One turned back

Scripture Lessons: Jeremiah 29: 4-7 and Luke 17: 11-19, NT page 80 Sermon Title: One turned back Preached on October 9, 2016 Sometimes people wonder – what’s the matter with kids today? So many lament pervasive ingratitude and the abandonment of manners, so I’ll begin today’s sermon with a quote that articulates the sentiment: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” You may agree with that, and if you do you’re not alone. As I said before, what I’ve just read is a quote. But the greater meaning comes from learning who the quote is attributed to. I’ve just been to visit my grandfather, and back when I was in high school he sent me this quote, possibly to make me reflect upon my lack of manners and contempt for authority, but while he may have related to the quote’s sentiments these are not his words nor do they belong to any of our contemporaries who currently stand in judgement of young people today. The quote is attributed to Socrates, proving that at least since the four-hundred years before Christ was born it has been observed that manners are in short supply. So, maybe not surprisingly, when Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, going through that region between Samaria and Galilee, and having healed the 10 lepers who came out to him begging to be healed – only one prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And where were the other 9? They had forgotten their manners it would seem, and neither Socrates nor my grandfather would have been surprised though Jesus was disappointed: “Were not ten made clean?” he asked the one who returned to thank him. “But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” This account here is a call to gratitude, but the double-whammy to any and all who have ever heard this passage from the Gospel of Luke is that the only one who had any manners was the foreigner, the Samaritan, and it is the foreigner, the lowly Samaritan who becomes the hero in the Gospel of Luke again and again. You know well the story of the Good Samaritan. It’s a parable told in the Gospel of Luke just before our 2nd Scripture Lesson in chapter 10 and it is in this parable that the only one who stopped to help a robbed and wounded man on the side of the Jericho Road, the only one to embody any manners is not the priest nor the Levite but the foreigner, the Samaritan, who knew what it meant, not just to mind his manners but also how to love his neighbor as himself. Jesus is making a point here – it’s not just that 9 forgot to say “thank-you”, it’s that the one who was never invited into proper society embodies the standards we’ve forgotten. And we’ve all seen that before. It’s kind of like when you’re packing lunches for your kids on a Tuesday morning and one of them says, “I’ll take a ham sandwich.” “You’ll take a ham sandwich?” you say under your breath, and then you go on with lunch preparation while you watch the news hearing about the foster kids or the refugees who rejoice over a cup of white rice and you start to think to yourself – “What is wrong with my children!?!” It’s kind of like the time you reluctantly took the neighbor kid who talks too much out to dinner even though he basically invited himself, and as soon as the food comes it’s scarfed down and while you’re waiting for the waitress to bring you back the check only one of those kids sticks around to say thank-you. Good luck complaining about him now. Gratitude is in short supply. Is it really any wonder only 1 of the 10 returns to kneel at the savior’s feet? For nothing much has changed – still today some mind their manners and some don’t. Some stand for the national anthem and some don’t – and you can’t really make a judgement about what kind of person is grateful for this country and which one isn’t, because you can scan the stands at the football game and the veteran weeps as does the illegal immigrant. One refugee stands with her hand over her heart while the one who knows better won’t even take his hat off. Good luck trying to understand what makes people thankful. It’s not wealth or the lack there of for I’ve seen the rich embody gratitude while the poor talked me out of my last dollar and never said a word of thanks. Christmas comes and one kid gets a bike and another gets an orange but gratitude isn’t proportionate to the gift. Gratitude is something else. And this is a strange thing I believe. But a miracle – as amazing as a miracle ever is – even a miracle won’t necessarily result in gratitude any more than winning the lottery will change the attitude of a bitter old man. Give a man on the street or a spoiled little girl exactly what she asked for again and again but don’t ever expect her to be thankful, expect her to ask you for something else in a couple minutes. In the same way – you think about the lepers – all 10 received a miracle, all 10 were healed, but sometimes getting what you want and being thankful for it are two completely different things. Being healed and being made well don’t always go hand in hand. I realized this while we were coming home from South Carolina during the hurricane evacuation. Last week we drove the 9 hours to get there to visit my parents and my grandfather, but with the chance of a hurricane striking the coast we left early Wednesday morning after arriving on Monday afternoon. You might think that being able to escape a hurricane would give a person enough to be thankful for on a Wednesday morning, but I was in a bad mood because after driving all that way we were having to turn right around, so as we stopped for breakfast in a tiny little town at a restaurant called Rusty and Paula’s I wasn’t very grateful at all. The thing about little girls is that pancakes are all the concession needed for having to leave their grandparent’s house two days early, but their father on the other hand was still a little bitter. So who knows what attitude I was presenting to all the locals there who wanted to know where we had come from and where we were going, but by the time we had finished eating the place had pretty much cleared out and that was when the waitress came over to tell us that someone had already taken care of our bill. Now this is a small thing compared to leprosy – a very, very small thing – but in this little example lies a lesson that I hope will stick with me – the lesson of letting go of the disappointment for a visit that didn’t go as expected so that I might spend my time being grateful for a stranger who cared for my family. In a study on gratitude a psychologist at the University of California named Robert A. Emmons and his colleague, Mike McCullough at the University of Miami, assigned participants in a study to keep a short journal. One group of the participants were to briefly describe five things they were grateful for that had occurred in the past week, another five recorded daily hassles from the previous week that displeased them, and a third group, the neutral group, was asked to list five events or circumstance that affected them, either positive or negative. 10 weeks later, the gratitude group felt better about their lives as a whole and were a full 25% happier than the group who spent their time recording daily hassles, which isn’t too surprising, but what is surprising is that the gratitude group also reported fewer health complaints and exercised an average of 1.5 hour more than the others. So, what’s the matter with kids today? What’s the matter with everyone today? On the one hand there are those who, like me, have so much to be thankful for, but we live in a world where restaurants have a box for us to leave our complaints at the door but no place for us to leave our gratitude. I remember the song from that great Hollywood Musical “White Christmas” - but do I fall asleep counting my blessings like Bing Crosby told me to, or do I fall asleep mulling over my anxieties? I was running just last week – and running as I so often do – huffing and puffing and complaining about being out of breath, but last week I was running through a cemetery. Now can you believe that – here I was complaining about being out of breath in a cemetery, and all of a sudden the irony hit me and I could see the dead rising from the grave and grabbing me by the collar to say, “You think you’re out of breath?” There’s a point in our lives where we have what we need and all that we wanted and dreamed of – but if happiness still remains elusive than maybe the answer is as simple as going to the source of all our blessings to voice a simple word of thanks. My grandfather has always been able to do that, and before evacuating South Carolina, I was able to visit with him. His dementia is severe now; I don’t think he recognized my face or my voice. Certainly he didn’t call me by my name, but the same smile was on his face that has always been there and when I talked with my Dad about it he told me that a friend of my grandfather’s had said, “the only way to explain it is that he’s mastered the art of happiness.” Isn’t that a wonderful thing to say about somebody? That they’ve mastered the art of happiness. And I think that’s right. My grandfather never made it through a family event without celebrating his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He never hung up the phone with me without telling me he was proud of me. He never missed the chance to tell the women he loved that they were beautiful. He never sat down at a Thanksgiving meal without saying, “Now, let us return thanks.” On the other hand, too many miracles have passed by me without returning thanks. It’s not that I haven’t been given enough gifts, it’s that too many gifts I’ve been given without taking the time to celebrate them. If you feel the same way then let me challenge you to end or begin each day by listing out your blessings, and by acknowledging our God as their source. And know that later this month you’ll be asked to fill out a Pledge Card. And while these cards mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, I can’t think of a pledge card without remembering the words of CS Lewis who told the story of a boy who had been given 10 dollars by his father. It was his father’s birthday so the boy spent 9 dollars on himself and one on his father. Now 1 out of 10 doesn’t sound like very much does it? But to give thanks for all that we’ve been given, that’s all that has ever been required. Amen.