Ten Healed, One Saved

[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio on Sunday, October 13.]

Luke 17:11-19

Our gospel lesson for this morning, Luke 17:11-19, is particularly well-known among Lutheran Christians, I think because it often serves as the text for our Thanksgiving celebrations.

The lesson does talk about being thankful.

But if we come away from this passage thinking that if we’re thankful, Christ will save us from sin and death, we completely miss the point. 

Such an interpretation would turn Jesus into a lawgiver who demands that we earn salvation. 

But, good Lutherans that we are, we know that we cannot be saved and will not be saved by anything that we do. Nor can we be made holy by anything that we do. 

To those tempted to think that we can be saved by works, the Scripture speaks clearly. 

Romans 3:21-22, for example: "But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” 

Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

If we could be saved from sin, death, and futility by good things that we do or by the attitudes we adop, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to go to the cross to offer Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. 

And we would have no need of the Word that makes it possible for us to trust in Him or to be claimed by Him in Holy Baptism, where the Word of Jesus meets the water, or to receive Him in Holy Communion, where that Word meets the bread and the wine to yield the body and blood of Jesus Himself. 

Christ has done everything needed to save you and me from sin and death in His own death and resurrection. 

Then the Holy Spirit, preaching the Word about Christ to us in the Word and in the Sacraments, brings us the gift of faith, the capacity to believe that Christ did this even for you and me. 

This is how we are saved and how we are set apart to grow as people of God: by God’s grace through a faith in Christ constructed within us by the Holy Spirit. 

Listen: God doesn’t need our thanks. 

God doesn’t need our faith in Christ. 

But when we have been saved by grace through faith in Christ, we will be thankful. 

Thankfulness to God will be present in those who have been saved from sin and death, saved to live with God for all eternity.

I remember seeing this movingly exemplified in a man at a funeral visitation years ago. I watched him as he showed particular empathy to a young widow whose husband had died suddenly and tragically. Later, this man and I talked. He himself was a widower who had lost his wife about ten years earlier. He had been a devoted husband and her death had devastated him. But he had the hope of the gospel. I remember him telling me, “Pastor, every night before I go to bed, I kneel down on my bedroom floor and I thank God that He loves me and saves me even though I’m a sinner.” 

This man wasn’t trying to earn brownie points with God (or me). He wasn't abasing himself and serving up a fake humble pie. His words were the expressions of a man in whom God’s great grace given in Christ had created a great faith in Christ that resulted in great thankfulness to Christ.

We see this very phenomenon happen in a seemingly unlikely person in today’s gospel lesson. Take a look at it, please. Verse 11: “Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us!’”

In those days, you know, lepers were forced to move away from their families and communities for fear that others might be afflicted with the same often disfiguring skin condition. They lived in colonies on the edges of towns, dependent on people who, from a distance, might bring them food or other necessities. This particular colony of ten included both Jesus’ countrymen and at least one Samaritan. Samaritans were, as you know, often hated and disdained by Jesus’ fellow Jews. But when people go through common horrors, the petty prejudices we stoke when we don’t feel vulnerable often evaporate. I have often seen bigoted people with loved ones hovering on the point of death in hospital ICUs bond with the families of other ICU patients despite differences in their colors or religions that would have, under different circumstances, have had nothing to do with each other. When life knocks you down and reacquaints us with the fact that we are not invincible, it’s easier for us to see that we are all human beings made in God’s image. So, it was with these lepers all desperate for Jesus’ help.

Verse 14: “When [Jesus] saw them, he said, ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were cleansed.” Jewish ritual and civil law required that a priest had to certify that a leprous person had been cured before she or he could resume their normal lives or be in worship at the temple or the local synagogue. That’s behind Jesus’ directive to the men.

But more to the point of today’s gospel lesson, we should ask ourselves, “What exactly did the lepers do to deserve to be healed?” 

We might all ask: “What did I do, what could I do to be saved from sin, death, and darkness?” 

I could ask myself a similar question: “What did I do that God spared me from a heart attack that should have killed me?” 

The answer to these questions and others like them that we might ask is the same: NOTHING! 

There is nothing that we can do to earn God’s grace, His undeserved favor, or any of His blessings. 

As the ten lepers should have learned that day on the frontier between Galilee and Samaria, the blessings God gives through Jesus are not deserved and cannot be earned.

Ten lepers were cleansed--or healed--that day. But only one of them, it seems, came to believe in Jesus as God the Son, the One and the only One we need for salvation from our sins and life with God that starts now and goes on in perfection beyond the grave. Nine seemed to view their return to normalcy as only their just due, taking good health as something God or the universe owed them, even though this is a fallen world in which ill-health or tragedy or difficulty can strike any person at any time. But one man had a different perspective.

Verse 15: “One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan. Jesus asked, ‘Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then he said to him, ‘Rise and go; your faith has made you well.’”

Those last words of Jesus in this passage are the key to understanding the whole thing. 

Jesus tells the Samaritan first, “Rise…” Here, in the original Greek in which Luke and the other New Testament writers composed their works, Jesus tells the man, “Ἀναστὰς…” This is a variation on a noun commonly used in the New Testament, anastasis. It often means resurrection. Jesus is telling the thankful Samaritan more than to rise up from the ground. “Rise,” Jesus is telling him, “from sin and death and futility. Rise!” And then Jesus says, “go,” go about your new life.

Now comes the absolutely most important thing Jesus says in this whole passage: “your faith has made you well.” 

Now, we may think, “Weren’t the other nine made well too?” 

No, they were only purged of their leprosy. 

The word Jesus uses of the end to all ten men’s leprosy is ἐκαθαρίσθησαν, meaning they were made clean. But when Jesus tells the grateful Samaritan man “your faith has made you well,” He actually says, “Your faith has saved you.” The word our translation renders as made you well is sozo, which means save. 

Friends, you can bet your whole life on this fundamental truth: WHETHER YOU ARE IN GOOD HEALTH OR BAD, WHETHER YOU LIVE OR DIE, YOUR FAITH IN CHRIST SAVES YOU!

Ten of the lepers were healed, but only one of them was saved. 

Ten received grace; one had faith. 

Ten heard the saving Word of God in Christ; one believed. 

Ten had the kingdom of God come to them; only one entered that kingdom. 

The thankful Samaritan wasn’t saved because he was thankful; he was thankful because Christ had saved him by giving him the gift of faith. He came to faith in Christ the same way we come to faith in Christ: His Word comes to us and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we believe!

Thankfulness is a hallmark of all disciples of Jesus. The Samaritan was so overwhelmed by God’s grace and goodness that not giving praise to God and falling at Jesus’ feet would have been unthinkable to him. 

Is it that way for us? I know that it isn't always for me.

In speaking of Psalm 147:12, which directs God’s people to “Extol the Lord...praise your God,” Martin Luther observed, “We have to be yelled at before we start praising the Lord. Even animals don’t live that shamefully! Pigs recognize the person who gives them their food. They’ll run after her and cry to her. But the world doesn’t even recognize God, let alone thank and praise him…”

It was based on these words of Luther that we used to tell our kids that the reason we prayed at mealtimes was so that we wouldn't be less than pigs. One day when our kids were about seven and four, we were out at some restaurant. The server brought us our food and Ann and I set out, as you do with younger kids, to cut up their portions and just get them generally ready to eat. Then we dove in. At that point, Philip, the older of the two realized we hadn't prayed and said, "We're pigs!"
When the Word of God came to the leprous Samaritan, he was desperate enough, helpless enough, and vulnerable enough, that when God’s undeserved grace came to him through Jesus, he proved to be precisely the kind of good soil that Jesus says elsewhere is needed for the seed of faith to take root and grow. 

The gift of faith in Christ made him thankful for being healed and that faith made him well; it saved him. 

May we always be desperate enough, helpless enough, and vulnerable enough for faith to take root in us, to grow in us, to make us eternally well, right with God. 

And may we always be thankful. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The Call to Be Bold and Humble

[This is the journal entry for my quiet time with God earlier today.]

Look: “...I thank and praise you, God of my ancestors: You have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king.” (Daniel 2:23)

This is part of a prayer of praise and thanksgiving offered by Daniel, a Jew held captive in Babylon after that nation conquered God’s people.

Daniel, following a period of training, was enlisted into the ranks of the Babylonian king’s “wise men.” Also enlisted from God’s people were Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. (The three are known best today by the names given to them by the Babylonians, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, although I’m certain they would prefer to be known by their given Hebrew names.)

The king had dreamt a troubling dream. Unlike the Pharaoh during Israel’s enslavement in Egypt many centuries before, the king not only expected his wise men to interpret his dream, but also to tell him what had happened in his dream. For some reason, neither Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, nor Azariah was present when the Babylonian seers confessed that they couldn’t see the king’s dream, only interpret the dream as the king recounted it. The king was furious and ordered the execution of all the wise men, even the four Hebrews.

When Daniel and the other three Hebrews learned of the king’s death sentence, Daniel went to the king and asked for time so that he could interpret the dream. He then enlisted Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah to pray that God would show them mercy by revealing both the content of the king’s dream and its meaning. “He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that he and his friends might not be executed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon.” (Daniel 2:18) Daniel wasn’t just interested in saving himself and his friends from the executioner, but also the Babylonian wise men.

That night, after the four had sought God’s mercy, the dream and its interpretation were revealed to Daniel. Interestingly, in the verse, Daniel thanks God not only for revealing these things to himself personally but also to “us,” to him and his three prayer partners. Our faith life is lived out in the company of, with the support of, and with accountability to other believers.

Listen: I’m struck by several things here.

I’m struck, first, by the nature of prayer offered to the God of Israel, now revealed to the whole world in Jesus Christ.

First, Daniel was concerned not just for his own life and not just for the lives of his fellow Jews, but for the lives too of the Babylonian wise men. In James 4:3, James upbraids his addressees, who are mystified at why they receive no answers to their prayers, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” Daniel wanted to save his own life, to be sure. But he also wanted to save others’ lives and to rely with bold faith on God. In 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul says that love doesn’t seek its own way. And in Philippians 4, he exhorts believers to put the interests of others above their own. Things could have gone very badly for Daniel when he boldly came into the presence of the king to plead for time to learn from God both the content of the king’s dream and its proper interpretation. But he did so with confidence in the mercy God shows when we love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Second, when we pray alone, God certainly hears our prayers. But when we enlist others to pray with us, there is an accountability. If Daniel had said, “Hey, guys, please pray that God will save us and nobody else,” it’s likely that he would have prayed alone...and without effect.  But the four Hebrews could all agree that seeking God’s help and wisdom in order to save everyone’s life was a godly prayer. The God of Israel was ultimately revealed in Jesus, Who tells us, “I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 18:19) (Of course, even when two or three or more pray for something, as Christians, they also pray in Jesus’ name and for God’s will to be done. Prayer is submission to the will of God, even when it’s not what we want.)

I’m also struck by the fact that Daniel didn’t forget to thank God for the answered prayers. How often have I gotten into scrapes and prayed, with genuine faith and submission, only to forget to thank God after He’s taken me through them? More often than I can remember, I’m sure.

I’m also struck again by the fact that true faith in the God we now all can know only in Christ is characterized both by boldness and humility. Daniel and his friends were bold in their prayers to God and humbly submissive to God. Daniel was bold to petition the king but did so without accusation or anger, only humility. Boldness AND humility should characterize the Christian’s life, including our prayers and our interactions with others. I often seem to fall prey to my human nature and end up being neither bold nor humble!

One big takeaway for me is to pray with faith and submission to the God revealed in Jesus. This is what Jesus teaches us to do. “Your will be done,” is, for me the hardest and most important petition of the prayer that Jesus has taught us, the Lord’s Prayer.

The other big takeaway is this: pray with certainty that God hears prayers offered in Jesus’ name, that is, prayers that submit to the will of God and are filled with a knowledge of God born of our relationship with Him. James says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” (James 1:5) The experience of Daniel and his friends bears the truth of that verse out.

Respond: Lord, teach me today to be both bold and humble as I seek to live my life in Your power and to Your glory alone. In Jesus’ name I ask this. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Who do I owe my thankfulness?

The New Testament book of Philemon isn't the longest of the Bible. It has just one short chapter. But reading it this morning as part of my 5 by 5 by 5 devotion time gave me plenty of material for consideration and prayer.

Philemon was a wealthy leader of the first-century church, probably in Colossae. His slave, Onesimus, also a Christian, ran away from Philemon and ended up helping the apostle Paul, then being held prisoner in Rome for his faith in Christ. Paul is sending Onesimus back to Philemon accompanied by this short letter.

Paul is very shrewd here (and elsewhere). He never overtly advocates the end of the Roman slavery system, but he asks Philemon to no longer treat Onesimus as he would a slave, but as a brother in Christ, an equal in the eyes of God, differing from Philemon not in status but only in function.

Paul even offers to compensate Philemon for any financial damage caused by Onesimus running away. Then, he takes the extraordinary step--taken in only a few of his letters--of actually taking the pen from his amanuensis (the secretary to whom he was dictating this correspondence) to write the pledge himself:

I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. [Then this amazing statement:] I say nothing about you owing me even your own self. (v. 19)

Christians believe that they have been saved from sin and death and given new and everlasting life by the grace of God given to all who trust in Jesus Christ as God, the only One Who can give forgiveness of sins and life from God. We're right to give thanks and praise to God alone for this great gift.

But no one comes to faith in Christ or to a growing, consoling, empowering faith in Christ, in a vacuum. No one wakes up one morning and says, "I believe in Christ." And no one's faith deepens without the help of mentors and friends in Christ.

There has to be someone--usually many someones--who share Christ with us. Otherwise, the human default mode, being to go it alone and to be our own gods without accountability to anyone else, we would never know about Christ and the forgiveness of sin and new life given to all who trust in this crucified and risen Savior.

As Paul puts it elsewhere:

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Romans 10:14)

God saves people for eternal life with God through their faith in Christ. But God commissions people--people who gave perfect witness to Him on the pages of Scripture, Christians who share their imperfect lives and the perfect good news about Jesus with friends and family, and others--to "preach," proclaim, teach, and give away their best friend and Lord Jesus to others.

This morning, I'm taking Paul's words to Philemon as words to me.

I'm taking the time to think about all of the people to whom I owe my eternal life because, in the power of God's Holy Spirit, they took and they take the time to share the life of Jesus with me. This includes people from my past and people from my present.

I'm taking the time to name each one before the Lord and to thank Him for their witness.

I'm offering a special prayer for those who are witnesses for Christ in my life right now, asking God to bless and protect them and their families and to help them sense His loving arms around them today.

I'm also offering prayers of thanksgiving for those now with the Lord in eternity, the sainted dead, whose witness for Christ has built up my faith in Christ--people like Martha S, Bruce S, Ron C, Karen H, Great Grandma Henry,  Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty, and Sarah S, to name just a few. I'm asking God, as I pray, to give them special embraces symbolic of my thankfulness to them and to remind them that I so look forward to seeing them again soon. My hope for eternity is one I possess because they and others have faithfully shared Christ with me and prayed to God the Father in Christ's name for me. How can I not be filled with thanksgiving?

It's not a bad idea to thank God for the people to whom we owe our connection to Christ, the life-giver. You may want to do so sometime today too.

Lesson from Flight #1549

Live in thankfulness.

Rejoice. Pray. Thank.

[This sermon was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

First Thessalonians 5:16-24
You don’t need for me to tell you this morning that these are tough economic times.

About a million-and-a-half Americans have lost their jobs since the beginning of the year. Some of them are members of Saint Matthew.

Two of the country’s Big Three automakers are saying they could go out of business soon without a bailout.

State governments, like our own in Ohio, are putting together contingency plans in case projected revenue shortfalls resulting from people making less and paying less in income and sales taxes. If the cuts have to go into effect, it may mean fewer services for some people at the very times they most need them.

Retirees and workers alike are watching the values of their pension funds decrease. (I checked my own pension account while preparing this sermon and found that it's lost one-third of its total value since the beginning of this year. Well, I don’t want to exaggerate; it’s actually only lost 32.9% of its value.)

How do we Christians, people who believe in a loving God Who cares about our every moment, people who believe in a God Who came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, and people who trust in a Savior Who promises to come again--how do we--deal with the grim realities of life? And not just grim economic realities, but all of life’s grim realities?

The people of the first-century church in the Roman colony of Thessalonica had similar questions. And for good reason.

Thessalonica, a city that set on the Aegean Sea in the northeast of the Greek peninsula, in the province of Thessaly, next to Macedonia, owed its existence and its fortunes to the Roman Empire. It was a key stop on a major trade route that connected Europe and Asia. Most of the people who lived in Thessalonica were economically well off, in no apparent need of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ when they first heard of Jesus.

Yet about three years before Paul wrote the words in our second lesson for this morning, in the summer of 50A.D., a few Thessalonians dared to confess that their hope wasn’t in the Empire or the emperor or their money, homes, or possessions, but in Jesus Christ alone.

In the intervening time, the Thessalonian church had been subjected to opposition from the local synagogue and Roman officials. They had suffered economic pressures, persecutions, and beatings. Members who had believed that Jesus' return to the world and the Day of the Lord were imminent, had died, leaving survivors wondering where Jesus was and what had happened to those who had died believing.

To help the Thessalonians cope with their circumstances and to prepare for Christ’s intervention in their lives, Paul gives the Thessalonian church--and us--two sets of three imperatives on how best to await Christ’s coming to us. The first set is short and sweet:

• Rejoice always;
• pray without ceasing; and
• give thanks in all circumstances.

This morning, I want to assure you that as followers of Jesus Christ, we can rejoice, pray incessantly, and give thanks in all circumstances.

In fact, to be ready for Christ’s return or for the moments when we meet Him at the ends of our lives, adopting Paul’s three imperatives is essential.

Through them, God answers the prayer Paul mentions in our lesson, a prayer he offered not just for the Thessalonians, but for all followers of Jesus, including you and me: that God would sanctify us, make us holy, make us more like Jesus, more like the people we were made and redeemed to be.

We can rejoice. Last weekend, I heard a sermon by Bill Hybels, founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, Illinois. He talked about things he’d learned from God in previous economic downturns. One of the lessons he mentioned happened in 1982, during our last major recession.

Three years before, he had founded the Willow Creek congregation. It was still meeting in a movie theater. He and his wife were struggling with their personal finances and saw it as a great personal turning point: They were able to put away $1000 in their savings account.

They were savoring the knowledge that their adoption of the Christian discipline of thriftiness had led to their achievement when an elderly man who was part of the church approached Hybels. This man was living in a condominium and would soon be turned out. All of his investments were either tied up or had gone south in the recession. He’d also accumulated uncovered medical bills and simply didn’t have the money to pay his mortgage. “Does the church have the money to cover what he owed, a thousand dollars?” he wondered.

Hybels explained that the congregation was in the process of paying down the land on which its first unit was to be built and was barely covering its expenses as it was. The man said, “I understand. I was just wondering.”

On his drive home, Hybels had a thought: What if he and his wife Lynne just gave this man the thousand dollars he needed? He stewed about how he could share this proposal with his wife. But when he explained it to her, she said, “Bill, that’s a no-brainer. Of course, we can give him the thousand dollars. That’s probably why God gave us the money in the first place.”

So, that’s what they did. The thousand dollars allowed the man to stay in his condo, helping to ease him through the recession.

Months later, that same man approached Hybels again, this time offering to begin repaying him in installments. Hybels immediately refused the offer. You can’t put a price tag on the good things God taught him and his wife from the experience. They had learned to rely on God completely, not on money; that every good and perfect gift comes from God; and that God gives to us so that we can give to others. Above all, maybe, they experienced the joy that belongs to people who are living in sync with God’s will for their lives. If we’re walking with the God we know in Jesus Christ we can rejoice no matter what our financial situation.

We can also pray in all circumstances. George Mueller was a pastor and social reformer in nineteenth century England, a time and place where the poor had it particularly rough. If you were indebted and couldn’t pay your bills, you were thrown into prison. Disease and alcoholism and abandoned children were everywhere. Most of Dickens' novels convey something of what that era was like. It was a tough time!

After his conversion to Christian faith at the age of twenty, George Mueller became a pastor and moved to the city of Bristol. The small church he pastored grew over the course of his lifetime and starting with just a few pennies, he founded an orphanage for which, before his death, he had raised the equivalent of about $7.5-million.

Mueller was a hard working person of action, but he was also a man who spent hours praying. Everything he did was built on the foundation of waiting for God's direction through seasons of prayer.

His diaries record that in November, 1844, he began praying that five different young men, children of friends, would come to faith in Christ. He prayed for them every single day, no matter where he was and no matter how he felt. Eighteen months after he began these prayers, one of the young men came to faith. He thanked God and kept praying for the other four. Five years later, the second one came to faith. Mueller thanked God and prayed for the other three. Six years later, the third one came to faith. One year after Mueller died, fifty-three years after he began praying for those five young men daily, the last two surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ.

I’ve had similar experiences with prayer. One that especially stands out, which I’ve shared with many of you before, involved a source of real, deep personal anguish for me. I prayed about this issue every day for thirteen years, sometimes wondering if God was telling me my concern weren’t really important. I had just about given up on praying about this item, when God answered my prayer suddenly and more wonderfully than I could have ever imagined. I want to urge you today: even in the tough times, even when your hope is running out, pray without ceasing.

Finally, give thanks in all circumstances. It was Advent, days before Christmas, when I got the telephone call informing me that Margie, who had suffered a long time from a debilitating disease, had passed away. I had visited with Margie and her husband hours before she died.

During that visit, her husband Carl told me, “Advent has always been Margie’s favorite time of year.” He explained that Margie loved everything about the Christmas season. But she also loved remembering that some day, whether at the end of her own life or the end of the world, Jesus would come to her and take her to be with Him forever. “Maybe, this Advent will be Margie’s Advent,” Carl had said.

I rushed back to the nursing home. “It is her Advent,” Carl told me as I walked into Margie’s room. And then, Carl and I gave thanks, not that Margie had suffered and died, but that Christ had come to her and taken her home. That experience underscored for me that we can give thanks, not for all, but in all circumstances. Carl taught me that even when times are tough, Christ is still with us and we still have blessings that deserve our thankfulness.

If I had to summarize the three imperatives in our second lesson today, it would be simply: When tough times come, hang in there with God.

We can do that because God has demonstrated His love and concern for us in the baby born in a cattle stall, Who died and rose for us.

This Savior is returning. In the meantime, we hang in there by rejoicing always, praying without ceasing, and giving thanks to God for our lives, our salvation, our hope, our purpose, for the joy of Christmas, for the love of Good Friday, for the promise of Easter, for the presence of Christ with us always, and all of our blessings in this world and the next.

When we hang in there with the God we know through Jesus Christ, we’re ready to welcome Jesus whenever He comes to us. We can join in the ancient prayer of the Church, "Amen! Come, Lord Jesus."