The Gospel of Luke 17:12-19

At that time, as Jesus entered a village, He was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When He saw them He said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. 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’s feet, giving Him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then said Jesus: “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.”

This is an interesting story that we are faced with.  We see the Ten Lepers standing at a distance and asking Jesus for Mercy upon them.  They obviously have heard about Jesus, or they see something in His that the recognize as holiness, either way they call out to him for mercy.

We do the same.  In each Liturgy that we celebrate we ask for mercy after each line of the litanies that we say.  More than 100 times we sing, Lord Have Mercy, as we are asking for the mercy of God in all situations.  When we pray, we pray that what is in God’s will is what is granted.  It may not always be what we want, but if we are walking in God’s will it should be.

Notice also, that they call to Him from a distance.  They have leprosy and because of that illness they are not allowed to mingle with people.  They have to stay away in order to keep the illness from spreading, they are cut off, just like we are when we sin.  We are cut off from God and from the community.

When they call to Him, He simply tells them to go and show themselves to the Priest.  This was how a person was to become ritually cleaned from their illness.  Notice, he does not heal them, touch them, or anything, just tells them to obey the law.  On the way they realize they have been healed.  Imagine, they have suffered with this illness for a long time, we guess anyway, and as they are walking to the priest, they are healed.  This amazing thing takes place that restores them, not only physically, but spiritually and returns them to the community.  Do they all go back to say thank you, no, only one returns, and Scripture tells us he is a Samaritan.

It is the same with us and our spiritual illness.  We all need the healing power that come from God through the Sacramental life of the His Church.  We come to confession, and ask God to have mercy on us.  The priest, acting on behalf of God and the community, pronounces the absolution and restores us to spiritual health and back to the community.  But are we thankful?

Christ has come to heal a fallen humanity.  He has come to restore us to our former glory but only a small portion will recognize Him and return to Him.  In our secular world we have lost sight of what is really important.  Are we like the nine who have been healed but do not turn back to worship the God that has healed us?

The man who returns “fell down on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks” but he was the only one.  Jesus asks, “Were not ten cleansed?”  Then He says to the man, “arise, go your way, Your faith has made you well.”  It is at the point of the man’s worship that his healing actually takes place.  It is the same with us.

Worship, or thanksgiving, is a corporate activity and through the prayers that we say, and the Sacramental life of the Church we find the healing that need, the spiritual healing, and perhaps the physical healing as well.  The Church is the hospital for the soul and should be the first priority of the Orthodox Christian to come to worship and to give thanks to God for the many blessings that have been bestowed upon us.

We come to worship, and ask for God’s mercy, do we take them time each day to turn back, fall on our face, and thank Him for the mercy that He shows us?  Are we the one, or are we the nine?

We all have gifts.  Some of the are physical gifts like the ability to throw a baseball at 90 mph, and some of them are mental, like curing some rare illness.  But what of our spiritual gifts?  The greatest sports figures spend hours honing their craft so they can be the best at whatever it is.  Some of us spend hours on the golf course working on our drive or on out putt, some of us need to spend more time doing that!  The great thinkers of the world, and yes they still exists, spend hours upon hours just thinking about things and trying to find out how things work.  So again I ask, what of our spiritual gifts?

In his first Epistle, St. Peter writes, “… you also, living stones, are being built upon a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”  He is speaking about all of us; we are all priests and take part in the Royal Priesthood of Jesus Christ.  Our job is to offer up spiritual sacrifices that will become acceptable to God.  We all have a part to play in the ministry of the Church the task before us is to find what the role is.

In today’s Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul writes that, “He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.”  He lays out the roles in the Church, for leaders in the Church, and for the regular folk as well.  He goes on to say that this is done for the, “equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.”  Just as St. Peter pointed out, so now St. Paul points out.

On the day of our Chrismation, when the Holy spirit came upon us, and confirmed our call to be a child of God, we were given gifts.  We all have them we just need to find what they are.  This can be a most difficult task, to discern what gifts we have and what our place should be in the Church.  We have to actively seek out what these gifts are.  We seek these gifts through prayer and direction from those who have come before us.  We are charged with “equipping the saints” and in order to do that we need to be equipped ourselves.

In the Church we often speak of the three T’s; Time, Talent, and Treasure, well we often speak of the treasure one more than the others, and that is something we need to change.  We cannot focus all of our time and energy on money, we cannot continue to build larger barns to store our treasure in if we have no one to share it with!

We have not often spoken about the Biblical concept of tithing.  This is the concept that Jesus often speaks of, and the Apostles take it up from Him, where we are commanded to give 10 percent, off the top, of our time, talent, and treasure to God.  Again this gets skewed toward the treasure part and we forget about the others.

Time, time is something that most people do not seem to have enough of.  In the olden days it seemed there was much more time to things.  The founders of this Church, for example, would work long hard days and then come there and build the Church.  They would spend hours here physically building the Church after working very physically demanding jobs.  When the Church was open, they would be here.  Many of you have told me stories of being dragged here for some service or another.  They made time for what was important.

Are there less hours in the day today then there were when the founders were here?  Did the calendar somehow change and make less than 24 hours in the day or 365 days in the year?  There must be since we seem to run out of time.  They concentrated on what was important.

A recent survey showed that people who attend church on a regular basis spend less than one percent of their time engaged in some sort of spiritual matters.  I am not just talking about coming to church, but on any spiritual matters.  In the course of the seven days of the week, there are 168 hours.  If we come to church each Sunday, then we spend approximately 2 of those 168 hours in Church.  Now I am not that great at math but that would seem like less than ten percent.  We spend more time eating then we do on spiritual matters!

Are you giving 10 percent of your time to God?

Talent, talent can be looked at the same way as time.  What talents do you have and are you giving ten percent of them to God?  Not just paying them lip service, but really and truly giving them to God.  The basic talent that all Christians have is the ability to pray, this ties in with time by the way.  If we spent ten percent of the day in prayer imagine what this world, and our lives, would be like.  Each week I put names in the bulletin of people who are on our prayer list.  Not a day goes by that I do not get asked to pray for someone, either by one of you, a friend of mine, or on the email.  Part of our daily prayer time, and I hope we all have a daily prayer time, should be spent praying for people by name.  Praying for people is something we call can do, it requires no special skills at all.  But what of other talents that we might have, are we using them to build the kingdom of God?

Are you giving 10 percent of your talent to God?

Treasure, we have spoken of this many times before.  We all give, what we can, out of what we have, to God through the Church.  The reality is we need money to keep the doors open and it is not getting any cheaper to do so.  But we cannot simply focus on this aspect of the 3 T’s we need a balance approach to our spiritual lives.  Remember, it is not “well I give 10% of my income to the church so I am good.”  No, we are required to give ten percent of the 3 T’s not just one or two but all three.

The goal of our spiritual life is to enable us to uncover and unlock our potential.  On the day of our Chrismation we were placed on the road that should enable us to do just that, discover our potential and then chart the course to unlock that and put it into action.  What good is something if we never use it for what it is intended to be used for?

God has given us all gifts, God has given us all talents, and God has given us all treasure.  The time has come that we all unlock the potential that we all have and put it to use for the building of the kingdom.  The founders left us a physical home of brick and mortar, now we have to build the spiritual home or prayer and worship.

The Gospel of Matthew 3:13-17

At that time, Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Today we celebrate one of the 12 great feats of the Church year, the feast of the Holy Theophany.

We read in the Tradition of the Church the about His 30^th year Jesus came to the Jordan to meet his cousin John the Baptist to be Baptized by John in the Jordan.  At first John objects to baptizing Jesus by telling him that he needed to be baptized by John.  But in the end John did baptize Jesus.

Jesus did not need purification in the waters of the Jordan but by doing this he made the purification of humanity His own.  In the action of His baptism He would wash away our sin, grant us regeneration and He would reveal the mystery of the Holy Trinity.  Jesus needed to be baptized, not in the same way that we need to be baptized, but to fulfill the righteous plan of salvation.

We heard in the reading from Genesis, at the Vespers service last night, that when God created the world the world was formless and covered in water.  Water is the first or primal element.  We humans are made up mostly of water and we need water, more than food, to survive.  When Jesus steps into the water He not only sanctifies the waters of the Jordan but he sanctifies all water and thus all of creation.  In the prayers that we will read when we bless this water, this will become all the more clear to us.

In that same reading last night we heard the story of creation and how the Spirit hovered over the water.  Now we see the Spirit come in the form of a Dove to anoint the one chosen by God, the Messiah, at the beginning of the New Creation.  Jesus does not become the Son of God on this day rather He is revealed to all as the Son of God, the Spirit has always rested on Him but on this day, the Holy Trinity is made manifest to the world.

At the Vespers service we read from Exodus, the story of the release of captivity of Israelites from the captivity of the Egyptians.  We read how they fled into the wilderness and were pursued by Pharaoh and his great army.  They were back up against the Red Sea with no escape, and God spoke to Moses and told him to raise his staff and the waters would part.  He did as God directed and the Israelites were able to walk “dry shod” through the sea to safety, but those who pursued them, those who were mired in their sins, did not make it as the water came back to engulf them.

The waters of the Red Sea saved those whom God had chosen, had freed them from their sins and their human captivity, their sin, or their captives, were left behind in that water and the people rose out of that water as a new people, a Holy Nation, freed from the captivity.  In the same way when we were lowered into the water of Baptism we were freed from what hold us to the earth.  Jesus sanctified the waters of the filthy world, as St. Gregory of Nyssa writes, and rose out purifying the entire creation.  As we rise from the waters of baptism, we rise as new creations.

This purification is foretold in the Prophet Isaiah, “Come now, let us set things right, says the Lord: Though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow; though they become crimson red, they may become white as wool!”

Through the ministry of Jesus we see the opening of the gates of heaven. Christ standing in the Jordan is Christ standing before the gates of paradise and Hades. In the icons of Christ’s Baptism, the gates of Hades lie beneath His feet we hear in the hymns of Vespers:

When You bowed Your head to the Forerunner, You crushed the heads of dragons; and when you stood in the midst of the stream, You let Your light shine upon all creatures, that they might glorify You!

Today the creator of all things comes to the earth and comes to be baptized in the Jordan.  Jesus who is free from all sin consents to be baptized in order to cleanse all of humanity from the error of the enemy.  The Creator of all is baptized by the hand of a servant so that he may grant all of humanity the cleansing through water and the spirit.  Today, the one who created all things, begins His ministry that will ultimately end in His death and resurrection that will complete what is begun today.

You have sanctified the streams of the Jordan and crushed the power of sin, O Christ our God!  You have bowed down Your head beneath the hand of the Forerunner and have delivered mankind from error.  Therefore we pray to You: Save Your word!