Our Gospel is not just a quaint little story about a nice guy who remembered to write a thank you letter. It is a carefully written tract on Christian healing. Christianity by nature is about healing, healing physical, social, and spiritual disease. We mend broken bodies, broken hearts, and broken spirits, anything that keeps a person from living in God's love.

All ten lepers in our story are physically, socially, and spiritually handicapped. We all know about the physical. We should also be aware lepers were socially handicapped. People thought they were contagious and forced them to live in poverty outside the village away from their families and homes. They were to wear dirty, torn clothing to show who they were. And just in case people did not notice, they had to call out, "Unclean, unclean. I am an unclean person". To meet a leper would be like encountering the homeless in our cities. In spite of ourselves as they reach their hands out to us we draw ours back, fearing touching them might make us unclean.

All ten lepers were also spiritually handicapped. If you were a leper and believed all these regulations were God's law, you soon began to think, "I must be a terrible sinner. If I can contaminate God's people, God could not possibly love me." And before long the leper began to hate himself. All this was especially tragic, because we know now that leprosy was never contagious.

Jesus healed the physical and social handicaps of all ten lepers, only one, a foreign Samaritan, was healed spiritually. His faith opened his eyes to what God was really doing, and this changed his whole life. He saw God never had been condemning him. He realized God is a loving Father who came not to punish but to heal him. When he returned to thank God, Jesus said he got it "Your faith has made you completely well". I think his life became our song, "Every blessing you pour out, I'll turn back to praise". He learned the most basic Christian insight, "We all receive far more than we can ever give".

I am sure his faith in a compassionate God made him a compassionate and generous person as well. I can not imagine he would ever again regard lepers as socially or spiritually unclean. I can not be so sure I can say that about the other nine. They seemed to quickly have rejoined respectable society with all its regulations. I am inclined to think they probably continued to think all lepers were dangers to society.

The Bible claims Christians continually thank God whatever their situation even though their society regarded them as socially and spiritually unclean. Remember the Romans branded us atheists who undermined law and order. Remember we were the poor and the slave. Yet we were to give thanks because God had healed us.

We continue to thank God today, and part of our thanksgiving is to overcome the stigmata our society continues to place on some people. When I entered the ministry "social handicapped children" was a legal term to designate certain children who had to be separated from the rest of society. They were treated as lepers. Does anyone here remember who a socially handicapped child was?

Let me give you a clue. Back in 1965 socially handicapped children could not be put up for adopted even though they were abandoned or orphaned. ..They were children of an interracial sexual union. Adoption agencies could not put for adopted children whose parents were of two different races. It is hard for us to believe this kind of label was ever used. One of the things we can be thankful for is that Lutheran Social Services was among the pioneers who first put up interracial children for adoption and an interracial couple from St. James was one of the first to enter the program.

Of course, our society still treats some people as socially handicapped even though it might not use the term. We treat them as if they were unclean and act as if they could contaminate us. We already mentioned the homeless, but there are also welfare recipients, the addicted, the mentally ill, the obese, Aids victims, gays and lesbians. I am sure you can add others.

The tragedy of this is that anytime we label or treat a person as if they were socially handicapped, we tempt them to see themselves the same way as lepers did: They begin to think they are unlovable. They begin to hate themselves. This results in terrible situations such as gay pastors standing in Lutheran pulpits slamming homosexuals as abominations.

As Christians who get it, we must constantly work to care for and heal anyone who is labeled physically, socially, or spiritually unclean. It is always difficult. But we must begin with ourselves. And we must begin around our Communion table. When asked to describe good Christian worship, Martin Luther pointed to the leper who returned to give thanks. That is why the proper name for our Communion meal is "The Thanksgiving" and that is why we work hard to make our meal joyful and exciting and why we make sure no one is left out.

Let me suggest a way we could demonstrate that tonight when we pray the Lord's Prayer. One of the Roman Catholic traditions is to hold your hands out palms up as you offer that payer. One time I was on retreat at a Benedictine monastery I noticed that people were just naturally holding each other's hands as they extended them in prayer. They were reaching out instinctively to join with each other even with people they would not normally touch, as they prayed to the Father in the Spirit through the Son. I suggest we do that tonight as a sign that God has healed us all physically, socially, and spiritually. No one has to move around much, but we want to make sure nobody is left alone.