I am perplexed. Why does being thankful appear to be such a difficult thing? It cures a lot of things. Maybe it’s just that being awful comes much easier. Oddly, we have forgotten that the basic meaning of awful is “to be filled with awe”, with reverence, worshipful. Instead, we have come to understand feeling awful is feeling absolutely terrible. Feeling awful includes a lot of not good feelings – shame, guilt, dysphoria, anxiety, anger, bitterness, loathsome, lonesome, unlovable – I could go one. We’ve all had our share of feeling awful.
Interestingly, in the current world of mental health the cure for feeling awful is being mindful. What they mean by that is sit still, breathe deep, and relax. If you can’t relax then tense your muscles starting with your toes and do your whole body, muscle group by muscle group all the way up to your face and the top of your head. This is good yoga stuff and if you’re having a panic attack, it will help. As you relax, listen to the sounds around you, smell the smells, touch something to feel its texture, notice the details in something. Then, take note of your feelings and name them. Don’t ask why you feel them for that will spiral you out of mindfulness. Just name them and take note of your body and how you feel those awful feelings in particular areas like is it hard to swallow, are your hands sweating, or do you feel nauseous. Don’t judge yourself for having these unpleasant thoughts and feelings. We’re humans in a messed-up world. Everybody gets them. Instead, pretend you are the best, most unconditionally loving friend you could possibly have and say to yourself what that friend would say. That’s being mindful and learning how to be nice to yourself. Even me just describing this should have made you feel relaxed.
Now, and it may be that I’m not as well read as I should be, but I don’t hear so much anymore about being thankful, particularly in the wake of Covid. I think the reason for that may be that a lot of to most of people today in the wake of environmental disasters, wars, refugee crises, pandemics, economic ills, and etcetera are having a difficult time stomaching the thought that there even is a God especially one who is personally loving. In order to be thankful one most have a power higher than oneself (to use the words of AA) who has a will and who cares to be thankful to. Unfortunately, we live in a day when we need God to be God, but God just seems to be letting things run their courses so that a sense of hopelessness is the true pandemic. We don’t see ourselves as being responsible for the ills in which we live. So, we blame others. We blame God. After realizing blaming doesn’t cure despair, we turn inward to ourselves and to looking out for ourselves and how to make myself feel good in this hopeless world for despair sucks.
This is a particularly hard time to live in if you are somebody who truly feels awful. The world will tell you there is no God so cure your own awfulness by self-soothing and doing what’s best for you – self-minded. I might be sounding negative and critical of what a lot of people are finding helpful, indeed life changing especially when you throw the daily practice of mindfulness into the pot with its resulting daily dose of feel-good brain chemicals, but... I’ll just say that I am all for self-awareness and self-acceptance – knowing who I am and how I affect other people and changing those things about myself by which I hurt myself and others. Those skills make one functional in relationship. Self-mindedness breeds dysfunction and hurts others.
I might be old school but I think the cure for awful comes from outside oneself and is discovered in a relationship with God and with others. It is knowing oneself to be a beloved child of the God who actually does care about everything and about us each and who actually can heal those overwhelming feelings of awfulness. Turning to God and being worshipful (awestruck) and thankful is crucial to wholeness for us human beings whom God created to enjoy Him, and life, and each other, and ourselves. Let me tell you about some lepers because I think these lepers in our reading today can help us see this.
Life as a leper in Bible times was horrible. If you have ever had the pervasively wicked feeling of “there’s something wrong with me”, then welcome to the world of the leper. Leprosy was a very misunderstood skin disease which in time made a person look like they are the walking dead. Skin lesions, rotting extremities, pale flaky skin, facial features deforming – a person literally looked like they were rotting away in death. Back then, they believed the disease was a curse on a person for secret sins. Since they looked like death, they were not allowed to come to the Temple to be in the presence of the God who gives life. They knew the disease was contagious and so lepers were made to live away from people and usually they formed colonies. There was a religious term for the state of being cut-off from the presence of God and from other people – unclean. Lepers were unclean. There was something wrong with them and so they were shamed and felt ashamed.
Well, Jesus is and his disciples were out in the middle of nowhere, when a colony of ten lepers approached him wanting him to show them mercy, wanting him to do what only God could do, to do that one thing that would make life right, heal them. Interestingly, Jesus didn’t do anything specific to heal them like touch them as he had done with other lepers. He simply told them to go start living the way they would if they were healed and clean. For a leper, the first thing you had to do if you were healed was to go see the priest who would pronounce you clean. That pronouncement made it so you could return to life in community and come before God. Jesus’ cure for just seems to be if you want to live, then quit acting like lepers and get on with living. That’s helpful advice for many of life’s situations.
So, as they took those first few steps of living life as if they were healed, they were made clean. They had come to Jesus in hope that he would do for them what he had for others like them. Then, in taking those first few steps of faithfulness to Jesus, to doing as he asked, they were healed. There was no longer reason for them to feel shame or be cut off from the presence of God and from human community.
One of the lepers, upon realizing he was now healed, began to praise God loudly and he turned around to go back to Jesus. He threw himself on the ground at Jesus’ feet and began to thank him. In those first few steps of faithfulness to Jesus, of turning to God for healing, this leper found his awfulness transformed into worshipfulness and thankfulness. So, he turned around to “God”, to Jesus, to be thankful. In his encounter with Jesus he discovered that there is a God who does care about him and that there was nothing, not even death resembling disease of leprosy, that could separate him from God’s love and healing mercy that can be found in the Jesus way of life.
When I hear what happens next, I am a bit shocked by Jesus’ response. Since only one of them came back, Jesus wondered what happened to the other nine lepers whom he had made clean. I wonder too. Did they go on to live the healed life? Did they not realize they were clean and continued to live as lepers? Did they go to the priest? Why were they not also moved to worship and to thankfulness?
I think it was that they didn’t realize that Jesus was God with them? They believed they were healed by a healer or a prophet or a great teacher. They had been healed but God remained distant. It’s like us not necessarily realizing the healing presence of God in medicine. God is at work in the life of everybody for healing and yet we don’t take time to notice, to turn around and in worship give thanks. And all the while, we continue on wondering why God has seemingly abdicated. We don’t see God’s work because we are happier, safer to depersonalize God and keep God at a distance so that we can blame God for all that’s wrong while we ourselves don’t open ourselves to God's presence, don't pray, don’t crack a Bible expecting God to speak, and rather take the route of “self-mindedness.”
Jesus says to the man who came back in worship to thank him, “Get up and go on your way, your faithfulness has made you well.” “Saved you” is what it says in the Greek. There is a difference between simply being healed of awfulness and living the new life that God has created in, through, and as Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit This man’s loyalty to Jesus expressed in his doing what Jesus said and returning in worship to thank him not only removed the “awfulness” of life that he experienced as a leper. He found himself not just healed, but made alive “New Life” in relationship to God which overflowed with the joyful worshipfulness and thankfulness that comes upon you when you realize you are in the presence and the God who made you and loves you as no one else can.
I know I’m just a voice out in the wilderness. But, I’m one of those people who has lived with that profound sense of “There’s something wrong with me” that makes me feel different and cut-off from others. I knew the dark world of addiction and Jesus healed me of it. Now, my days begin and end with turning to God worshipfully. I do better when I add thankfulness to that mix. I’ve tried being mindful, but I prefer being prayful even when praying is screaming at God in lament. Even then, God makes his presence felt. He lets us know he hears us and he communicates back, “You are my beloved child and your life is in my hands”.
Knowing oneself to be a beloved child of God and that your life is in the hands of One who loves you enough to die for you goes a long way in this world of “Awfulness”. I, like every one of you, would like to see God at this moment step up and be God and do what God does – heal, restore, resurrect – both for me personally and the whole world. But now is not God’s time to do what he’s going to do. But rather, now is our time to turn back and be thankful and be mindful not so much of ourselves but more so mindful, open to God’s presence with us. It is our time to remember how he’s been faithful to us in the past. It is time for us to give thanks especially for the people he’s put in our lives – spouses, children, family, friends. It is time for us to turn around, come back to Jesus, and be thankful. There is nothing that can separate you from the love of God present with you in Jesus. Amen.
