[Proverbs 4:10-23 / Galatians 5:16-24 / Luke 17:11-19]
“Let us sing for joy and gladness, Seeing what our God has done, Let us praise the true Redeemer, Praise the One who makes us one.” If there were ever anything the Church does that the world considers a waste of time, there it is: giving glory and praise to God. The world can’t imagine a much more worthless endeavor than that.
And yet it is the very heart of what we do when we come together as God’s people. We hear His Word and receive His Sacrament, and with it all, we raise a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to God. To practice together referring everything to God, so we “name” it in the Biblical sense of that word, and we confess it as gift of the Blessed Trinity. And of course, what happens when we come together as Church is just to be the tip of the iceberg – such praise wants to spill out from the Divine Service, to sanctify our entire pilgrimage through this world – “at all times and in all places, giving thanks.”
Our first reading warned us against walking in the path of the wicked, that we should not walk in the way of the evil, avoid it and go not on it. We must remember that the Epistle to the Romans refers to the world taking the gifts of God without acknowledging the Giver and instead turning those gifts into idols – not referring them to Him from whom they came – as the chief sign of man’s fall into sin. Whatever else you can say of the way of the wicked, it is a way devoid of the praise of God. The wicked are involved in many things, but singing praises to the Blessed Trinity is not among them.
St. Paul gave a list in the Epistle of what the wicked are up to - the works of the flesh, which are opposed to walking in the Spirit. They are what fill lives devoid of praise. Listen: sexuality immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these. Of all these the Apostle is clear: “those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” No, for the Kingdom cannot be inherited by those who seize the good gifts of creation and bend them to their own purposes, without referring them to the Creator in praise and thanksgiving.
I’ll never forget how my pastor drove that home to me once. He was talking about rules for dating. You know what he said? He said: Do whatever you can give God praise and glory for and then you’ll never be in doubt about what to do. I’d never heard anything like before. But it gets right to the heart of the matter: are you referring all things in your life to the Giver and giving Him glory and praise, or do you try to enjoy things by themselves. Sex isn’t wrong. It has its place. It’s place is where a husband and wife can give glory to God. Marriage, that is, such as the Hemanns give thanks to God for this weekend – 40 years of blessings – all referred back to the Giver and so praise and thanks!
Instead of the works of the flesh – that is, of our lives disconnected from God and so not referring all things back to His giving – there is fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. No law can condemn such things. Such a life flows from all things being referred to our Giver God in praise and thanksgiving. The flesh that gets crucified – that is, that gets to die with Jesus on the cross – is that disconnected from God way of living that seizes a thing unto itself without referring it to the Lord.
And so on to the Gospel for the day where ten lepers cry out in their misery a Kyrie eleison to the Master, and He delights to send them on their way to the priests to show that they are healed. As they travel along, stepping out in faith, they realize the truth: Jesus has healed them as He sends them on the way to give praise and thanksgiving to God! Ponder that!
One of them, a Samaritan, stops and runs back to Jesus, throws himself at our Lord’s feet, giving Him thanks. He has realized that the proper place for the giving of thanks isn’t the temple on Gerazim where his people worshipped, nor the priests who offered the sacrifices, but that Jesus is the Temple and the Priest and here is where worship will happen from now on. At the feet of Jesus. Praise and glory to God! All good things received from and through Him.
Jesus is astonished the Samaritan gets what his fellow Jews miss out on. They went onto the lesser temple and lesser priests and never put together Who it was that could speak a Word that could heal them so completely. “Was no one found to return and give praise to God – that is, to God enfleshed - except this foreigner?”
I’m sure that the nine were very grateful to Jesus. I’m sure that they told anyone who would listen to them the miracle of how He healed them. But not to refer the gift back to the Giver in praise and thanksgiving was to miss out on the greatest joy that Jesus reached them. As at Christmas when a wonderful toy is given a youngster, and they take it and run off. Sad that. The joy is when they look up, their faces filled with joy and gladness, and they run into your arms and say: “Thank you, momma; thank you, daddy.” There the gift has been fully received – for behind the gift was the love and the relationship. That’s what the gift was for in the first place. So with us and our Giver God.
The gifts aren’t there merely for you to take away and enjoy; but for you to experience His love and His embrace. To run to Him, to fall down before Him, to give Him praise and glory. That is the first and primary enjoyment of every gift.
The lepers got skin made new again. You’ve been given a glory robe of righteousness in Baptism’s flood. You’ve heard His promise put into your ears by His called servant that your sins are wiped out, forgiven, forgotten, gone. HISTORY. You’ve been called to feast at His table where He gives you His own body and blood – the gift of His love on the cross – right into your mouth with the promise of pardon and resurrection from the dead. You’ve been given His words of wisdom to open your eyes and help you see what truly is, so that you might come to be for the praise of His glory.
So then, utterly contrary to the thinking of the world, in the thinking of the Church the saddest waste of all is a life that is lived without praise to the Trinity, a life that snatches the gifts, but never acknowledges the Giver in praise and glory. Those most to be pitied are the sad folks who’ve never known the joy of singing a Gloria Patri or Te Deum or a Gloria in Excelsis or an Agnus Dei. And so we invite one and all, to come with us and fall together with us at the feet of the Incarnate Lord, Heaven’s God in human flesh and blood, the true Temple and true Priest, who has made us clean in His blood, and who has gifts to give that will astonish and awe, and through whom we are blessed to continually offer the sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name. And so to the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be all the glory and praise now and every moment of every day and to the ages of ages! Amen.
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