21st Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 23C

21st Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 23C October 9, 2016 We have a spiritual practice in our family that we just started in the last year. We call it “the three things.” I started doing it with our children after I heard an interview with the singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer on the program On Being, and she shared it as being one of her own spiritual practices. At night time, when the children are settled in their beds and preparing for sleep, I ask them to tell me three things that they are grateful for on that particular day. They are usually some of the most mundane things of their everyday lives, but as Newcomer says, the voicing of these things for which we are grateful sends us off to sleep from a place of wholeness and thanksgiving. And the curious thing is that it is only seldom that the children struggle to think of three things and only three things. Usually, the recitation of the things for which they are thankful snowballs until it is like one of those cartoon snowballs rolling down a mountain and getting bigger and bigger on its way down. It’s often hard to limit ourselves to only three. And they usually ask me what my three things are, and we discover that often they remind me of something of which I am grateful which I have forgotten over the course of the day and vice versa. It has become an integral part of our nighttime routine, and I think it is because it is about acknowledging the sacred in the midst of the ordinary and giving thanks for it. In our gospel reading for today, we see a story that is unique to Luke’s gospel, where Jesus is walking through an in-between place (between Galilee and Samaria) and he encounters 10 lepers who call out to him “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Lepers in that culture were segregated from society because of the contagion of their disease, and so they are essential folks who have been shunned by society who are walking around with horrible disfigurement and parts of their bodies which can no longer feel anything. And Jesus heals them all, no questions asked, telling them to go and show themselves to the priests, which would then allow them to be reintegrated into society. And the writer of Luke tells us that on their way to the priests, they are made well. And upon realizing this miraculous healing, one leper turns back, praises God, returns to Jesus and falls at his feet and thanks him. Jesus observes that only the Samaritan has returned to give praise to God (even though the other 9 are doing exactly as he instructed them to do), and then he gives the Samaritan former-leper a second blessing saying, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” This passage in Luke’s gospel follows right on the heels of last week’s passage about faith, which follows right on the heels of Jesus teaching his disciples about the challenges of discipleship. And its placement is not accidental. Luke is reminding his listeners and us that praising God and expressing gratitude is an important component of discipleship. And it’s also no accident that the word that our reading translates as “has made you well” (when Jesus tells the leper to go his faith has made him well) can also be translated as “saves”. So Jesus is also saying to the leper: Go in peace, your faith, your praise of God and your act of thanksgiving, your recognition of the way God has healed you and acted in your life has saved you. In his book Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis observed the connection between gratitude and well being. He writes, “I noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced minds praised most: while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. Praise always seems to be inner health made audible.” So how do we feel gratitude when we are in the midst of trials and tribulations? How do we express gratitude to God and each other if we are struggling, if we just don’t feel grateful? This gospel reading reminds us that even in the middle of nowhere, even in the in-between times, God shows up, and God heals us if we ask for it. It also reminds us that gratitude is so much more than a feeling. It is a key practice of discipleship. Just like how we practice faith (by showing up and being who God is calling us to be) even if we don’t feel like our faith is enough (or particularly faithful), we can practice gratitude by paying attention to the ways God is working in our lives and in our world, we can look for and name the ways that the most holy moments show up in the midst of the most ordinary, and then we can name that and give thanks. That is practicing gratitude. That, my friends, is discipleship. Our church has had some struggles lately. I wonder how we might all be changed, healed, if we were just a little more attentive to practicing gratitude? What would this church be like, if, every time we walk through these doors, every single one of us took a minute and named three things for which we were grateful here in our common life? What would our lives be like if the last thing we did every day was to practice gratitude by naming three things, encounters, people, moments, ideas…for which we are grateful this day? I’d like to challenge us all to take on these practices of gratitude in this in between time in the life of our church. In this practice of discipleship, might our practicing of gratitude, our outward praise to God for the good things of our life make our inner lives more healthy? It really couldn’t hurt….