November 23, 2025
Making Room for Small Mercies
Luke 17:11-19
This morning I’d like us to think together about what it means to make room for small mercies. The question I want to explore with you is this: How do we learn to see small mercies? How do we train our spiritual eyesight to notice and recognize God’s presence in everyday gifts and mercies?
Let’s begin with the gospel lesson from Luke. What’s going on in this story? Jesus is traveling through the borderlands between two places called Samaria and Galilee. The borderland – like so many places along the border in our own country – is a transitional space. There is no border line, it’s a region: a place in between cultures, and traditions, and ethnicities. As he passes through there, Jesus encounters ten lepers, which means they had a skin disease, standing at a distance, as the law required them to do.
The group of men were both Jews and Samaritans. Under normal circumstances, the two groups despised each other. But their shared suffering and misery overcame their prejudice to bind them together.
They cry out: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”
And Jesus sees them and responds to their plea for help. He gives them a strange command that must have required a lot of blind faith: “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” It’s an odd instruction because they’re not yet healed. But they go anyway, in faith. And as they went, Luke tells us, they were cleansed.
All ten of them receive the gift of healing. But the story is not really about their physical healing, because now it turns.
Verse 15: “Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.”
Notice that verb: he saw that he was healed. This story is about seeing deeply. It’s about perceiving and recognizing. The man turned back, literally changed direction. With a loud voice he glorified God. He fell at Jesus’ feet giving thanks.
And then the detail that Luke wants us to notice: “And he was a Samaritan.”
The outsider. The foreigner. The word Luke uses for “foreigner” appears only here in the New Testament and it is the same word that appeared on signs at the Jerusalem temple, forbidding non-Jews from entering the holy space.
This man was excluded from society by his ethnicity, his religion, his disease, his geography. He was pushed to the margins in every possible way.
And he is the one who SEES.
Jesus asks: “Were not ten made clean? The nine, where? [Literally how it reads.] Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Now, before we judge the nine too harshly, let’s be clear: they weren’t doing anything wrong. Unless Jesus was trying to trick them, they weren’t disobedient. They did exactly what the Lord told them to do—they went to show themselves to the priests. They were healed along the way.
They just didn’t stop to take it in. They didn’t stop to perceive it, to be grateful for it. They received the gift without recognizing the Giver.
I can recognize myself in those nine, and maybe you can too.
We are on our way, and while on our way we fail to notice the gifts of God.
Parker Palmer calls this “functional atheism.” It’s a belief that ultimate responsibility rests with me, even if I affirm a higher power. God may be God, but if anything happens around here I’m going to have to get it done and so I better get going. So we move fast, with heads down, and we receive blessings without recognizing the One who blesses.
At least three things blind us to the divine gift, I think.
Busyness blinds us. When we’re running from one thing to the next, our attention narrows. We see only what’s urgent, not what’s important. Only what is right in front of us, not what is all around us.
The fierce urgency of today moves quickly to the next thing. The fierce urgency of what is now and what is next crowds out our awareness of the gifts of everyday life and forecloses the gratitude that would complete the circle of receiving those gifts well.
We live with work schedules and family commitments, group meetings, appointments, kids’ activities, community responsibilities. With deadlines and due dates, with lots of good things and necessary things, often crammed into not much space and time.
Centeredness blinds us. Not self-centeredness, but centeredness. The Samaritan could see partly because he was on the margins. Multiple layers of exclusion made him aware in ways that people with privilege aren’t aware. Those of us at the center—comfortable, secure, well-resourced—often miss the blessings that outsiders notice right away. You’re safe in your home. You have a steady source of income. You can walk down the street in your neighborhood without fear of being picked up. You can send your children to school. You can go to the doctor or the dentist and show your insurance card. These are privileges, and those of us who have them and have lived with them all our lives, miss the blessing of these gifts.
Third, familiarity blinds us. We get used to blessings, so we don’t notice them. Do you wake up today? (Have you woken up yet?) Did you take in breath and open your eyes? There’s saying in the Black church tradition that God woke you up this morning and put you in your right mind. What that means is that the alarm clock didn’t wake you up, the gift of God that is in our lives woke you up. Alarm clocks went off in many homes this morning where no one got up. The first small mercy every one of us experiences every day is that God wakes us up, opens our eyes, enlivens our minds, gives us life.
It is natural, human nature, to overlook our blessings, to be much more aware of our needs than our blessings. More conscious of what we lack than what we’ve been given. Small mercies become invisible when we take them for granted.
How do we learn to see? What trains our vision?
Jesus says something different to the one who returned: “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” All ten had a kind of faith—they cried out to Jesus, they obeyed his command, they were healed. But this one has something more, a slightly different kind of faith. What did he have?
The theologian Miroslav Volf puts it this way in his masterful work Free Gift: “Faith receives God’s gifts as gifts; gratitude receives them well.” Let me repeat that, let it sit with you.
There’s a difference between receiving and recognizing. The difference is gratitude. Gratitude can heal us in a way that is deeper and more mysterious than therapy or medication. Gratitude can even heal us when medicine and technology cannot. This story is not about the physical healing of the men who cried for help. It is about the spiritual wellness of the man who showed gratitude.
Let me illustrate with the results of a research study.
About ten years ago, researchers at Indiana University and UC Berkeley studied nearly 300 people who were seeking mental health counseling. They knew already that gratitude had positive effects, but they wanted to see especially the effect of gratitude on people who were struggling – not just people who were already well.
They divided the students who came for counseling into three groups. All received counseling, but one group was also asked to write gratitude letters each week. Another group was asked to write about negative experiences each week. The third group only received counseling and did no writing.
What were the results? Those who wrote gratitude letters reported significantly better mental health four weeks later, and even better mental health twelve weeks later.
And along the way the researchers made four discoveries about how gratitude works:
First, it’s not about forced positivity. When they analyzed the words people used in their letters, they found it wasn’t the abundance of positive words that explained the benefit. It was the lack of negative emotion words. In other words, gratitude shifts our attention away from toxic emotions like resentment and envy.
So expressing gratitude isn’t about finding silver linings that aren’t there. It’s not saying “this is hard, BUT I’m grateful.” Instead, it’s saying “this is hard, AND I’m grateful for…”
Gratitude doesn’t erase difficulty. It lives alongside it. The practice of gratitude trains where we direct our attention.
You can feel softer, more open-hearted. Your pulse slows. Your face relaxes. Gratitude doesn’t solve your problems, but it changes how you hold them.
Second discovery: you don’t have to perform gratitude to benefit from it. Only 23 percent of the people in the study actually sent their gratitude letters. But everyone who wrote them experienced the benefits.
So this isn’t about writing thank-you notes, though those matter. It’s about the internal practice of recognition. You can be grateful – meaningfully and healingly grateful – quietly, and privately. The seeing is what matters.
Third: gratitude’s benefits take time. They didn’t show up right away. At one week, there was no difference between groups. At four weeks, the gratitude writers were doing better. At twelve weeks, even better still.
This is why we call it the practice of gratitude. It’s not instant transformation. It’s gradual rewiring. Jeremiah says in Lamentations, “Morning by morning, new mercies I see.” That’s actually how this works, day by day.
Fourth, and most remarkable: gratitude really changes your brain. Three months after people wrote their gratitude letters, researchers did brain scans. They found that the gratitude writers showed different brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex—the area responsible for learning and decision-making. Their brains had literally become more sensitive to experiencing gratitude.
Gratitude is not positive self-help, it’s neuroscience. God wired us this way. The more we practice seeing small mercies, the more our brains become attuned to noticing them.
Do you recall that God gave the people manna in the wilderness, but only enough for a day. Their brains were wired this way too: to be transformed by practicing daily attention to God’s mercy.
This reminds me of Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk who spent forty years in the kitchen of his monastery, washing dishes and repairing shoes. He said this: “The time of work is no different from the time of prayer. In the noise and clatter of my kitchen, as people all around are calling for different things, I possess God with all the peace in the world.”
This is the spiritual parallel to what neuroscientists are finding. We train ourselves to see God’s presence in the everyday of life.
What might this look like for you?
When you wake up in the morning. Taking a moment to wake up before waking up your phone: a moment of awareness of breath, of thought, of possibility. God is giving you this day.
A cup of coffee or tea in the afternoon might be the occasion to write two paragraphs in a journal listing what you’re grateful for. While you’re brushing your teeth—you rehearse to yourself your gratitude for that day.
These aren’t elaborate rituals. Just pausing to notice. To see. To give thanks. Over time, our brains—and our souls—become more attuned to God’s presence.
For us as a congregation, we have much to notice and be grateful for: growth in our church, plans for the future, many hands that share gifts in worship and education, flowers delivered to folks in need each week, meals shared with families in crisis. Children who run through the halls, lift their voices and laughter in worship. Youth who are active and inquiring and faithful. Music that lifts our spirits. The laughter we experience together.
While there is much about our world which deserves our lament and our protest, there is also much for which to be thankful.
Miroslav Volf says: “Gratitude enlivens the world.” The world desperately needs to be enlivened and so let us be grateful.
Small mercies reveal to us God’s persistent presence with us. Not spectacular, but daily. Not earned, but given. Morning by morning, if we train ourselves to see.
The Samaritan saw. He returned. He gave thanks. And Jesus said his faith made him well.
This week, as we move toward Thanksgiving, I want to invite you to a simple practice: Notice one small mercy each day. Just one. Name it, even if only to yourself. Let it open you to the One who gives. Train your vision to see.
May we learn to see and return and give thanks.
For the wonders that surround us, for the truths that still confound us, most of all that love has found us: thanks be to God.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina