Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

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

Today, 10 men are healed! Alleluia! The Gospel celebrates with these men and celebrates the power of Jesus Christ to heal! It’s a miracle!

I can confidently say that is most certainly true! It is a miracle!

But even this wonderful, miracle and the hope that Jesus can, will and does perform more miracles, all on its own feels hollow on this Sunday morning…

I mean, yes, we can cling to a promise that Jesus heals… It’s hopeful and that is wonderful. But, I know, just as well as all of you, that our world seems to be in more turmoil now than it’s been in for a long time. Our fellow human beings around the world and even in this country, are being used and dehumanized ruthlessly as political ploys in order for some powerful few to look more powerful.  

This past Thursday, 49 of 65 synodical bishops in the ELCA, including our own New England Synod Bishop Nathan Pipho, published an open letter saying, “We are living in a time when vulnerable communities are being scapegoated and attacked. […] These assaults on our siblings are not political abstractions – they are deep wounds in the body of Christ.”

To my knowledge, the conference of bishops has never published such a strongly worded letter.

In the midst of this turmoil, Jesus is our great hope for healing. And yet, each day, even our own government is encouraging and becoming more violence towards our fellow human beings. And as 49 Bishops have indicated with their letter saying further, “Our faith compels us to stand where Jesus stands – with and for those whom society often seeks to exclude, erase, or diminish.”

I stand here in this pulpit, crying out to Jesus for healing of our wounded relationships; I cry out for healing of those harmed by government actions here and around the world, and a healing of our divisions.

And, on a more micro level, here at St. Matthew - we have beloved members of this parish who are in deep need of restored health to their bodies… there are members of this church here in Avon who desperately need healing right now. Again, I stand in this pulpit crying out to Jesus for his healing power. Come Lord Jesus, come.

As I cry to Jesus, I affirm that I do believe in Jesus’s power to heal, yet, I don’t think that truth is the full truth of this Gospel text today. Because, it doesn’t feel like the fullness of the Good News is being gifted to us in just proclaiming the truth of one miracle.

As Martin Luther said in a sermon in 1522 on Jesus’s performance of miracles, the miracle itself is “a temporary sign” that points to the eternal promise of the Gospel.

In other words, in every instance of Jesus performing a healing miracle, the miracle is a sign that points towards God’s Promise that all will be healed throughout God’s creation. It points us toward the fact that God is present in the healing and meets us with healing in the places of hurt, sickness, harm, and terror.

In the text today, Jesus – Emanuel, which means God With Us - showed up and noticed 10 sick men and then he took action to heal them. In the midst of their experience of life on the outskirts of society because of their illness, in the midst of their begging for subsistence, in the midst of their life lived on the margin, Jesus noticed.

So, in the midst of our turmoil, pain, sickness, evil and even death, perhaps the Good News that Jesus’s healing miracle points to and that we can cling to is that God shows up in those places of turmoil, sickness, evil and death. The miracle in our story points us toward God who went to the place of sickness. It tells us that God is there in that place with us.  

God sees you. God has acted in your life in your baptism and God acts in your life when you come and eat of this bread and drink from this cup. God is indeed so close to you that God is inside you and you remember that when you eat the sacrament. You have been washed and are greeted as a child of God. God is here with you. God gives you every good gift whether that is a huge miracle-sized gift or a tiny little gift. God gave us Jesus to see that God knows us, acts alongside of us and understands what it means to live a human life in this world that can so often feel dark, lonely, unforgiving and even at times evil. God shows up in those places.

And then one of the healed men turned back to Jesus, giving great thanks and praise to God and to Jesus for the gift of his health. He realized that God had showed up and so he prostrated himself on the ground, with this face in the dirt giving deep thanks and praise!

And you know, we come to this church every Sunday and we sing “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give our thanks and praise. It is indeed right, our duty and our joy, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks and praise to you, almighty and merciful God through our savior Jesus Christ…” 

To be grateful for the ways in which God is with us through the Sacraments and the Word, in both the big and the little moments of life, transforms our lives into ones that center God and God’s salvation promises of life, health, forgiveness, justice, and redemption.

And when our lives are centered on those God-given things then we become people unable to see other people as our enemy. In the eyes of God, it is a perpetual lie when someone tells us we have neighbors who are enemies. Because we know that God shows up to the enemy, and forgives. We know that God shows up to the broken or fractured relationship and heals.

This is the Gospel to which we cling.

In giving our loud thanks and praise to God, centering God in our life, being joyful and full of song for God, and for seeing God’s creation and all people within it as God’s very goodness, we take the power away from those who are working to make us afraid because we don’t allow them to make us into enemies of each other because we know God’s truth is that all people are Children of God.

We know through this Gospel that God shows up into the brokenness and heals. Let us give our thanks and praise.

Amen.  

Rev. Ryan | October 12, 2025