October 12, 2025
“Beggars for Sure”
Pastor Russ Norris

Arlo and I went for a walk on the beach last week.  It was still warm enough to take your shoes off and dip your toes in the water.   Arlo likes to dip his paws in the water.   My favorite times are when there’s a really, really low tide – like last week when we had a full harvest moon – and you can walk out a hundred feet or more from the shore and the water’s still only up to your knees.

And standing there, with a brilliant blue sky, dotted with puffy little clouds, the water lapping at my feet, the ocean sweeping away into the distance, I just felt this sense of amazement and gratitude.  Do you know what a miracle this planet is?  Astronomers have discovered more than a thousand exoplanets, circling other stars, light years away.  And not one of them is like this little grain of sand we live on, suspended in a sunbeam.  Seventy percent of the earth is covered with water!  Seventy percent.  There’s no other planet like this!  Standing there, looking out at the ocean, it boggles the mind, and you just want to say, “Thank you!”

And don’t tell me you haven’t had the same feeling.  Maybe when you held your first child, or your first grandchild – or when you look into the eyes of the person whose life you’ve shared for 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more – when you walk through a garden in the spring and smell the flowers – when you hear the music of a symphony – and your heart just swells with gratitude and thanksgiving.  You know what I’m talking about!  There are times in life when all you can say is, “thank you”.  Thank you.

Now, not everyone buys into that, of course.  In the gospel reading this morning, only one in ten felt that way.  Only one in ten came back to say “thank you”.  “Where are the other nine?” said Jesus.  “Did I not heal ten lepers?  Where are the nine?  Did only one come back to say ‘thank you’.”  Maybe a ten percent return is the best we can expect.  But it’s sad … it’s really sad how ungrateful we can be.

Leprosy was a horrible disease in Jesus’ time, even scarier than cancer and coronaries are today.  Because the consequences of leprosy in Biblical times were terrible.  Lepers were quarantined, isolated, exiled from their homes, their families, their neighbors – everything.  You were untouchable.

 Today, of course, we know that leprosy, called Hanson’s Disease, is an infection that can be treated and cured with antibiotics.  But in the time of the Bible leprosy was like a death sentence.  No one wanted to be near you, or come in contact with you; because they might catch it.  And there was no cure.

 In the story this morning, a group of ten lepers was living together in a colony outside a small village near Jerusalem.  Three days earlier, Jesus had healed a leper.  And by now word had spread, so maybe these ten lepers were hoping Jesus could do the same for them.  And so, they called out, “Jesus, have mercy on us!  Help us!  Save us!”  Which of course, he did.  He gave them orders to go to Jerusalem, find a priest, and get a certificate of health, certifying that they were cleansed of their leprosy.

 On the way, these ten lepers noticed that something amazing had happened.  They were healed.  The disease was gone!  They were whole again!  And, they were ecstatic!  Free!  No more leprosy.  No more isolation.  No more exile.  And off they went as fast as they could, to their homes, their families, their friends.  Off they ran to their fields, their fishing boats, their gardens, their cattle.  And as they ran, they were so happy to be clean and well again, that they forgot all about the man who healed them.

Only one … only one remembered.  Only one turned back.  Only one returned to Jesus, fell at his feet, and said “thank you, Lord”.  And he was a Samaritan, a despised foreigner to the Jews.  Jesus said, “Where are the nine?  Were not ten healed?  Did no one return to praise God except this foreigner?  Where are the nine?”

So, what’s this story really about?  The tragedy here is that nine lepers got the healing, but not the Healer.  They experienced the miracle, but not the Miracle Worker.  They got the gift, but not the Giver.  That’s the tragedy of the story.  They missed the real blessing.  Oh, they were healed; of course they were.  Jesus didn’t take it back.  But they never came to know and love the One who healed them; the one who so richly blessed them.

People often cry to God in a crisis, when they’re desperate.  They used to call that “foxhole religion”.  Everyone’s religious when they’re shooting at you.  But once the crisis is over, often so is the need for God.

 And we start to take God for granted again.  We take his blessings, we take the wonder and the miracle of life, for granted.  We take them for granted.  Part of the sickness in our world today is a pervasive sense of “entitlement” – the idea that I am somehow entitled to things – that I don’t owe anything to anyone – and I’m certainly not responsible to anyone … not even God.   People suffer from a kind of self-centeredness that assumes everything I have is my right.  It’s what I have coming to me; it’s what’s due me!  It’s what I deserve.  And so, like the nine lepers, we wander off, convinced that we are all entitled to what we’ve got.

And yet, the healthiest people I know are the ones who recognize that everything we have and everything we are … is a gift.  Not something we deserve, not something we are somehow entitled to; but a gift.  Martin Luther, on his deathbed, said it best.  His very last words, with his dying breath, were these: “We are all beggars, and that’s for sure”.  We are all beggars.  Everything we think is “ours” – everything we claim as “ours” – is really a gift – ultimately, a gift from God.  Now those who recognize that life is a gift no longer see it as an entitlement; they live with gratitude and generosity, no matter how much or how little they have.

Three hundred and seventy-five years ago, during the Thirty Years War – a war fought between Catholics and Protestants over religion – a man by the name of Martin Rinckart was a Lutheran pastor in the little town of Eilenburg in Saxony.  Eilenburg was a walled town, and so people poured into it for protection from all the fighting.  They were all jammed in there together – people, animals.  Many of them fell victim to disease and famine.  And then, in the middle of the war, the town was hit by the plague. 

Rinckart was pastor of the same church for thirty years – from 1619 to 1649.  When he arrived, there were four ministers in Eilenburg.  One left town and was never heard from again.  Rinckart buried the other two.  And as the only pastor left, he was called on to conduct as many as 40 or 50 funerals a day – 4,480 funerals in all, including his wife.

Somewhere in the midst of all that suffering, all that death and despair, Rinkart found time to write a hymn.  You know the hymn.  We sang it just a few minutes ago:   “Now thank we all our God, with hearts and hands and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices; who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.”

Incredible!  What an incredible sense of gratitude and thanksgiving.  And what, you might ask, did Martin Rickhart have to be thankful for?  Well, it’s not an easy thing for us to understand today.  Our lives are so complicated, so filled with things, with “stuff”, that it’s easy to get consumed by it all – we wonder, “Will I have enough?”  We worry about not wearing the right clothes, not driving the right car, not having the latest electronic toy.  And all too often our “stuff” is what defines who we are.  As the singer and song writer Eric Bibb put it, “I got too much stuff, I just can’t get enough!” 

You see, the greatest miracle isn’t being healed of leprosy, or cancer, or a coronary; the greatest miracle is when my heart – my cold, dead, stony heart – is healed of its ingratitude – when my all-too-human heart is filled with thanksgiving – for all of God’s countless blessings.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us not to worry.  God knows what we need, and God provides what we need.  How can we learn to count not our entitlements, but our blessings, and give thanks?

How can we learn to do that?  How can we learn to live lives of simplicity, gratitude, generosity?   Maybe the first step is to remember the one who returned – the one leper who was healed and came back to kneel at Jesus’ feet and give thanks.  Because that’s really where it all begins – it begins when we realize that everything we have, everything we are, everything we ever will be – it’s all a gift.  It’s all a gift.  We truly are all beggars, and that’s for sure.  Amen.