An Outlier of Gratitude
This year, my mother and I spent the first two weeks of November in Thailand. It is the country where I was raised and the country where Mom and Dad served the Lord for many decades. We went to participate in the one hundredth anniversary celebration of McKean Rehabilitation Institute in Chiangmai. In the early days of the last century, Dr. John McKean, a medical missionary to Thailand, established a place on an island in the middle of the river for the isolation and treatment of leprosy patients. Over the years, many medical missionaries have worked with leprosy patients in that setting, several miles outside of the city walls. As recently as just one hundred years ago, those who contracted leprosy were still sent away by their families to live apart from society, like the lepers in our story today.
We now know that ninety-six percent (96%) of the population has a natural immunity to Hansen’s disease or leprosy. For those who contract it, there are now drugs that can halt the progress of the disease and allow those who have received treatment to be mainstreamed back into society. Unfortunately, today, just as it was centuries ago, the disease still has the ability to disfigure and cripple its victims and those who contract the disease still deal with the stigma of that disease.
In 2002, Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for the “The New Yorker” magazine, wrote a book entitled “The Tipping Point” about little things that can make a big difference in the behavior of groups of people. Then, in 2005, he wrote a second book called “Blink” which focused upon the power of gut reactions in the decisions that people make. Last week, his third book entitled “Outliers” was published. Outliers examines the lives of phenomenally successful people in an effort to discover why they are different from the rest of us. In statistical terms, an outlier is a point of data that is outside the norm and does not fit the pattern established by the rest of the data. Those of us who have done statistical studies know that outliers in our data have to be explained. The topic is so important that the definitive textbook on the subject… a six-hundred-and-four page tome… sells for more than two hundred dollars on Amazon.com. By contrast, Malcolm Gladwell’s intriguing three-hundred-and-twenty page book is only $16.79 from the same source. It’s much easier to read, too.
Why are outliers so important? Because they are different… and we have an insatiable curiosity about anything that is different. The leper in our story today is an outlier… in so many ways. In the first place, he contracted leprosy… a disease that 96% of us cannot catch. Secondly, he was a Samaritan living among Jews. Perhaps, they were all so far down on the social totem pole that it did not matter any more who was a Jew or who was a Samaritan. They were all outcasts.
It was no surprise that Jesus encountered these ten lepers outside of the city. They weren’t allowed inside the city. What is surprising is that these lepers called out to Jesus to have mercy on them. Usually, they just called out “unclean, unclean” to those who ventured too near. But, perhaps, since Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem at the end of his ministry, they had heard of his power to heal the sick… and some of the other nontraditional things he did may have given them hope that he might talk to them. The story never says that Jesus went over to them, nor does it say that he touched any of them. He simply told them to go and show themselves to the priest. That must have confused them, for they could see that they had not been healed. But these lepers had nothing to lose by going to the priest… they had already lost everything they had… their homes… families… friends… the ability to earn a living… even the ability to worship at the temple. They weren’t welcomed anywhere. So, they went to find the priest… and as they were going, they were healed. Every sign of their disease disappeared.
Now, we never see nine of these men again. What happened to the nine? We don’t know. We assume that they showed themselves to the priest at the temple and then went home to their families. But remember, one of these men was a Samaritan. The Samaritans were so hated by the Jews that they were not even allowed to worship in the same place as the Jews. This man could not go to the temple that the others went to… he had to go find his own priest… in his own country. He had further to go… but he came back. Of the ten who were healed, he was the only one who came back. He came back, praising God in a loud voice… and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet and thanked him.
Oh, yes, he was different… definitely an outlier. I have called this man an “outlier of gratitude”… for he was the only one who showed gratitude for the gift he had received. His actions were not the norm for that group… he was very different. Yet, to this day, he is remembered for exactly that… for being different. Now, let me share with you how different from the norm this man truly was. When you have time, pick up your Bible and look for the words “grateful” or “gratitude” in the four gospels. You will not find those words in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Look for the words “thanks” or “thanksgiving” and you will only find them in the gospels when Jesus is giving thanks to God. Look for the word “thanked” and our scripture today is the only reference from the four gospels using that word. Then, look for the words “praise”, “praising”, “praised” or “praiseworthy” and you will only find one instance where a form of this word is used in the gospel of Matthew and seven times where it is used in the gospel of Luke. Apparently, giving thanks, being grateful, or praising God was not a common practice in Jesus’ day. So, it makes me wonder whether it is a common practice for us today.
This year, it seems as if there is not much for which we can be thankful. The economy is sliding south so quickly that the graphs look like giant slalom ski jumps. It all began with a mortgage crisis and endless foreclosures. That was followed by banks closing… some of which were major names in financial circles… “solid” companies. And then, it all just seemed to snowball. We all know friends or family members who have lost their jobs… or lost their homes… or are afraid to answer the telephone for fear there will be bad news. The unemployment rate is climbing at a scary pace... as are inventories of everything. Retirement funds have lost half of their value. Businesses are collapsing… and taking people’s pensions with them. And no one knows when this downward spiral will stop.
So, perhaps this is not the year to be thankful, but a year to drape our homes in black and wait for the End Times… what with natural disasters adding tragedy to the economic news of the day. But, for some reason, those of us who are here today made a different choice. We decided to come to this Community Thanksgiving Service… and to sing praise to God. In doing so, we have a lot in common with our forefathers.
You see, when the pilgrims and the Native Americans sat down together to share that first Thanksgiving meal in 1621, there wasn’t much to be thankful for then either. The little pilgrim band did not have a single family among them who had not suffered loss during that first year. In fact, less than half of those who landed on Plymouth Rock were still alive. It had been a brutal year. Why be thankful?
The same is true of the year that Abraham Lincoln issued the Thanksgiving Day Proclamation. In 1863, this county was still fighting a devastating war that had pitted brother against brother. The bloodiest war in our nation’s history at that time had left a nation of grieving parents and destitute widows in its wake. And there was no end in sight. Why be thankful?
Yet, in both cases, people deliberately came together… not to whine or complain… but to praise God… as we do today. What brings us together? Our faith… what the book of Hebrews calls “the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” For what we know is that we have a God who has been faithful to his people for generations… a God we believe will be faithful to this generation of people as well. We who sit here know that we have been blessed. We know that our lives are filled with the evidence of God’s love and care for us. The story is told of a man who went on a mission trip to a Third World country. He returned just time for his community’s Thanksgiving Service. While he was normally a quiet and reserved man, people noticed that he was particularly enthusiastic in his praise and his singing at this service. Afterwards, they asked him about it. “What’s not to be thankful for?” he asked them. “We have air conditioning that works… cars that run… and toilets that flush! What more do we need??”
And beyond that, we have food to eat… shelter from the cold… family and friends to surround us with love… and we live in a country where we are free to worship our God openly and often! When was the last time that we fell to our knees to thank our Savior for all that he has given to us? I hope when someone records the “gospel” of these days, the book will overflow with references to “grateful” and “gratitude”… to “thanks” and “thanksgiving”, to “praise” and “praises” for our God is worthy of praise… not just today, but every day of our lives. Amen.
Luke 17:11-19