Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

St. Luke 17.11-19

September 6, 2026

“It is not good for the man to be alone.” God made us needing communion, community. Apart from God we have no life; apart from others we have no purpose. “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Yet that is what has befallen the lepers.

Here’s what the Torah commands for lepers: “He shall dwell alone; his habitation shall be outside the camp.” He was cast out, ostracized, his flesh rotting away in isolation. “He shall dwell alone.”

It’s an extreme example of what happened when our first parents fell. The man and his wife remained in physical proximity, yet were isolated, turned against each other. They hid from God. They covered themselves from the other’s view. And they blamed each other.

Sounds like congress. Or one or two church meetings I’ve been to. And maybe your home is like this sometimes. Isolated from your own family. Blaming each other. I like this line from “The Endless Enigma (Part Two)”: “Everyone came, but they all sat alone.”

The parables of Jesus depict hell as an outer darkness. Perhaps hell is spending an eternity alone, alone with nothing but the torment of your own embittered soul, neither giving nor receiving love.

So these decaying, reeking lepers, condemned to a life of solitude, banded together. It’s hard for us to imagine their world. They weren’t just quarantined for medical reasons. Their disease represented sin itself. Readmission to society required not a doctor’s examination but a priest’s blessing. It was assumed their sickness was because of sin.

The very word “flesh” becomes synonymous with the sinful nature. That’s why St. Paul in today’s epistle calls sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, and orgies – he calls all these “works of the flesh.” And he follows up that list with these frightful words: “Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Do you get angry? Do you envy others? Do you get drunk? Do you look at women with lust? Are you jealous? Who among us is not plagued and tempted by one or another of these various corruptions that God’s Word calls the works of the flesh?

Repent! “Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

What can we do? Cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Much of the church’s liturgy is just an expansion of those words. “Lord, have mercy!” over and over again.

Jesus hears. Jesus answers. The lepers are healed.

One comes back. Why? Is only one of them polite?

That’s not quite right.

He is thankful, and rightly so – but Jesus doesn’t commend his gratitude. Jesus praises the man’s faith. This shows us what real worship is.

Immanuel has a long history of taking ceremony seriously. There’s good reason for that. But the true worship of God is not our ceremonies. Ceremonies, our Lutheran Confessions say, “are in and of themselves no worship of God or even a part of it” (FC X.9, Tappert).

So what is true worship then? True worship is not good form, right ceremonies, good etiquette. True worship of God is:

Faith in God
Trust in His mercy
Taking Him at His Word
Relying on the Sacraments.

The Large Catechism puts it this way: “True worship and service of God takes place when your heart directs all its trust and confidence only toward God and does not let itself be torn away from Him. It consists in risking everything on earth for Him and abandoning it all for His sake.”

Jesus sent the lepers to Jerusalem. “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” There, they’d return to God’s presence in the temple,. But the one leper who comes back has figured something out: “God is present in the flesh of the Man who healed me! If I want to go to the real temple, I need to go back to Jesus!” When Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it again in three days,” it wasn’t until after His resurrection that the disciples understood Jesus was speaking about His body. The leper figured it out first.

What does that mean for you? The temple is wherever Jesus is. That’s why Jesus institutes His Supper.

So what does Jesus say to this man? “Arise, go your way.” The wording is actually ambiguous; it can mean, “Arise, come.” The man is, I think, called to stay with Jesus, to go His way.

What does that mean? The leper’s flesh is healed, but the full healing is not just the disease, but the entire human nature. That’s what flesh often means in the Bible. You can see it in that long list in the epistle. A disciple of Jesus walks by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. A disciple of Jesus resists, rejects, subdues the desires of the flesh.

So that’s your homework this week, and mine too: “Come My way,” Jesus says to us; “Follow Me, crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. Pray for the fruit of the Spirit to be manifest in you: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

You’re not alone. You commune with Jesus and His disciples. We pray our Father, give us this day our daily bread. You are not alone. God saw your condition and entered into it. Your sins are forgiven. He is healing you. Follow Jesus in the way that leads to life. +INJ+