“Your faith has saved you. Stand up and go.”
I don’t know about you but when I was a child growing up,
it was my mother who always told us and taught us
how to say thank you for small little things,
you know, “Say Thank you for dinner.”
I’m sure you were all taught in the same way
that it should become a natural habit to say thank you.
But it is so easy to get out of that habit, especially with God.
I don’t know why that is with God; we get so much from God
and we forget to simply say thank you.
It seems so straight forward.
How often do we pause and say,
“Thank you Lord for the gift of this day.
Thank you for these few things that have happened this day.”
We’ve come full circle on this pilgrimage now.
We started with Mass all the way back in Galilee
and we are now reading about the story of Galilee to Jerusalem;
and here we are having gone that exact journey
and having been where these ten lepers were exactly healed.
We were literally there in person and how powerful that reality is.
And we were at the River Jordan
the exact spot where Naaman was washed;
that spot is exactly where Naaman was cleansed
in the ancient times in that first reading.
One of the things I said in one of my first homilies
was taking the time out at the end of each day
to write down a word, a sentence or a paragraph
of the highlights of this trip by day
because we will forget often times the gift of this trip.
I say, again, on the way home on the plane,
try to spend, I know we are all tired,
I’m certainly tired along with you
but certainly try to turn back to God now and say
“Thank You” for one single thing that happened each day
as you look at your writing to summarize your pilgrimage.
And then just kind of do what Maher did with us when we left;
we were going to that last spot.
He recalled every single thing we did.
Try to recall what was that one thing that you are grateful for,
for each of the last 12 plus days.
Let us not be one of the nine lepers who were cleansed
and did not go back to say thank you.
It is worth just reflecting
and let’s not be too hard on these other nine
because we are probably more like the nine
than the one most of the time.
They did have faith.
They asked Jesus to heal them.
And remember they did have enough faith to ask
and they walked away when Jesus told them to,
which meant they believed that they were going to be healed;
and in fact they were healed.
What the difference is the one who came back was saved.
What was the distinction that he knew;
that he had been healed and that is what saves us.
That is the realization.
I am hoping on the last trip home that you realize
that you have been healed;
and that this healing that has taken place
may begin on this journey
but may now continue for many, many more weeks
and months and hopefully, years to come.
But it starts with us, returning to the Lord and saying “Thank You.”
And that is what we do when we come to the Eucharist.
Every time we come to the Eucharist, we say Thank You.
I know Ben comes to daily Mass;
I know Jan comes to daily Mass;
and Jose and Anne Marie go most often to daily Mass.
Everyone goes to Mass but how powerful it is that
we now offer thanks as our last effort together;
that we say “Thank You, Lord for the gift of these days”
Not only for all the sights that we have seen
and that nobody got seriously ill while many got COVID
but hopefully did not have any serious symptoms.
But what we do is we also come back as a group
that has shared an experience from God.
We say “THANK YOU” to God today.
“Your faith has saved you. Stand up and go.”
