Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the Holy Gospel reading which was just read.

Dear friends in Christ, today's Gospel reading is also appointed to be read when the Church celebrates a Day of Thanksgiving, and so you can see why we read it every year on our National Day of Thanksgiving in November. The Samaritan leper falls on his face at Jesus' feet and gives Him thanks for the miraculous healing He had done. In the original Greek of this story, the word we translate as "giving thanks" is eucharistwn. That should sound a little familiar because another name for the Lord's Supper is the Eucharist, which means "thanksgiving." In the early days of the Christian Church, the name Eucharist was the most common way of referring to the Sacrament of the Altar.

There are two basic reasons why this title Eucharist caught on. First, when Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, we are told that He gave thanks before He distributed the bread and wine that were His true body and blood. So the Greek-speaking Christian Churches would have heard the word eucharistesas every time they celebrated the Lord's Supper, and it became a shorthand way of talking about the whole event. The second reason the early Church called it Eucharist is because when Christians celebrate the Communion liturgy and receive the Lord's Supper, it is a way that they show Jesus their faith in His sacrifice for their sins along with their thanksgiving to Him for salvation. So for centuries the Eucharist has been recognized as the time for the faithful to receive Christ's true body and blood and as an opportunity to give thanks to Him for all His blessings to us. Today I want to show how the example of the Samaritan leper should lead us to the Holy Eucharist.

We don't know how those ten lepers heard about Jesus, but the news about His powerful works had gotten around. Jesus was along the border between Samaria and Galilee, so He had spent quite a bit of time in that region over the years. When Jesus entered the village, the lepers stood far off because they weren't allowed near healthy people. Being a leper was not only uncomfortable, but meant that you were a social outcast. These ten were out of options. Perhaps they had heard that Jesus was a man blessed by God with healing powers, so they called out to Him asking for mercy.

As we have seen time and again, Jesus responds to pleas for mercy with compassion, and He tells the lepers to go to Jerusalem to show themselves to the priests, with the implication that they would be clean by the time they got there (if you were unclean with leprosy, the Old Testament Law forbade you from going into the Temple, but once you were cleansed of a skin disease you would go show yourself to the priests for ceremonial cleansing). The lepers all took Jesus at His Word, and sure enough, along the way they were all cleansed of their leprosy, healed of their illness.

At this point, we only hear about the reaction of one of the lepers, but I think it's safe to assume that they were all ecstatic. If you have ever had a serious illness and eventually got better, you can relate somewhat to their relief and happiness of feeling better. Surely all ten of the men began praising God for His goodness, but nine of them continued on the way to the Jerusalem temple (just as Jesus had told them to do), where they would have gone to the priests for the appropriate ritual cleansing and sacrifices. And it seems that these nine lepers were Jews, so they would have recognized that the Temple was God's Old Testament location for worship and praise, and surely they would have given thanks to God for sending this mighty prophet Jesus to heal them.

But what the nine lepers didn't get, and what the one Samaritan leper did realize, was that the location for worshiping, thanking, and praising God had shifted away from Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit worked faith in that foreign leper's heart and moved him to turn around and head back to Jesus, all the while proclaiming the goodness of God who had healed him, and when the Samaritan got back to Jesus, he threw himself into the posture of worship, face down on the ground in front of his Lord, repeating again and again, "Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Oh, thank you, Jesus!"

The first surprise about this event is that it wasn't one of the Jewish lepers who returned to Jesus, but a Samaritan. The Samaritans were hated and looked down on by the Jews, because the Samaritans' ancestors had been former Israelites who had married non-Jews and had rejected a lot of the Old Testament. They only followed the books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy) and wrongly taught that Jerusalem wasn't really the location of God's presence but that worship should be at Mt. Gerizim in Samaria rather than at Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. But in spite of their errors, some of them were expecting God to send a Messiah, a Savior.

We would have expected a Jewish leper to recognize that Jesus was God's Messiah, but this story shows that God often reveals the truth about Jesus in places we don't expect Him to. During Christ's earthly ministry, He was sent specifically to the Jews, and only after His resurrection did He send the apostles out to preach the Gospel to all nations, to the Samaritans and Gentiles. But in today's Gospel reading, Jesus gives a glimpse that under the New Testament being a true child of God wasn't related to Jewish ethnic heritage, but God's house is open to even the hated Samaritans and ultimately Gentiles like us, and our admittance to God's new Temple is through faith in the Temple of Christ's body.

You see, the main point of this story is not to imitate the gratitude of the Samaritan (although we should certainly be grateful to our Lord and show our thanksgiving to Him), but the main point is that we should imitate the Samaritan in finding God in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. The Jewish lepers missed that; they thought God was still residing at the Jerusalem Temple. But the Holy Spirit gave the Samaritan the eyes of faith so that he could see that God's Messiah was not only a man, but also truly God the Son himself. And so the Samaritan bows before God in the flesh to show his faith, and to offer his eucharistia, his thanksgiving to Jesus.

You are all familiar with the Psalm, "Oh, give thanks to the LORD, for He is good," but what the Samaritan leper understood on that day is that "the LORD" is Jesus. Just like Thomas would say after the Resurrection, as he stared at the risen Jesus with the nail marks in His hands and feet and the spear mark in His side—"My Lord and my God!" And as St. Paul said, on the last day, everyone in heaven and earth is going to bow at the feet of Jesus and confess, "Jesus Christ is Lord!" On that day, the Samaritan was giving thanks to the LORD Jesus.

But the response of Jesus to the Samaritan's thanksgiving is surprising. Jesus asks, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" It almost sounds like Jesus is putting the Samaritan down, but that is not the point. Rather, Jesus is disappointed by the unbelief of the nine Jewish lepers, and expresses dismay that they don't "get it." This is a repeated theme in the Gospels and Acts—Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Savior, but Samaritans and Gentiles come to believe in Him. But after Jesus expresses His sadness over this situation, Jesus says the most encouraging thing to the Samaritan: "Rise and go your way; your faith has saved you." He has been saved not just from the physical illness of leprosy, but from eternal damnation for his sins.

For Jesus came not only as a great healer, but as the Divine Savior from sin and everlasting death. God the Son assumed human flesh so that He could bear all our sins, sorrows, and illnesses and go up to Jerusalem and have the Temple of His body hung on the cross. After Christ's death, the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple tore from top to bottom, showing that the old location of God's presence in the world was no longer there, but rather in the flesh and blood of Jesus. On the third day, the Temple of Jesus' body was raised from the dead and He commissioned the apostles to go out and baptize all nations into His body, absolve sinners for the sake of His suffering, death, and resurrection, and to feed believers with the Eucharist, Christ's true body given in death and true blood shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.

And so this is what He has done for you: even though you were a sinful Samaritan, not part of God's people, a foreigner outside the Kingdom of God, the Holy Spirit has called you by the Gospel into faith in Jesus Christ as true God and true Man, your Savior from sin, death, and hell. By Baptism He has brought you into Christ's body, the Christian Church, and has made you a temple of the Holy Spirit. And He has shown you not to seek God out there in the world, but rather to find Him in the flesh and blood of God the Son, Jesus. Yes, the location of New Testament worship is where Jesus has promised to be, right here in our Divine Service: "Where two or three have been gathered together in My name, there am I among them." Of course, He also has promised to be with each of us all the days of our lives, but in the Church He has given us a special location to receive His gifts and also to respond with thanksgiving and praise.

It is easy for us to take for granted the gifts God has given our Church in Word and Sacrament. If you have been raised in the Church, the danger is that sinful familiarity has bred contempt for the astonishing mercy God shows us through preaching, teaching, Baptism, Absolution, and the Eucharist. So we can learn from the Samaritan in today's Gospel reading, that our praise of God should be sincere and exuberant—as the Psalm says, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord"—here in the Divine Service we should join together in loud songs of praise to Christ for the eternal healing He has given to us sinners. As you sing the liturgy again today, notice how much our Divine Service is permeated with prayer, praise, and thanksgiving to the Lord.

And like the Samaritan, we also should be eager to throw ourselves on our faces before Jesus in eucharistia, heartfelt thanksgiving to the One who laid down His body and shed His blood for us. And the only place in the entire world where we can actually receive His true body and true blood in our mouths is in the Eucharist, where Jesus comes to us to feed us with Himself, giving us forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. It would be highest ingratitude to say, "No thanks, Jesus. I don't need what you are offering." But the response of faith is to say, "Lord, I, a poor, miserable sinner humbly bow to receive your precious body and blood, and I offer you the lowly sacrifice of my thanksgiving to you, for all that you have done to save and preserve me."

And to those who have been baptized, absolved, and eucharisted, Jesus says, "Rise, and go your way. Your faith has saved you." He has come to heal you, and now He sends you out to live by faith in Him and love for your neighbor. Jesus didn't rescue the Samaritan from his leprosy so that he could go back to begging as a filthy outcast, but so that he could live a holy life as a follower of Jesus, led by the Holy Spirit. In our Epistle, St. Paul describes the Christian life as one in which we are to crucify the sinful flesh with all its lusts—rejecting sexual immorality, impurity, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, dissension, envy, drunkenness, and all other sins against the Ten Commandments (St. Paul says that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God)—and instead, we must live by repentant faith in Christ, and the fruits of the Spirit's work in our lives by Word and Sacrament will be love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. "Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires," so that they can live grateful lives of faith in Jesus.

Of course, our sinful flesh wars against the Spirit, so the battle must be fought each day of our lives until our Lord takes us to Himself in heaven. That is just one more reason why we Christians desperately need the mercy Christ gives us in Baptism, Absolution, and the Eucharist. And for all you who recognize the guilt your flesh has brought upon you, do not lose heart but take courage that Jesus has died for all your sins, and after showering His forgiveness upon you the Means of Grace, He says to you the same thing He said to the thankful Samaritan: "Rise and go your way; your faith has saved you." In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.