitude. Let us learn to live in gratitude even on the long route, in the midst of our going...God bless you on the journey.