The following sermon was delivered by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church, Fairfax, Virginia, on October 12, 1980. The sermon is entitled, Where Are the Nine? And the scripture reference is Luke 17, verses 11 to 19. 

You may want to turn to the gospel reading again, Luke chapter 17. we were looking at the paragraph beginning with verse 11. This is one of those very simple stories in the Gospel which suddenly takes on a whole new dimension as we understand some of the background of it.

If you were to go way back in history to about the year 1000 BC, to the time of David, you would find the nation of Israel was one united kingdom. somewhat on the same lines that it is today, the same general piece of geography. But it didn't remain that way very long.

It held together as a nation during David's time and during the time of his son Solomon. And that was the golden age for Israel's history. But by the time Solomon's reign came to an end, approximately the year 930 BC, The kingdom of Israel divided north and south, divided into two separate nations, never until very recent history to be put back together again.

It divided right across west to east above the Dead Sea. And the northern kingdom took the name or kept the name of Israel, and the southern kingdom took the name of Judah or Judea. We have a little transparency for you to help you visualize this.

CBN can have their satellites. We'll have our transparencies. From about that time on, north and south were at odds with each other, but the situation became a whole lot more complicated in the year 721 B.C.

The Assyrians came in and overran the northern kingdom. The Assyrian emperor or king was Shalmanser, And under his leadership, the northern kingdom was absolutely decimated. The great majority of the people who lived there were destroyed, literally killed.

Men, women, and children wiped out. They leveled many of the buildings. They sowed salt into the fields so that they would never produce again.

And those who survived all that were literally driven off the land. We were referring to this on Wednesday evening. Some of you may have been there in the lectures on the Old Testament.

They became known as the Ten Lost Tribes because their own separate history is from that point on lost. They have no distinctive life as a people. They're driven out of their own land and we can only presume that they intermarried with the peoples of Europe and Britain and that's the end of them as a distinctive people.

But then what happened is that Shalmancer and his successors looked around for other peoples under their authority to repopulate that northern part of what had been Israel. And they imported colonists from places like Kutha and Babylon and Hamath, particularly cities around the Persian Gulf area, and put them into that part of the land that is then called Samaria. It took the name of one of the cities in the north that became the capital and the colonists expanded that name and took it to be the name of their whole kingdom.

And what happened as those people moved in is that they developed a culture and a religion which was extremely eclectic. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of their background, some of the trappings of Judaism and a whole lot of other influences as well. And so on the surface of things, they had some resemblance to the Jews.

But from the point of view of the real Jews, they were the worst form of hybrid because they did the very thing that the Jews were commanded not to do. That's to lose the distinctiveness of God's calling to them as a people. Jews were commanded by God, it was their covenant, to keep their relationship with God absolutely pure.

And these colonists coming in from here, there, and elsewhere, Arabs and Persians especially, amalgamated, mongrelized the relationship of God with his people. And so from the Jews' point of view, these folks were regarded about as folks around the Persian Gulf are regarded today. Roughly the same dimension.

Their rivalry began almost immediately. It intensified over the next several centuries and it reached a real zenith in the mid-300s when the Samaritans decided to build their own temple on Mount Gerizim. And that's just about where that dot is under the word Samaria.

And if you know anything about the significance of the temple in Jerusalem to the Jews, perhaps you can feel something of the impact of that decision. God said, here in Jerusalem, here and here alone will I have my temple. Here and here alone will sacrifices be offered.

Here alone will atonement be made between sinful man and holy God. And you can imagine what the impact is of saying, no, we'll build another temple, thank you very much, and it will be of equal status or even more important up on Mount Gerizim. That temple lasted for about two centuries, and it's out of that, perhaps you can understand, the woman at the well asking that question to Jesus, where should we be worshipping?

You Jews say down in Jerusalem, we've been taught that it's supposed to be up here on this mountain. by the time of Jesus the rivalry had become so great that the Jews would literally not go into that area at all and they had either withdrawn completely to the southernmost part Judea or some of them had pushed into that northernmost area called Galilee and if you happen to be a Jew that wanted to go from Galilee down to Jerusalem, the way you would typically do it is you'd cross the Jordan River just south of the Sea of Galilee and you'd go down on the eastern side of the river which was Gentile territory called the Decapolis and cross back just above the Dead Sea. They wouldn't even go through the area.

That's how great the animosity was. And perhaps you can also hear the implication of that cryptic little word comes over and over in the Gospels, Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. If you met a Samaritan, you'd draw your skirts around you and go by on the other side of the street.

But typically you would never meet him. You never came near him. I'm interested in the light of all that at how frequently Jesus singled out the Samaritans to be either the recipients of His particular graciousness or His love or His mercy or a healing or use them to become the object lesson in a story.

You think immediately of the Good Samaritan in which he tells this little story in which the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side and won't have anything to do with the man who's been beaten up and is lying in the ditch and this good Samaritan, right? From the point of view of a Jew, that's a self-contradiction. This good Samaritan comes by, ministers to him, becomes an example to us of what it is to be a neighbor and what it is to love.

And Jesus ends his little story by saying, Go thou and do likewise. Can you feel what that would feel like to a Jew? Me, go and be like a Samaritan?

And yet that's what Jesus did over and over. He singled out the Samaritan. We've already given reference to the woman at the well.

Here Jesus, instead of taking that typical circuitous route to avoid Samaria, goes right through the middle of it. Sits down at the edge of Jacob's well and talks with this woman who's not only a Samaritan, turns out she's little better than a harlot. And he offers to her not only his friendship, but life eternal.

She becomes converted. She becomes an evangelist, runs around and tells everybody else that she's met Messiah. This is how Jesus dealt with these outcast, despised, rejected people.

It's fairly typical of him, isn't it? It's interesting, if you look for it, to see the way that Jesus took pains to reach out and express love above and beyond normal social contact with people that everybody else avoided. We're talking about lepers here.

I'm interested at the number of times we read about Jesus coming up to a leper and he doesn't simply say, be healed, but he touches him. If you know anything about leprosy in those days, nobody touched you. You didn't get anywhere near a normal person.

You didn't come into the village. And for Jesus to come up, a man who is well, and reach out and put his hands on the rotting away nose or ear or cheek or hand, running sore, smelling, stinking, rotting body, and embrace such a person, and then he heals him. Jesus reaches out.

to the outcast in this special way. Well, in this particular story, he's coming down from the Galilee into Samaria, and it takes place apparently right on that border where those two territories touch. He comes to a little village in a kind of a no-man's land.

It's right in between the two territories. And as he enters into the village, he comes upon a fairly common site, a little tiny leper colony. As I've already said, the lepers are not allowed into the village.

There's ten of them in this particular colony, and presumably it's a mixed group. Nine of them are Jewish. One of them is a Samaritan.

Interesting, isn't it, that there are two places where all the divisions fall away. One is in the love of God, and the other is in the rejection of men. There are no distinctions in the leper colony.

That's the one place that the Samaritan is an equal. And Jesus comes along and somehow, we're not told how, these lepers recognize him for who he is and for what he's able to do. Some word has reached them about him that he may in fact be the Messiah from God.

And they call out to him, they plead, Jesus, Master, help us. And he does so. But he does so in a very strange way.

He says, go and show yourself to the priests. What's strange about that is that that's the instruction that's given all the way back in Leviticus chapter 13 for those who have already been healed. If you have leprosy and God does some miraculous work in your body and it goes away, before you're admitted back into social circles, before you can do that, you go and present yourself to the priest and he has to pronounce you clean.

And Jesus says to this little group of ten, go, present yourself to the priests. And we read that as they went, they were healed. I love that, don't you?

Why did they go? He said to, and somehow they believed enough to obey. And as they went, they were healed.

I love the creativity of the Lord Jesus. He is not limited to any one way of healing. Sometimes he spits on the ground and makes clay and rubs it on your eyes.

Can you think of anything sillier than that? And yet that's what he does and the people are healed. Sometimes he takes his fingers and sticks them into ears that have been stopped up.

He says, Ephrathah, be opened, and the ears are opened. Sometimes he lays his hands on people whose bodies are broken or crippled in some way and they're made whole again. Sometimes he simply speaks a word.

This time he says, go, show yourself to the priests and as they went, they were healed. At first glance, you might think that he was mocking them or they might have thought that. Sort of like the man with the withered arm, it's all crippled up and Jesus says, stretch forth your hand.

And you can just imagine him saying to himself, what are you doing, mocking me? Can't you see that's my problem? I can't stretch forth my hand.

Don't know if it's ever occurred to you, but I sometimes wonder if Jesus ever saw sickness. He treated the man as if he had no problem. He says, I said, stretch forth your hand.

And the guy begins to respond and finds that as he does so, he's able to. Jesus says to another man, get up and walk. He says, I've been lying here for 38 years.

What, are you making fun of me? I can't get up and walk. But something about this Jesus compelled him to believe, to take the risk of making an utter fool of himself, perhaps hurting himself worse than he's now hurting.

And he rolls over painfully onto those spindly little legs and suddenly finds muscles are supple and strong and he not only stands up and walks, he leaps and dances and picks up his bed on his shoulders and carries it home. This is the creativity of our Lord. He says to these men, go, show yourself to the priests and as they go, they're healed.

May I suggest to you that when Jesus tells you to do something, do it. don't look around don't check out with somebody else don't say I don't see any evidence of it do what he says and watch him bless but the story interestingly enough is not primarily about healing it's primarily about what happened immediately afterward because out of the ten who are healed only one the Samaritan stops dead in his tracks, turns right around and comes back to thank this one who has so blessed him. And I'm interested in the way it puts it.

It says, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He doesn't care who hears him. He doesn't care who laughs at him.

He's going to praise God with a loud voice. Can you see the picture? This leper, this Samaritan leper, right?

And from the point of view of the Jews, all Samaritans are lepers. Comes back, not only thank you, it's not, you know, thank you Jesus, but don't let anybody see it. Praising God at the top of his lungs.

Falls down on his face, praising God, making an absolute spectacle of himself. He's obviously not an Episcopalian Samaritan. We're getting better at that, though, aren't we?

You know. You go into some churches around the country and you say, Lift up your hearts! And with a resounding answer they say, We lift them up unto the Lord.

The rest of the liturgy goes on, Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God. and what you say is, it is good to give Him thanks and praise. I wonder if you always believe that.

It's good to give Him thanks and praise. Our whole service this morning is just shouting the praises of God. Did you feel that as it was unfolding?

We were singing the Jubilati which says, come into His courts with thanksgiving. Go into His gates with thanksgiving, into His courts with praise. That's the only way you get close to Him.

Do you know that? You can stay out in the vestibule if you like and watch. If you want to come in, you come in with praise.

We repeated a psalm. Praise the Lord. Bless His name.

Let every creature bless His name. Do you know what the word hallelujah means? Literally?

It means hooray for God. That's what we're really saying. So he comes back with a loud voice and praises God.

I don't know if you can find yourself in this little story, but I know I can find myself. How easy it is to ask God for blessing. How easy it is to ask Him to heal this or fix that or repair this.

How easy it is to feel sorry for ourselves. He got more than I did. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.

How seldom we stop to thank him for all that he's already given. You know, the balance ought to be about 80 to 90 percent thanksgiving. And then if you get around to it, you can ask him for something as well.

I took a little experiment some years ago, and you might like to try something like this yourself. I wanted to see if prayer really made any kind of a practical difference. And so all during Lent, I kept a notebook, made a little commitment with myself that every single thing I prayed for, I would write down and keep track of what happened.

And so as I said my prayers, I would write down everything that had come to mind. Everybody I prayed for, Every specific request I made, I just jotted it down. And I didn't look at it again until after Easter.

And then I went back to see what God's track record was. And I was absolutely astonished. One of those requests was a clear and decisive no. Two of them were still ambiguous.

Not all the evidence was in. And out of literally several hundred other specific things, God had answered every single one of them, just as I had asked Him. And the wonder of it was, I didn't even remember that I had asked about half of them.

Can you identify with that? Some of you can. Minnie was reminding us the other day that last time we gave the Life in the Spirit seminar, we were praying that God would give us teachers.

And she stopped to thank God for the teachers that he's given. The whole Truro Continuing Institute. It's brand new.

I didn't even remember we had asked about it. Neil's got a whole teacher training program. Didn't even remember that we had asked about it.

One man, and of all people, a dirty foreign Samaritan, stops to thank God. And Jesus asks a whole series of rhetorical questions. What? Only one?

What about the other nine? Weren't there ten who were cleansed? Where are the other nine?

Was no one found to return and give praise to God except for this foreigner? Is that possible? Is it possible that God's people could receive his blessing and not be thankful?

Is that possible? And then there's an O'Henry ending to the whole thing. I hope you caught it.

This guy's still laying on his face. And Jesus says, come on, get up, rise, go your way. Your faith has made you well.

Oh, wait a minute. I thought it said that ten of them were made well. Only one.

Does he address this particular comment too? Was he? Or was he not?

Made well. See, what Jesus is saying is your faith has touched something far deeper than your physical healing. The word is sozo, and what it really means is you've been made whole.

You've been made complete. You've been made sound. How many of you know that there's something more important than the healing of your body?

As important as that is, one man was made completely well. The others got their bodies taken care of. You catch what Jesus is saying?

Where was his faith? It was not, in this instance, in his receiving. That had already taken place.

His faith was in his praising. And because he knew how to praise, he was made whole. he was made sound.

Scripture says in everything give thanks. In everything, whether you're healed or whether you're not, in everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. When my father was first badly afflicted with multiple sclerosis and hospitalized, I went to visit him one day with Peter Marshall.

And Peter came in and he said this to my dad. He said, John, I believe that God wants to heal you. God never did heal his body.

Peter said, I believe God wants to heal you, but whether he does heal your body or not, he's more interested in you. And he doesn't want you to just go on being the same person that you've been, living the same kind of a life, he wants you to belong to him and become a new person in him. Dad's illness got worse and worse and worse and worse and he finally died.

But from that moment on, he counted that day as the day when Jesus Christ had come into his life and made a difference. And shortly before he died, he said, you know, I have been healed. so my body hasn't I wish it were so God has used my illness to bring me to Christ and I've got to tell you it's worth it he said and I've got all eternity to live in his presence with a body that works right I wouldn't have missed it for anything let's bow our heads Lord Jesus Christ we would thank you this morning that in your love you reach out to the outcasts to the despised and rejected to harlots and tax collectors to lepers and Samaritans and to me.

Thank you that your love would make me whole as I learn to praise you. Lord, open my lips that my mouth might show forth your praise. I would say hallelujah to you.

Hooray for God. Hallelujah to you. Be exalted.

Be exalted, Lord Christ. Amen.