Proper 23C 10-10-10

I haven't posted a sermon in a long time but wanted to share this one. I have already seen that I am in good company.

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Proper 23C • 10-10-10

This interlude of healing and thanksgiving provides a bridge from the preceding teachings about the tough demands of justice and the difficult burdens of leadership in the new community to the following warnings about the end-time that they felt awaited them. Likewise, the travel journey portion of the gospel is coming to a close. Even though it seems as though the disciples and Jesus have been meandering for weeks on end, making no progress, they are finally approaching Jerusalem and Jesus’ death on the cross. As they get closer and closer to Jerusalem, Jesus is careful to remind those following him of its significance. Much time is spent talking about matters of faith. In Jesus’ teachings, faith on earth is represented by unusual people: Lazarus, a Samaritan, a foreigner, a widow, a toll collector, and little children.

The story of the leper we hear this morning serves as another story about faith, but there is more to it than just that. It is also a story about gratitude, cleansing, healing, boundaries, insiders and outsiders.

Biblical scholars and medical scientists agree that Hansen’s disease, that is, leprosy, did not exist in first-century Palestine. Instead what is generally meant by the biblical word, ‘leprosy’ is any condition that affects the appearance of body, clothes and home.

Though lacking a true understanding of what leprosy is, the Bible spends a lot of time talking about it. In the Hebrew Scriptures, two chapters in the Book of Leviticus speak about leprosy and how it affects an individual’s place in the community. What really is at stake here is the whole idea of cleanliness. That which is dirty or unclean is out of order, and out of place in a social system. Boundaries, which define what is and is not clean, what is and is not in place or order, limit a person’s interactions in a particular society.

The leper as an individual is someone who suffers not only from weakened body boundaries — the skin being afflicted by a disfiguring disease — but also social boundaries. The leper is someone who is incomplete and therefore unworthy to be present in society. No blemished person could possibly be a complete specimen of its kind. And so, the leper in Jesus’ time would be outside of social boundaries.

Understandably, as social outcasts, lepers travelled together. The ten in the story from Luke are following the directions from the Book of Leviticus: they are to stay apart from society, and cry out ‘Unclean’ should they approach a non-leper. In essence, they are to maintain strict boundaries that keep them out of Jewish society.

Jesus, as a Jew, would have known these restrictions. Yet when the ten approach Jesus, and cry out, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ he responds to them. Were Jesus to maintain the strict boundaries as directed by his faith system, he would not have even spoken to them, he would have chased them away. Instead, he instructs them, saying, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests,’ knowing that the only way they can be reincorporated into the social system is to be certified clean and declared ‘back in place’ by a temple priest. Jesus also knows they will be healed as they go.

Presumably the ten go to the temple priest — the gospel does not say. What it does tell us is that one of the ten, when he realises he is healed, turns around to give thanks to God. He returns to Jesus, and falls at his feet and thanks him.

The gospel has saved up the punch-line for this moment. In one short sentence, it informs us, ‘And he was a Samaritan.’

A Samaritan. Not only once cast out of society by virtue of his leprosy, but twice cast out because of his nationality. A doubly impure, scorned man, someone whom the boundaries would have permanently kept out.

Yet Jesus ministers to this man with the same grace as he has to the other nine. Moreover, he tells the Samaritan something he does not tell the other nine: ‘Your faith has made you well.’ A stronger translation is, ‘Your faith has brought you salvation.’

Wholeness through faith, not through physical appearance; destroying boundaries that separate one person from another, restoring people to their communities, making them whole, giving them salvation — that is what matters to Jesus.

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Haven’t we all been outsiders at some point or another in our lives? Frankly, I think it is nothing short of a miracle that we all survive junior high school. I don’t have many memories of that time period in my life but the few that remain are not all happy ones. Friendships seemed as solid as a marsh or swamp: I never knew if one day I would be ‘in’ and the next day ‘out’ for no reason at all other than the other kids decided that was how things were to be. Negotiating all the changes that come at that age — you feel like a klutz, you act like a klutz and everyone else is a klutz — requires a lot of patience and faith that somehow, you’ll come out the other end of that age intact.

Nowadays eye-glasses frames are far better-looking than those that were around for children in the 1960s. How many of you adults remember having super-dorky looking frames or being the only child in your elementary school class to wear glasses? Woe to the child who was hearing-impaired and had a hearing aid. That child was even more set apart.

In fact, for anyone who has gone through a temporary or permanent facial difference — by injury or birth, he or she knows what it is to be looked at, questioned, and deemed as less of a person perhaps, as the ten people in the gospel story were before Jesus healed them, because they look ‘funny’. (I know what it is like to journey albeit very briefly in that world. I traveled there for a while in sixth grade, the result of a bike crash-faceplant on asphalt.) They know of the contradictory feelings of shame but also wanting the world to accept them on their terms. They want the world to see them not just for what the world thinks they are — a curious person who doesn’t measure up to society’s norm of standardized (and impossible) beauty — but God’s beloved child, complete, integral, and equal to everyone else.

There are countless other examples — the person minus a limb, the person with a cleft palate, the person with badly crossed eyes, the person rendered bald by chemotherapy, the person scarred by fire. We know them. We have seen them. We are them. They should not be defined by what we think they lack. They are as whole as we are, we are as whole as they are.

We need to teach our children and ourselves that God’s goodness resides in every child of God. The recent spate of teen and young adult suicides as the result of out-of-control bullying attest to a failure on our parts to instill a respect for every person God has created — instead, people demand that others they look like, talk like or act like the way they think they should. The death of each young person is a tragic loss of potential in the larger life of the community. In an odd way, those who have bullied these individuals to death are the ones lacking wholeness because they are too afraid to contemplate that someone might be different from the way they think they ought to be. You and I need to be alert to any instances of bullying, as well as conveying to our children that no matter what others might say, they are God’s beloved, they are whole persons and that bullying just is not an option. If they find themselves putting down others, they need to be invited to considered what is missing in their wholeness that they need to harm someone else.

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What gives a person wholeness? What restores them in body, mind and soul?

Jesus says in the gospel to the one person who came back to him giving thanks: ‘Your faith has made you whole.’ Faith, that which is as light and supple and as strong as silk. Not a set of beliefs, but confidence in God. Faith is having something and someone, God, to rely on. Faith, strong like bamboo, but also able to sway in a storm so that it won’t break. Knowing that you aren’t alone when the world wants to set you apart as different or incomplete.

In this case, when the world wants to cast us out because we are not ‘whole,’ or ‘clean,’ our faith can tell us, ‘No. Those are the world’s standards. Those are human-created standards. Those standards are not God’s standards. God created me and loves me for who I am, as I am.’ That faith in our innate goodness strengthens us as it also reminds us to return to the one who made, us God… and in our returning, to give thanks and express our gratitude.

The one healed person who returned to Jesus and gave thanks had faith. He returned to the one who showed him God’s love.

Maybe we’re not at a point where we can give God thanks, but we should always return to Jesus. As the words to hymn 692 say:

I head the voice of Jesus say,
“Come unto me and rest;

and in your weariness
lay down your head upon my breast.”

I came to Jesus, as I was,
so weary, worn, and sad;

I found in him a resting place,
and he has made me glad.”

Come to Jesus, as you are. Find in him your resting place. He will strengthen you so you can then give thanks for who you are — a wonderfully integrated, whole, restored and beloved child of God.

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Analysis of purity codes comes from William Countryman's Dirt, Greed and Sex, Fortress Press, 1988.