Thanksgiving (a little late)

Better late than never: Here’s a little something about Thanksgiving.

We’re awfully close to the tipping point where the Thanksgiving holiday falls completely into the clutches of the advertising world, where Thanksgiving is treated as just another excuse to get you to buy more stuff, accumulate more goods. Our holy-days have been co-opted by the marketers and the cultural diluters: All Hallows Eve, the feast day of St. Valentine, the Nativity of our Lord, and the festival of Christ’s resurrection. They’re pretty good excuses to sell, sell, sell. But Thanksgiving remains as a small, flickering light, where the elements of a great holiday are still linked to the good and precious small things that make for a deep, rich life: family, friends, a little turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, and, depending on your predilections, a nice Merlot or a glass of Mogen David. As the old hymn says, we gather together as God’s people. And in our gathering we give thanks.

So how about it? Go on now and give thanks. If you read the story of Jesus and the ten lepers in the gospel, that’s what it seems to be about: giving proper thanks to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus meets up with these ten lepers and gets ‘em all nice and clean, with no more rotting fingers and noses, and sends them on their merry way to be declared by the priests as fit for human company again. Nine of the ten former lepers head out presumably to the local gentlemen priests’ club to get their clean bills of health. But that one comes back to thank Jesus who, frankly, seems a bit sur­prised at the paltry return on his investment of messianic healing power. But give thanks is what the tenth leper does and then gets sent on his way again.

I’ve had any number of chances to preach on this story of Jesus and the ten lepers. And I’ve been like most preachers who take it as an opportunity to tell my hearers what a fine example that tenth leper is. "See! Now there’s a truly thankful fella. If you want to be an upstanding Christian you should take him as your model. Give thanks, my friends, give thanks."

But I’ve come to the conclusion that to speak of this remarkable little story in this way is to come at it with very little attention to my call to deliver God’s word to you in a manner that actually gives you saving faith. For what’s a sermon that tells you to give thanks but a thinly disguised example of yet another demand dressed up in religious language? Because I use the example of someone who encountered God in the flesh, then somehow that must be good news for sinners like you and me. But here’s why such a sermon is unfitting for a Christian preacher, and a Luther­an one at that: It pays attention neither to how your life actually works or to what Jesus death and resurrection have done for you and all creation.

If I were to stand here in the pulpit and tell you to take the tenth leper as your model and be thankful, it would ignore how such thanks actually comes about. It’s the nature of relationship stuff that things like faith, hope and love (the big three that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 13, the standard wedding reading) don’t appear as a result of our will. Who in the world has ever become hopeful because they decided to have hope? Hope comes when the thing hoped for is so sweet and rich that a person can’t help but wait for it with eagerness. In Ephesians Paul points beyond the act of hoping to the thing we await: “the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”

The same is true of love, for has any one you gotten up one day and thought, “I’ve decided to fall in love to­day”? Try it out for size. Turn to the person next to you. Look that person in the eye and decide to fall in love. It doesn't work, does it? You fall in love because your be­loved has so much charm and wit, or a winsome smile and long eyelashes, that you just can’t help yourself. As the old Temptations song said, “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch / You know that I love you / I can't help myself / I love you and nobody else.”

That’s exactly how it works with thanksgiving. You might tell someone thanks because your parents brought you up to be polite, to say please and thank you as a matter of course, because that’s what you ought to do. But that’s not the same thing as having a thankful heart. It’s not the same thing as bursting with gratitude because you know how much you owe the person you’re thanking.

Demands like “Be thankful!” have never done us sinners much good, because, while they can get us to drum up some outward action like shaping air and teeth and tongue into the words “thank you,” they simply can’t make you thankful. Martin Luther liked to tell his hearers that these were words from Moses. They’re the law, making demands, doling out commands. They might be able to pull you into line morally, so you don’t hurt someone else. But the law, even something as nice and good as saying, “Be thankful,” can’t change your heart. Moses couldn't make it happen for the Israelites, and neither can a law-preaching pastor standing in front of a congregation on Thanksgiving Eve.

So if the story of the thankful leper and Jesus isn't meant as an example for you to take up, then what’s it do for you? I’ll tell you: This word from God comes to place your whole life under the light of God’s judgment and Christ’s redemption. Its aim is not to tell you to decide to be thankful, but to make you thankful, to give you faith, to get you to fall in love with your Lord, and to save you from the devil, the world and your sinful self.

These lepers may have had a skin disease that you’re fortunate enough not to be afflicted with, but they’re really no different from you. You can’t say, “Whew! It’s a good thing I don’t have to deal with such an ugly, smelly disease. I’m glad that I’m in good shape.” But leprosy was just the particular form of sinful brokenness that they had to live with each and every day. It's simply another variation on the wages of sin that we human beings have been paid since our first mother and father sinned in the Garden.

You may not have leprosy, but the real disease that lies behind it is something you’ve caught. It’s capital-S Sin and your Lord has come to cure you of it. But notice this: In this story, Jesus doesn’t come to cure some leprosy out of ten people who don’t have the disease. He is the great physician who’s come to heal the sick, to make the lame walk, the deaf to hear, and the blind see. Christ our Lord comes to take on the raging virus of sin in all its forms, so that you might be healed.

Notice in this story of Jesus and the lepers that not a single one of them was healed because they decided to be healed and the tenth leper didn’t come back because he decided he needed to be thankful. The healing comes sim­ply because that’s our Lord’s nature. Wherever he encounters the effects of Sin he’s Johnny-on-the-spot serving up a dose of his power. Jesus heals because he wants to, because that’s what he’s come to do. His healing is valid; it actually happens.

In the world’s eyes, not being a leper anymore is a pretty good thing, just like not being a thief or not being a person trailing the baggage of broken relationships is a good thing. Jesus is just fine making that sort of visible healing happen. But he’s not satisfied with just shining up the veneer of your life or the lives of the lepers or the lives of any sinner. Such a repair job is just a surface fix and won’t last beyond your last breath. Those nine lepers who went off in search of the priests to show off their suit­ability and their newly regained status as clean people may get permission to enter the synagogues, but the fact that they have a clean bill of health doesn’t mean any real change has happened for them.

It’s an awful lot like having the gospel proclaimed to you in the water and word in baptism and then never having it mean a lick. Your baptism can be valid without having any real effect. You can dress a person up in a clean white robe without it actually cleaning up that person’s heart and placing faith where there was only unbelief. No, what Jesus is after is a complete and utter change in the identity and very being of sinners like you and the lepers. He wants to make a new creation out of you, and that only happens when he gets at the truth of the sickness of sin in you.

There’s no­thing that any of us truly deserves from God except his wrath and judgment. We come before God not having kept the commandments, not having loved our neighbors as ourselves, not loving the Lord with all our heart, strength and mind. Instead, and if we’re honest about our­selves, we know that it’s we ourselves whom we’ve put first in our lives. We trust ourselves to make a future, to achieve whatever goals we hope to arrive at in life, to make our next breath happen, and our next and our next. And that’s exactly what happened for those nine lepers. They don’t come back to Jesus because they’re off to live their lives, assuming that they can go on and on and on like the Energizer bunny, under their own power and free will to make new lives for themselves.

But the tenth leper, now that’s a different story. He comes back not to confess his new cleanness like the other nine did to the priests. He came back to the source of the new life he’d been given. He came because he recognized his nothingness a­part from Jesus. When you know you deserve nothing and Jesus gives you absolutely everything, when you realize the true state of affairs, there’s nothing to do but give thanks. The leper just couldn’t help himself.

What he did was no different from what Luther talked about in the Small Catechism when he explained what baptism means for daily living: “It means that the old creature in us with all its sins and evil de­sires is to be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance, and on the other hand that daily a new person is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”

You see, it’s not in the healing that salvation and thankfulness come for the tenth leper. It’s in having his eyes opened and in the relationship Jesus established with him that his complete healing and salvation happens. Not on­ly is he a leper who was forced to live on the fringes of society, always forced to give people warning of his presence. He’s also a Samaritan, someone who’s seen by the religious folk of the day as an outsider, unable to come into God’s good graces. Not only does Jesus have no fear of the man’s disease, he also doesn’t have a pro­blem with his lack of religious credentials. Christ our Lord is smitten with those who have no shred of evidence to plead their goodness or righteousness.

All the tenth leper had was a true knowledge of his nothingness and the new reality of his life caused by this preacher from Nazareth. It’s in the mysterious combination, in the un­breakable bond of both his living death as a leper and an outsider and his new clean state in Christ that he has the full and complete healing that Jesus is after along. When that happens there’s only the explosion of gratitude that can result, the new healed body lying prostrate before Jesus, saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

And this is why a sermon saying you ought to be thankful doesn’t do the trick. It misses the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection. If all you needed to get better from the disease of Sin is an example or a demand or a law, Moses would have been plenty for you. You wouldn’t need a savior. You wouldn’t need the great physician. You wouldn’t need anything but a how-to manual for successful living or moral aptitude or a copy of Godliness for Dummies.

To tell you to be thankful would be to forget the very thing that gives you any life at all: your Lord’s death and resurrection. It would be to leave out the most important part of this story and your story: the event that tells the truth about your sinfulness and death and at the same time raises you up to new life. For it is Jesus on the cross who changes everything for you. It was the empty tomb that declared the emptying of Jesus’ lungs of their last breath as the victory over your Sin. It is Jesus crucified and risen who says your divine judgment is condemnation and your hope is in him alone.

As Paul says in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul’s three words in Corinthians, faith, hope and love, are relational. They happen because you’re compelled to love, to hope and, finally, to trust. At the end of the story, Jesus doesn’t say to the leper that his thankfulness has made him well, but his faith. In the trusting of Jesus, the leper is fully and finally healed both of leprosy and his Sin.

It’s all a matter of faith. And if it’s faith that will make you well, then you might just ask, “Where the heck can I get me some of that bad stuff?” I tell you it comes when true sinners, and not sham sinners, appear before the Lord and hear his freeing word. So gird your loins, sinner, for Jesus is about to come before you: Stand up straight with your broken lives and your trust in your­selves. Throw off your bandages to reveal your rotting flesh like a real sinner and hear our Lord as he speaks to you: You are forgiven in spite of yourself. You are claimed by one who is absolutely unafraid of your darkest secret and deepest shame. He knows you through and through, for he is the one who holds each and every cell, all your amino acids and DNA together. And he is dead and risen that you might have life and have it abundantly. No longer does your future depend on either your past or your resolve to make things better, for Christ comes to raise you from the dead and bring you salvation all on his own power, his own holiness, his own lust for life.

Now you no longer need to decide to be thankful, for our Lord has given you everything and eternity, too. You are given something that elicits your gratitude. And in that new life, suddenly all God’s good gifts come to be seen as our Lord’s horn of plenty. Your sweet potatoes with marshmallows. The warmth of your bed on a crisp November morning. Your beloved family gathered around your table tomorrow and those you’ve lost who are gathered around God’s heavenly table. Your future. Your past. Your every single breath and heartbeat. These come not just as another thing you should be grateful for in life, but an actual part of the salvation that God has set out for you from the beginning of time.

Then the word for you is not, “Be thankful,” but “Get up and go on your way in the new life you’ve been given. Your faith has made you well.”