RUTH 1:1-19a

PSALM 113

2 TIMOTHY 2:3-15

LUKE 17:11-19

Sermon – October 10, 2004

How can we find reasons for giving thanks in our lives? How can we then make giving thanks a way of life and, by our actions, give other people reasons to be thankful?

Our Old Testament and Gospel readings this morning give us poignant and powerful answers to these questions. These stories are set in cultures and circumstances which are strange to us, but let me unwrap these stories for you and let us together discover the glories inside of them.

The book of Ruth is set in the era after the settlement of the Holy Land by the Israelites under Joshua (after the death of Moses) but before the time of the great Kings of Israel. It was a murky era when individuals of families or populations could cross what we would think of as international borders for reasons of famine or reasons of family. Naomi and her husband and two sons moved during a time of famine from their home in the Holy Land to the land of Moab, east of the Dead Sea – in the modern country of Jordan – a foreign, pagan nation which was already a traditional enemy of the Israelite people.

While they were there, Naomi’s husband died. Her two sons both married Moabite wives – and then both of her sons died. Naomi, understandably, was absolutely devastated and felt she would be depressed forever. Hearing that the famine in her homeland was over, she resolved to at least return there. Before doing so she, with full ceremony, released her daughters-in-law from any further obligation to be with her, urging them to stay in their homeland and find new husbands. One of her daughters-in-law complied. But she just couldn’t convince Ruth to stay in Ruth’s homeland and with her people and her religion.

In eloquent and historic words, Ruth declares, “Do not press me to leave you or turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God!” Naomi shrugs, and allows Ruth to accompany her – two penniless widows on a journey sustained by the thinnest of hopes.

They go back to Naomi’s hometown, and Ruth unexpectedly is wooed by and marries a relative of Naomi’s. At almost the end of this poignant little book of the Bible, we see Naomi doing what she had given up hope of ever doing – cuddling her baby grandson. Who cares about biological relationship or the lack thereof; Ruth’s baby had a “Nana” in Naomi.

Ruth had been widowed, and given that her mother-in-law had been widowed and her mother-in-law’s other son had also died, had she been superstitious she would have wasted no time getting far away from Naomi. But she wasn’t; she gave thanks for her relationship with Naomi and, counter-intuitively, resolved to become closer to her and for the first time to convert to Naomi’s religion. This is after Ruth’s (first) Jewish husband had died.

Ruth resolved to broaden and deepen her attitude of gratitude by joining a community of faith, the people of Israel, which was quite a leap indeed: a Palestinian or Jordanian woman becoming Jewish. And, let’s remember, she was accepted.

The result of Ruth’s attitude of gratitude and commitment to joining the people of the Lord God is that she became an enormous and unexpected blessing to her mother-in-law, to Boaz, her new husband, and to their son.

But the story doesn’t end there. Ruth had no idea how much good she was going to do. Amid all the unfamiliar names in that story you might have heard one very familiar name, the name of Naomi’s hometown in which she and Ruth settled: Bethlehem. (Pause.) Ruth was the mother of Obed, grandmother of Obed’s son Jesse, and great-grandmother of Jesse’s son David, the greatest King of Israel.

And centuries later someone else, another descendant of hers, came back to the ancestral hometown: “Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David.” Without Ruth’s act of conversion and commitment, no King David – and no adoptive human father for Jesus himself. We have no idea how much good the good we do does.

St. Luke in today’s Gospel tells us of another foreigner who has a faith encounter that changes his life. Lepers were people afflicted with one or another skin disease which made them pariahs, outcasts from society, unable to worship in any temple or synagogue or live in a village but reduced to being segregated apart at the fringe of society. So it was that the 10 lepers in this story, even while calling out to Jesus for help, keep their distance because they were “untouchables.”

Jesus’ response may puzzle us. He says merely, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” The only reason for them to go and show themselves to the priests would be to show that they had been healed and could now be certified by the priests as healed and able to return to normal society, including public communal worship. For the 10 lepers to even start walking that way took faith: they could have said, “Very funny, Jesus” and stayed right where they were, depressed and perhaps sarcastic.

But they went on a faith walk: “And as they went, they were made clean.” But only one of the 10 even returned to say thank you to Jesus – and he was the sole foreigner, the Samaritan! He had the attitude of gratitude.

Both Ruth and this nameless leper had faith and started walking and only after they started walking discovered the blessings God had for them. They decided to be thankful, and then discovered far more to be thankful for.

Including, in the Samaritan’s case, getting held up as an example of faith and love of God after spending a lifetime as a member of an ethnic and religious minority group which was on the receiving end of much prejudice from Jesus’ fellow Jews.

This healed man “prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.”

We today live in a culture which doesn’t really believe in giving thanks for our blessings. We are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of ads which tell us that we really haven’t made it, aren’t successful, don’t have the right looks, the right friends, a good future and aren’t cool unless we buy this product or this service, whatever the ad is pushing! And when we buy them, there are more, more, more ads telling us the “goal line” in our lives is just a few hundred or thousand or hundred thousand dollars away and if we don’t believe it we don’t get it.

Bogus.

Let’s try, just for a minute, to forget the hundreds of thousands of ads we’ve been exposed to, and do something really counter-cultural: count our blessings. (Pause.)

I know, it’s easier to count our headaches, our stresses, our fears, even our hopes. But just for a moment, let’s give thanks for the ways God has blessed us. Everyone’s list will be different, but there are some things that we all can share. We are all made in the image of God, men and women alike, and therefore we are all priceless, no matter how useless or dumb or hopeless any ad tries to make us feel. We all have a large book with heroines and heroes like Ruth and this leper who can inspire us and help us to put things in perspective. And we have all been offered forgiveness of our sins, healing in many different ways, a sacred community, personal coaching through thick and thin and the hope for eternal life by our Lord Jesus Christ.

That’s just for starters. No matter how poor or rich, young or old, thin or fat, bereft or surrounded by blood relatives each of us may be, we all have blessings to count. We all can, if we choose, adopt an attitude of gratitude.

How can we find reasons for thanksgiving in our lives? By remembering the spiritual blessings we have been offered and by sitting down at home and listing on paper, each of us, the reasons we have for giving thanks. I’ve found lots of gratitude in places our materialistic culture would not expect, like people who have one of their five senses impaired who rejoice in the ability to use the other four. If you can use all five of your senses, you may never have thought of giving thanks for them. Check it out.

How can we make giving thanks a way of life? How can we be blessings to others, and give others reasons to be thankful? Ruth made giving thanks a way of life by committing herself to God and to the community of those who strive to know and love God even as we are known and loved by God. The ex-leper was able to literally throw himself at Jesus’ feet and give thanks. Ever wish you could do that?

If you do it with your life, it counts. If you throw yourself at Jesus’ feet by committing yourself to the community that calls him Lord and Savior, it counts.

We don’t have to travel to a foreign country like Ruth did. What we do have to do is make an attitude of gratitude shape the way we use our time, our talent and our money.

Materialistic culture tries to teach us that nothing could possibly be more important than spending all our time and money on ourselves. You may have seen the bumper sticker “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” WRONG.

The one who dies with the most toys dies. The one who lives for others is beginning to experience eternal life.

Living with an attitude of gratitude starts with two things: our calendars (pullout) and our checkbooks. How often do we give thanks to God for our blessings by ourselves in prayer, as households, or week by week as part of the worshiping community? How often do we serve God by serving others? And what percentage of our incomes do we intentionally dedicate to the glory of God and preparing the way for the Kingdom of God by caring for God’s people and God’s world?

Intentions are good, but intentions don’t show up in audits. Eventually, all of us will have our calendars and our checkbooks “audited” by God. What will they show?

Today and next week we at St. Barnabas begin the disciplines of reflecting on our own stewardship of Time, Talent and Treasure and committing ourselves to preparing the way for the Kingdom of God in explicit ways by our commitments of Time and Talent and of financial pledges for 2005. There are lots of other worthwhile ways to implicitly build the Kingdom of God, but to remind ourselves – and others – that that is what works and gifts of charity really are about, we need to do and to give in ways that clearly have “Christian faith” plastered all over them.

The new “Time and Talent” sheet is in your Sunday leaflets. About ten days from now, you will be receiving financial pledge cards and information about making financial commitments to the Lord’s ministry through this church for 2005.

As part of that mailing, you will hear words which may be unfamiliar, like “percentage giving” and “tithe”. There are no “dues”, in this church. It’s free, and like all of you, it’s priceless. If we picked a number for “dues” – say, $1,208, the national average pledge in 2002 in the Episcopal Church – that would shut some people out of participation and it would be less than many others would want to give. More important, Jesus doesn’t want us to do things that way. So we don’t. Jesus taught that generosity is measured not by what we give, but by what we have left. The most generous people he knew were poor people who gave extravagantly in proportion to their incomes.

“Tithe” is a new word for some people. It means giving 10% of income to charity, or some people give that much to church in addition to other charities. It’s the word the Bible uses to describe basic giving, aside from special offerings. Setting this percentage – whatever one’s income is and however it changes – means that you know that a set proportion of what you receive from God is systematically being offered back to God as a thanksgiving with an attitude of gratitude.

Some people may already be at 10%, others may be working their way there, some may be at 2%, some may never have given systematically at all. Like any discipline, start somewhere and make progress steadily. Or – try tithing for 30 days and see what it’s like! Or “tithing lite” – 5%. Could you sustain a decent life on 5% less spending than now? Then it’s possible to dedicate that much voluntarily towards incarnating your response to what Jesus called the greatest commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself.” That’s what church is about: helping each other to live these commandments out as individuals and as a team.

Let us think about the examples of Ruth and of the healed leper, whose attitudes of gratitude inspire us and had such impact. May we also do so much good we have no idea how much good we do.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church