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This ought to be the easiest of sermons to preach. As a friend of mine said about his sermon on this morning's Gospel reading, "At long last we're off those texts from Luke's Gospel that keep telling us about our obligations to give to the poor and the dangers of wealth for the soul. The subject today is thanksgiving, and it ought to permit a sermon about how wonderful it is [that God has] blessed [us] with plenty of food, gracious homes, lovely clothes, and a free country. "It ought to permit a sermon of thanks and praise for our blessings, touching just lightly on the importance of giving expression to that thanks: a little prayer now and then, a little bill in the offering envelope, [a note to remind you to thank grandma for the sweater she gave you last Christmas]. Yes, this should be a sermon that prepares the way for a good meal and an afternoon enjoying the comfort and plenty earned during the week." That would be a pleasant sermon to preach, but there's only one trouble. The lessons we've just heard won't support such a sermon. Throughout the Old Testament, we read a lot about those on the inside, on the one hand, those who love God and keep his Word, and those on the outside, on the other, those who worship other gods and who are not part of God's chosen people. But if we go back far enough, back to Abraham, we are reminded that when God blessed Abraham and made Abraham and his seed the people of God, it was for the purpose of creating a holy people all right, but a holy people who would go out from the holy people to bring those who are on the outside, in. Abraham and his seed were blessed, not just to be a chosen people whose blessing permits them to prosper amongst themselves, but calls them to go out to be a blessing to all the peoples of the world. And it's with this in mind that in this morning's Gospel reading we find Jesus, child of Abraham, traveling "through the borderlands of Samaria and Galilee," out among people whom the people of Israel considered misfits, unrighteous foreigners. And as he was entering a village, ten men called to him "from afar," Luke says. They called "from afar" because, as outsiders, as lepers, as men who were not even allowed to live inside a city because of their uncleanness, they knew to keep their distance. It was presumptuous of them even to speak to Jesus, a child of Abraham. But Luke says that Jesus sees them, and he stops and listens to their plea. "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us," they cry across the wide distance they've cautiously kept. And Jesus responds, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And "as they went," Luke says, "they were made clean. And one of them, finding himself clean, turned back with shouts of praise to God. He threw himself down at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. And Jesus said, 'Were not all ten made clean? Was no one found returning to give praise to God except this foreigner?' And Jesus said to the man, 'Stand up, and go your way; your faith has healed you.'" Because of this final exchange, many consider the point of this story to be thanksgiving. But what if the point of Luke's story is not the one who returns to give thanks, or at least not only him? What if the point of the story is the ten who were healed, and Jesus? "They had found each other, these ten lepers," says Steve Phifer. They had found each other, and Jesus. "They had no one else. Their families had turned them out; they had to. It was only right. [They were unclean.] Their villages had sent them away; they had to. And now they had found each other, [because they had to do that as well, because they had no one else]. "They drifted from garbage heap to garbage heap, finding only rags to wear and scraps to eat. [Wherever they traveled, their scent] announced their approach and people scattered like a beaten army before a conquering foe, and always with the cry, 'Unclean! Unclean!' "The sight of healthy people running in such terror from this rag-tag mob was ironic. The ten lepers had no strength; they were practically starving. There weren't even enough fingers and toes and hands and feet to go around. They were human refuse, a moving trash heap." The norms of righteousness named them polluted, unfit for society, so they were made to fend for themselves. So they had found each other; they had no one except themselves. "But somewhere along the way they heard about a man who did not run from lepers. He was a teacher and a healer," they had heard, "and he was coming their way. As he approached, they met him but stood at the appropriate distance. And they lifted up their voices, and said, 'Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.' "Jesus looked at the ten. He saw them, not their disease. He saw wives without husbands, homes without fathers.... He saw men whose dreams had crumbled within them as their bodies crumbled on the outside. He saw helplessness and despair. "And when he saw them, he said said to them, 'Go show yourselves to the priests.' And it happened that, as they went, they were cleansed. "This man who did not run told them what to do - go, he said, not to another dump, but to the temple, go to the priests, [go to those on the inside and show them you are a child of God, too.] ...And as they went, something new began to happen. Crippled feet began to tingle and burn, not with pain but with new growth where stumps had been. Fingers and hands and whole arms began to swing in the wind as strength, long forgotten, returned to limbs no longer wasted by disease.... "Ten men began to strip away rags they no longer needed or deserved. Nine of them ran on to the village, but one stopped and looked on at his former colleagues as they disappeared around corners and into streets that led them back to life. This one turned and looked back at Jesus. "'If Jesus hadn't met them on the road, if he hadn't fearlessly spoken to them,' he must have imagined, 'their lives would never have changed. If it hadn't been for you, Jesus,' he must have thought, 'I would still be sick and an outcast.'" Surely Jesus must have been pleased that one thought to return and thank him, but I rather think that this story is more about the healings and Jesus than anything else, more even than about the giving of thanks for blessings received. We can easily give thanks for material blessings, because we have so many of them. But can we understand what it is like to thank God when we don't have them? Can we understand what it is like to give thanks for spiritual blessings in the absence of material blessings. And why? "The people giving thanks and praise in this morning's lessons are not materially blessed like us," my friend reminds us. "They are poor, outcasts, misfits. Ruth was a woman (never a good thing to be in the Bible), a widow (strike two in the ancient world), and a Moabite (the Israelites hated the Moabites). Strike three. She had to support herself picking up grain the harvesters had missed in the fields - lower than a migrant farm worker. And the one leper who returned to give thanks out of the ten who had been healed was the Samaritan: again, a person the Jews regarded as a foreigner and a religious traitor, someone who should not even be spoken to." This is why I think today's readings, rather than being primarily about thanksgiving for material things, are more about the kingdom of God, more about that kingdom which Jesus assures us is among us and within us. I rather think the story is more about the spiritual blessing of faith, about how the kingdom is lived among us in the person of the misfit from Moab, lived in Jesus, that child of Ruth who "takes up the weak out of the dust, and lifts up the poor from the ashes" to "set them with the princes, with the princes of his people," and who "makes the woman of a childless house to be the mother of children." (Psalm 113) Jesus the misfit is forever telling us, all of us, "Rise and go; your faith has made you well." That is the good news, not only back on the border of Samaria and Galilee, but here in Colorado Springs. In Matthew's Gospel, for example (15:28), as in today's story in Luke, Jesus is far from Judea, near the region of Tyre and Sidon, in a land foreign to the people of God. And there he is approached by a Canaanite woman who asks him to have mercy on her daughter, who is sick. They were misfits, pagans, folks good Jews weren't supposed to have anything to do with. Like the lepers in today's Gospel. And Jesus tells the woman that he came only to the insiders, "to the House of Israel." But she has a need she believes Jesus can meet, so she persists. And Jesus says to this outsider, "Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted." And when Jesus meets the outsider from Rome, Cornelius the centurion (another person all good Jews despised), it is the outsider's faith, Jesus insists, that heals his servant, a faith, Jesus says, that is greater than any faith he has seen among the insiders in Israel. Then there's that other misfit Jesus meets on the road one day, the leper we find in Mark's Gospel, who falls on his knees right in front of Jesus. It was a bold, presumptuous act. And he begs Jesus, "Sir, if you are willing, you can change my life. You can make me fit for society, fit for human companionship again, fit for love." And Jesus, "filled with compassion" - that is, Jesus, suffering with the man; Jesus, "filled with warm indignation," the new English Bible says - Jesus, filling himself with the man's own suffering, indignant at a world that would dismiss or ignore a child of God in such a way, Jesus breaks all the rules and throws caution to the wind. And in the Name and Person of God, he reaches out and touches the untouchable, and so embraces him, embraces the unclean, the outcast, the dying, and draws him into fellowship with himself, into a place of respite and healing. Which brings us to the best known of all passages of Scripture for Christians: "For God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son, so that anyone, from whatever nation or language or peoples, anyone who believes in him, anyone who cherishes and trusts the love he brings, should not perish, but should have life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved." God sent his Son so that all who believe in him and respond to him might be "in," might be inside the grace and love of the fellowship of God and his people. That's the Good News we come here to hear every Sunday, the good news we are to share as Jesus shared it. And as Paul shared it. "God's word is not chained," Paul wrote to Timothy from prison. "I am chained, chained in prison because of the Gospel I preach. But God's Word is not chained. And my purpose," Paul adds, "is to send that Word out from here to those who are really chained, spiritually chained, in order to set them free." To free them like Jesus. Like Jesus, who hears ten lepers calling to him "from afar" and who notices them, not their disease. Like Jesus, who reached out to touch the leper, and so brought him into fellowship with himself. Like Jesus who, when he met the ten lepers, saw ten wives without husbands and ten homes without fathers. Like Jesus who saw men whose dreams had crumbled within them as their bodies crumbled on the outside. Like Jesus who saw helplessness and despair, and then told the ten, foreigners and Jews alike, to go their way, told them to dare to go to the temple and to show themselves to the priests as persons, not as problems, to show themselves as children of God, as part of the fellowship of the saints, not as pariahs. And on their way, Luke tells us, their chains fell from them, and children of God they became. Thanksgiving for the spiritual blessing of faith like that is what today's readings are about. Not thanksgiving for material possessions and prosperity, but thanksgiving for confidence in God's assurance that God loves us as we are and where we are. The primary point of the story of the ten lepers is found not alone in the one who returns, but in the ten who were healed through their encounter with Jesus, healed through their encounter with the One who "takes up the weak out of the dust, and lifts up the poor from the ashes" to "set them with the princes, with the princes of his people," and who "makes the woman of a childless house to be the mother of children." It's like the encounter with Jesus in church one day my friend tells about: Like many Episcopal Church parishes in old blue-collar neighborhoods, St. Andrew's, a big-city parish in a city I used to know, is one of those places that may seem to some to be collapsing along with the rest of Western civilization. Since 1929, it has never been solvent. The neighborhood has now largely changed around it. Now it is left to the blacks and the Latinos, while many of its former upscale members have fled to pursue the "American Dream" in other places. But we went anyway, and we found ourselves in a congregation of maybe sixty people: wild-looking black teenagers who, we discovered at coffee hour, started coming to St. Andrew's as little children when they followed behind the parade through the neighborhood at the parish's Corpus Christ festival; old white couples, faithful through forty or fifty years of urban change; homosexuals; the lonely; the odd - a full catch of humble humanity. Humblest of all, there were a dozen or so severely mentally disabled adults from the group home across the street. The Peace - you should be warned in case you decide to go some day - is passed with a vengeance at St. Andrew's. Everyone hugs everyone. It went on for an incredible five or ten minutes, and we found ourselves in the midst of it. We found ourselves in the arms of Herman, a retarded man of maybe 40 with the tiny head of a child. We also found out later that Herman, who wanted us to zip up his fly for him, always bursts into tears when he receives communion. They said that Herman has spoken an intelligible word only once: "happy," at the moment of his baptism. Happy there at St. Andrew's; happy in the Body of Christ's Church. And when we left St. Andrew's, we realized that at the Eucharistic banquet of Christ, the Peace of the Lord is not an intrusive "hello" among friends and brothers and sisters, relatives and rich neighbors, but a radical encounter with the depths of the reality of man and of God, a risk - a humble embrace with Herman, a humble embrace with the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind. Who is the leper? Who are the poor, the sick, the crippled, the lame and the blind invited into fellowship with God in the Bible? They are you and me. That's what Ruth and Luke and Paul are all getting at this morning. They're talking about the fellowship of the saints, about the way it is with God and man, about the fact that we are the poor, the blind, the lame, who are all invited to this Table here this morning, invited to trust God enough that we can come with everyone whom God has invited. All meetings with Jesus, both those in the Bible and those here in this parish church this morning, are radical encounters with the depths of the reality of man and of God. The encounter of God with the calloused hands and calloused hearts of human beings - that's what we see at every communion rail. At every communion rail we see the encounter of God with soft hands and soft heads and soft hearts, the encounter of God with broken legs and broken hearts, the encounter of God with joyful spirits and broken spirits. We find some who bounce up for God's bread and wine with the legs and hearts of children, and some who wish they could, but who now can hardly make it into the building and into a pew. We find some who come with the joy of a new marriage or a new child, and some with souls heavy with secrets and sin, all coming just as we are to a common feast - one bread and one cup, no seat higher or lower than another - all coming with the hope that here at God's Table we will find God's healing and blessing, just as the ten along the road did. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |