Given by Sherry Black
at St. Stephen's, Harrisburg, IL on October 14th, 2007.

Have you ever felt really alone, isolated, lost? Been cut off from family and friends. Perhaps you were in the military and stationed overseas. Or moved to a new community. Or when you left home for the first time for college or moved to a new town. Perhaps you’ve even had a taste of isolation from being in the hospital for a stretch of time.

My father was a civil engineer, in heavy construction, and as he paid his dues in the industry in the years after college, we moved to where the jobs were: dams, bridges and pipelines. I lived in 8 states before I was ten, and attended 5 elementary schools before 5 th grade. And always being the new kid in town, I felt pretty isolated and alone. And being kind of shy and bookish, it was hard to make friends. But in 3 rd grade in Jonesville, Louisiana, another new girl my age moved in. Her name was Darlene Leonard—the same as my last name, my maiden name. And we were an instant community of two, a community of outsiders. She was my first very best friend. And when her family moved away before mine, I was even more lost and alone than before. So this time I rejoiced when, a few months later, we planned to move again, another new start.

The lepers formed a community of outsiders, of outcasts. Leprosy was any number of skin conditions with one outcome: death. Lepers were kept isolated from any contact with other people until they were either cured or they died. Any kind of leprosy, of skin disease resulted in being unclean, excluded from community life and worship. Lepers had to follow strict rules, and keep themselves far away from others. Outcasts! Despised! Feared! They made their living by begging—and that at a distance, shouting distance from other people. Talk about isolated and lonely! No wonder they formed a new community, a band of untouchables. The fellowship of the cursed.

Because it was believed that leprosy was a punishment from God for some great sin; and the leper had done something to deserve this fate.

Jesus was still on the way to Jerusalem, and now he was in a no-man’s land between Samaria and Galilee. In this place that was no place, in an unnamed village, a band of ten lepers saw him. Surely they had heard of this Jesus and the miracles he had performed, how he had healed all kinds of diseases. So the news of a cure-- or of a healer-- was like the news that there is a cure for AIDS or cancer or MS or spinal injuries. And so, from an appropriate distance they shouted: Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!

Jesus saw them and told them to do that which is required of people cured of leprosy: to go and see the priests in order to get certificates saying they were cured. Then and only then could they return to their community, to society, to their family and friends. And that’s all Jesus said. He didn’t say, “be healed” or “your sins are forgiven.” He said, go and show yourselves to the priests. Act as if. And as they went, they were made clean. Can you imagine they joy? Their isolation was ended. Can’t you visualize their happiness, joy and even thankfulness that they could return to normalcy? They wouldn’t have to hang out with the lepers, a forced fellowship of sufferers. Particularly since on of the group was a despised Samaritan. They could go back to hating those kinds of people like they and their families had always done.

Samaritans. The Old Testament prophets considered Samaria to be a center of idolatry and paganism. The Samaritans were of Hebrew origin, and originally worshiped at a temple on Mt. Garizim, which was destroyed in 128 b.c.—not at the Jerusalem temple. They worshipped the one true God, but regarded only the Pentateuch, the first five books of the bible, as authoritative. They hoped for a return of Moses, and believed they were the true faithful descendents of ancient Israel. The Samaritans believed the Jews were in apostasy, going back to the 11 th century B.C. when the Jews moved their center of worship from Gerizim to Shiloh and finally to Jerusalem. In fact, there were centuries of bad feelings between them.

Hostilities between the Jews and Samaritans are recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah. Samaritans were despised by the Jews and considered unclean, just perhaps one notch above the Gentiles.

But it is a despised Samaritan alone who, when he saw that he was healed, turned back to Jesus, praising God with a loud voice. In gratitude, he fell to the ground at Jesus feet and thanked him. An outcast among outcasts, only this man returns to Jesus.

And Jesus asks, were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Jesus does not curse the nine, but simply wonders. Why do some see and others don’t? Why was one found while nine are lost? I don’t know, and perhaps Jesus didn’t know either. But he said to the one who was cured and grateful, the one who was found, “Get up and go on your way, your faith has made you well.”

See, there seems to be a difference between their cure—being made clean—and wellness. All ten were cured, only one was made well. And only Jesus can make us whole, make us well.

I had a friend in seminary who said we all were afflicted with the same terminal disease: that our blood is OS positive. We are all original sin positive, and this is a deadly disease for which Jesus not only provides the cure but makes us well. When we accept Christ as savior and Lord, we are healed of this fatal illness, and made whole. We leave our lives of lonely desperation and at our baptism we are born into a new family, the church, the family of God. As Christians, we need never again be isolated and alone, because God is always with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.

And our response must be gratitude, thankfulness. We thank God not because we should, but because of his grace to us. Gratitude is our response to God’s free gift of grace, salvation, wellness, and life. If we truly had any idea of the immensity of God’s love for us and his actions on our behalf, on what he has done for us, we to would fall prostrate, giving thanks to Jesus for what he did for us.

In 12-step groups they talk about having an attitude of gratitude. And because recovery has its challenges and difficulties, many in these groups are encouraged to make a gratitude list: write out all those things for which you are grateful, and look at it when life seems hard and you want to give up or give in. Remember all those blessings in your life for which you are grateful, something we should all think about.

Paul Harvey told this story:

It is gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket.

Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life. Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts. The largest raft was nine by five. The biggest shark...ten feet long. But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take a miracle to sustain them. And a miracle occurred. In Captain Eddie's own words, "Cherry," that was the B-17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, "read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off." Now this is still Captain Rickenbacker talking..."Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don't know how I knew, I just knew. Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food...if I could catch it." And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. You know that Captain Eddie made it.

And now you also know...that he never forgot. Because every Friday evening, about sunset...on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast...you could see an old man walking...white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls...to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle...like manna in the wilderness.1

Eddie Rickenbacker expressed his gratitude by feeding the seagulls. The Samaritan leper expressed his gratitude by returning with praise on his lips, and in his great emotion falling at Jesus’ feet, and thanking him. How are you expressing your gratitude for all that God has done for you?

1 "The Old Man and the Gulls" from Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story by Paul Aurandt, 1977, quoted in Heaven Bound Living, Knofel Stanton, Standard, 1989, pp. 79-80.