The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity – Pr. Anderson sermon
St. Luke 17:11-19 “Pray, Praise, and Give Thanks”
September 6, 2026 | Christ Lutheran Church
In Nomine Iesu
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Lord God, heavenly Father, by Your blessed Word and Your holy Baptism You have mercifully cleansed all who believe from the fearful leprosy of sin, and You daily grant us Your gracious help in all our need: We beseech You so to enlighten our hearts by Your Holy Spirit, that we may never forget these Your blessings, but ever live in Your fear, and, trusting fully in Your grace, with thankful hearts continually praise and glorify You; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one true God, now and forever. Amen. (Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary, by Veit Dietrich, p. 161)
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. (Rom. 1:7, etc.)
The sermon text for today is taken from the 17th chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. We read selected verses in Jesus’ name:
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan.
Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And He said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”
These are Your words, heavenly Father. Sanctify us by Your truth, Your Word is truth. Amen. (Joh. 17:17)
In Christ Jesus, who reveals to us how we give true thanks, for it is thanks that comes from true faith, and faith given because of His holiness, dear fellow redeemed:
As we go out into the world and as we know the reason we come back, there are times where we share a smile even when the situation, we are up against isn’t a happy one. Well, you are gathered here today because you know the main reason you can smile when you might not even feel like smiling. You smile because of the message of the Gospel, the message of your Savior who has died to take away your sins. Who has given you eternal life to live with Him forever and ever with all of these problems gone and ended. So, knowing God is taking care of you, why else do you leave here with a smile? We have a rich Lutheran heritage and, in that heritage, we can find our smiles coming out of the black book we have in our pews. We have a very special Hymnary where we join with Christians in history, letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God (Colossians 3:16). Look how we are tied together with this verse of our chief hymn from the Reformation. Now thank we all our God With heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things hath done, In whom His world rejoices, Who from our mother’s arms Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love And still is ours today (ELH 63 v.1 ). Pray, praise, and give thanks for His love is still yours today.
Now there will be days where this is easier said than done. As we learn Scripture and hymns that bring smiles to our faces, there will be a struggle to keep them at the forefront. Most of the time, it is the bad and icky stuff that sits out in front of us or it sticks to us. This substance comes in all different forms. For some as we have been praying in church, and as we now see in our text, it is physically attached to us. For us to even dream of the physical ailments leaving us, we have to have our bodies inspected. For the people in Jesus’ day, they must be examined by a priest, if found clean, then they must make an offering, and then they can return home. While we are able to go to doctors, it was not the same in Jesus’ day. Depending on the illness and what we see in the Old Testament, the ailment of leprosy, you lived outside of the community to not get anyone else infected. You had to stay there until you were healed, but back then, most of the time it wouldn’t heal.
While the law required separation, and even now we know how important it is when we are sick to try and stay home to try and not get anyone else sick, the social anxiety to be completely cast out of your home to live away from everyone you love is hard to bear. And as we learned last week, the casting out didn’t just happen with serious illness. Other people were sent away as the Jews despised the Samaritans because of historic betrayals and heretical beliefs. Jesus on His way to Jerusalem only sees one group and that is a group of ten who are in need of help. Jesus helped them, and the response wasn’t the expected response. Ingratitude is the response of the majority. Being that He had performed a miracle, before we jump and say that we would all be like the one man who pray, praised, and gave thanks, the opposite of what is expected is what happens in God’s kingdom. The apostles were told to not expect thanks, right before this miracle. “Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty'” (Luke 17:7-10).
Knowing how sometimes it hurts when we don’t hear gratitude for something we did, our text reveals Jesus’ lamenting. For this miracle didn’t see one person healed. Ten men who were on the outskirts of society with leprosy were all healed and only one came back. And what did that man do? He did something we are all reminded to do. God wants us to thank him and give him glory for any blessings we receive from him. For the record, these men did demonstrate a positive thing. They had faith because of what they had heard. They had faith Jesus could heal them without being near them. As they cried out, our cries should be the same. When we review this text, how is our faith in the Christ who is still near us? Do we at times think that He is too far away? Have our prayers, praise, and thanks escaped our thoughts? If our answers are sometimes, we have believed this, well we aren’t the only ones of history to have done it and we won’t be the last. While we have our struggles and know the majority of all people look to forsake the Helper, our warning and hope comes from the Lord as Jeremiah prophesied, O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you shall be put to shame; those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living water. Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for you are my praise (Jeremiah 17:13-14).
Jeremiah knew the Lord is the one who helps. Having recognized the Lord, He was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” These are the same words that are being used to seek help from the Lord, the God of the world. You used these words, “have mercy,” as they have been adopted in the Church’s liturgy for two ways. They are used as we used them today as being penitential and a cry for salvation. Then they will be used in two weeks as an intercession. A prayer that is pleasing to God. A prayer that is answered by God with physical results as a loud voice begins to give his praise from a distance. And beginning the praise as with the ask for mercy doesn’t just stay out and away from your Lord. You see the man as he praises God at Jesus’ feet. Jesus commends the faith of a Samaritan leper who alone gives thanks for his healing. A Samaritan who knows the thoughts of his neighbors, knows who Jesus is, and he doesn’t hesitate because he sees the miracle that Jesus has done. He sees his leprosy cured.
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. This was a continuous action. It is a well-deserved continuous action for this Samaritan knows it is a big deal for Jesus to heal him. He knows he is considered an outsider. He knows that on a social level, Jesus shouldn’t want anything to do with him and he knows on a spiritual level Jesus shouldn’t want anything to do with him. The miracle reveals the exact opposite of what most people think should happen. Instead of the expected, Jesus knows how things will turn out when He responds, “Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” He knows how things will go because of who He is. This verse reveals the reason the nine should have returned. Jesus is God. He deserves all thanks and glory. Not only does He have the power to take away diseases that will cause a physical death, but in their healing which took place for all of them, it reveals He has the power to save from spiritual death. They are shown by the Samaritan that true faith gives thanks to the one who brings salvation. For faith is active in worship and in living.
And as you look for your faith to be on display through prayer, praise, and giving thanks, you can rest, knowing your faith is also heard in your cries. And it is heard in this kind of cry, not the cry for cleansing, but this cry for mercy. In the peoples cry for mercy that has been witnessed since the fall, along with this cry is the theme of salvation. And this theme gives rise to worship. And what promotes in you as hymns of thanks is that this miracle is the sign of the messianic age. Christ has come, Christ is still here, and He will come again. And here you are experiencing true worship which witnesses those who are infected with sin called back to praise God with a loud voice. The Law shows you how to be clean. If you are pure, you will call upon God’s name, pray, praise, and give thanks. And how do you know you are pure? You only know whether you are pure through the hearing of God’s Word. Therefore, you can only give thanks through the hearing of God’s Word.
In His Word you hear Jesus tell you He has cleansed you. John writes, But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). Through the cross, your eyes that are able to see your hope for your very sight is a metaphor to seeing God’s salvation in Jesus. And your prayers, praise, and thanks go up in this salvation because as you see all of the laws of Leviticus, Jesus supersedes the Old Testament holiness code with his own holiness. His holiness is based on His own person as the sinless Son of God who came down to die for your sins, making you pure and holy. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise (Galatians 3:27-29).
Since there is no distinction now about who you are in Christ Jesus, your joy and smiles through the week are from hearing your Savior and sharing His Word with others saying, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” This is not even the first time Jesus has told this to an “outsider” as He told those whom He had driven demons out to “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you” (Luke 8:39). Because of what God has done for the world, He continues to daily have His mercy extend to the unworthy, which includes you. And because of your failings, He gives you His thanks in mercy. The giving of thanks that is found in His church with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Where you come and kneel before the presence of the crucified and risen Christ, who like the Samaritan, is saved through faith. This is the King in His church. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure (1 John 3:3). And with the new and created pure heart, in giving prayer, praise, and thanks to Him, who bore no grudge toward you but came to save you, you can sing, All praise and thanks to God The Father now be given, The Son, and Him who reigns With them in highest heaven, The one eternal God, Whom earth and heav’n adore! For thus it was, is now, And shall be evermore (ELH 63 v. 3). Amen.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, forevermore. Amen.
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