Turning doubt into praise

A reading from the gospel according to Luke, chapter 17, beginning at verse 11.

Luke 17 · chapter mention

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was passing along between Samaria and Galilee, and as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.

When he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priests.

And as they went, they were cleansed.

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks.

Now he was a Samaritan.

Then Jesus answered, Were not ten cleansed?

Where are the nine?

Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?

And he said to him, Rise and go your way.

Your faith has made you well.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

It is normal to the Christian experience to have doubts.

And sometimes those doubts are life's big questions that just seem to pop into mind randomly.

Why does anything exist at all?

Is God real?

Can I trust this Bible?

Is it what it actually says it is?

But I think more often doubts come into our minds in moments when a relative stability in life gives way to disorientation.

When something goes wrong, or when we find ourselves suffering, it's in those moments that doubts come to mind.

The big questions like, why is this happening to me, God?

Where are you in my pain?

And when are you going to do something about it?

And surely thoughts like these were in the minds of the lepers who were living together in a village somewhere along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

Because their relatively stable lives had definitely been upended by that diagnosis with that dreaded and contagious disease.

After all, if you know anything about leprosy, the thing that you know is that it was so contagious you had to leave your house and home lest you would infect your loved ones and you would go to a place where lepers lived.

Though, of course, it wasn't really a place where you went to live, it was more a place where you went to wait to die, akin to our modern hospice care centers where nobody rents out beds long term.

And so uprooted from house and home, torn away from the arms of those who loved them, brought into that fraternity that brought even Jews and Samaritans together, that shared desperation, that hopelessness, that lack of any sort of prospect for a bright future.

Those lepers in that village surely laid awake in the middle of the night asking, Where are you, God?

And sometimes probably screaming in the broad daylight, Why did this happen to me?

In short, they wrestled with doubts in the midst of their disorientation, their suffering, their difficulty, and their pain.

And in so doing, they were in good company.

In the scriptures, there are many psalms that we call Psalms of Lament, and the Psalms of Lament follow this same pattern.

The Psalmwriter will describe how the stability in life was taken away, the equilibrium was upset by something that happened to them personally, or perhaps by events that happened to the entire people of God.

And because of that equilibrium being upset, the psalmwriter will go on to complain, to voice those doubts, to take God to the ropes and say, Where are you, God?

Are you asleep?

Look, this is what you promised, but this is not what I see happening.

So when are you going to keep your promises?

God, you're not doing a very good job at being God.

And it's important for us to recognize this pattern, a pattern that we find in the Psalms, a pattern that these lepers lived out, because that means it's also a pattern that we will experience.

And yet I worry that we might be afraid to give voice to those doubts in our hearts.

Out of fear that God will be upset with us if we ever let it slip to anyone, and maybe even to ourselves, that we have great big question marks running through our minds.

And certainly out of concern that if our fellow brothers and sisters should know what was running through our minds, they would conclude that we were weak in our faith.

And so perhaps what we do often is take those doubts and bottle them up.

We sweep them beneath a rug that is woven out of the facade of some sort of false piety, some overconfident trust, some strong front that we put on to mask the real feelings inside our hearts.

If that's what we do, then we should learn a lesson from the psalm writers and from these lepers who did not hesitate in the midst of their doubts and concerns to cry out to Jesus when he came past, to say, Have mercy on us, Jesus, Master, pity us, see it, see the suffering, do something about it.

The lepers learned what we need to learn that in our doubts, when we are wrestling with those questions, there's no better place to turn than to Christ.

After all, Jesus heard their plea.

And he didn't do so after first interrogating them about how strong their faith was.

He simply heard them cry out for mercy, and he sent them on their way as if their leprosy were already taken away.

Sent them to go to the priests with the implicit promise that when they arrived there they would be cleansed and healed and declared so by the priests.

And so Jesus, in his mercy, he brings them from that place of disorientation into what?

Maybe into recovery or into a restoration of health?

Well, yes, but of course, this is where this account takes an interesting turn.

For it seems that most of those lepers understood what Jesus did to be a return to the way life was before the crisis had taken place.

A restoration to health that meant going back to that relative stability that they had known before they came down with the diagnosis of leprosy.

All but one of them, of course.

And that one stands out and is singled out by Jesus.

For this one Samaritan leper seems to have sensed that what happened was meant to do more than just get them back to the way life was.

That Jesus brought them through their doubts and their disorientation so that they could be brought to what we might call a reorientation, a turning of their life more fully in faith and trust to their Lord, which the Samaritan leper demonstrated by turning back on the way and running and falling at Jesus' feet and lavishing his thanks and praise upon him for all that he had done.

In this leper, we see a life that has been changed, who has gone through crisis and doubt and now lives differently.

Now, the odds being what they are in this account, one out of ten, ten percent begs the question of you and me how we respond when crises in our life, when the crises pass, when Jesus delivers us, when his mercy is shown to us.

Do we find our lives reoriented to God?

Or do we find ourselves quickly coasting back into a place of complacency?

Returning to life the way it was before the crisis shook us awake.

I don't think that we should be too hard on these nine lepers, or too hard on ourselves, for this reason.

Because the nine lepers did what Jesus had told them to do.

They went to the high priest, they showed themselves, and then they went to go knock on doors and surprise their relatives, their families.

Surely they wanted to get to those happy reunions as quickly as they possibly could, because who wouldn't want to take your loved ones in their arms and hold them tight when you thought you would never be able to do that again?

Of course they wanted to do that as quickly and as they possibly could.

That's one reason why I don't think we should be too hard on them.

And I think we should also reckon with this that if we stop for just a moment and consider how everything about us, our very existence, the fact that we are here, the life we live, the air we breathe, everything is owed to the goodness of our God.

It leads me to this conclusion that if I take stock of my own heart, I don't think I hit even 10% of gratitude, of giving thanks to God for his gifts, which are poured out upon me day after day, hour after hour, second after second.

In fact, I don't know that I even can understand or comprehend how I could return proper gratitude and thanks to him for all that he has done for me.

And I don't think that the takeaway here is that you better make sure you write your thank you notes to Jesus.

Because I notice that when he spoke to that Samaritan at his feet, he didn't say, Your giving of thanks has saved you.

Your gratitude has made you well.

No, you see what he says.

He says, Your faith, that is what has saved you.

In other words, Jesus didn't look in divine foreknowledge to see which of those lepers was going to return to him and then only heal that one.

And that means that his mercy here is grace, that kind of love that cannot be deserved, and that simply flows freely from the loving heart of God to people who don't deserve it and can't give proper thanks to him.

In fact, can't do anything to merit his favor, but can only hold up the hands of faith and receive the gifts that God would give to us.

It's faith that is the proper reorientation, in other words.

And that seems to me to be the perspective that we need from this account.

That in those moments when we're wrestling with our doubts, God is actually at work.

That's why he wants to hear your doubts.

He wants to hear your complaints, he wants to hear your pleas for mercy.

Because as much as it might seem like he's absent, he's not.

In fact, he's powerfully present in those moments.

And he intends through the difficulties in this life, through those doubts, through that wrestling with him to bring you to a place where you were not before.

That is, to bring you even closer to him.

Close enough to him that you might fall at his feet.

So I would like to think that this one Samaritan leper represents what it looks like when God sends us into the arid regions of life, the places where we thirst for God's presence, and where God is doing his work of building in us more resilient faith.

I suppose the fancy word for this is hormesis.

Hormesis is a word that means that there are some stressors that actually build strength.

So think of it like lifting weights.

You stress your muscles so that they can become stronger.

And the difficulties and trials, those moments of disorientation in our lives, that's God's hormesis.

It's when he's sending us to the gym, it's when he's exercising the muscles of faith, so that we might be brought through those moments to cling even more closely to him, to be brought to greater trust, total confidence, and so to be running to Jesus, learning that in every circumstance there is no better place to turn than to him.

And there at his feet to let our faith overflow in praise and thanks for all the goodness he shows to us.

That's the pattern here in this account.

From stability through disorientation to reorientation, drawn closer to your Lord Jesus.

And that puts a different take on life's difficult moments.

It doesn't make the doubts go away, but it helps us to understand what God is accomplishing through them, how he is there drawing us to himself, refining our faith, and turning our doubting hearts into trusting hearts, and turning our doubting lips into lips that speak his praise.