Leapin' Lepers!

Scriptures:      Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7, Psalm 66:1-12

                        2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19

Today’s Gospel reading is a deceptively simple healing story.  We’re told that Jesus was in a border area between Samaria and Galilee, where he encountered ten lepers.   They begged him for healing, and Jesus told them to go and show themselves to the priest.   All ten went off toward the Temple, but one returned to thank Jesus.  And we’re told that one was a Samaritan.  And Jesus said, “Didn’t I heal ten of you guys.  Where did the other nine go?  Was none found to return and give praise to God, except this foreigner?”  And then Jesus sends the Samaritan on his way, telling him, “Get up and go on your way, your faith has made you well.”

Many sermons on this text begin and end with the importance of saying “thank you”.  And that certainly is a major part of the story, as it ends with Jesus commending and lifting up the one healed leper who thanked him.   Gratitude is a wonderful and appropriate response to God’s blessings on us, a response that seems increasingly rare in our world.  The opposite of gratitude is entitlement, the feeling that somehow God or life or the world owes us.  Entitlement is an attitude that will always leave us feeling disappointed, will always let us down, because no matter how blessed we are, an attitude of entitlement somehow tells us that God or life or the world owes us even more.   An attitude of thanksgiving – giving thanks – by contrast, takes nothing for granted, but recognizes that all that we have and all that we are, are gifts from God.  To borrow from a sermon from former Bridesburg Presbyterian pastor Rev Scott Bohr, thanksgiving leads to thanks-living – living in such a way as to speak and act from a place of gratitude, making our every word and action a thanksgiving to God.

I could end the sermon here, and we’d all get out earlier, but I’d like to unpack this story a bit – the very fact that it’s so short can lead us to give it a quick glance and move on. But maybe there’s more here than meets the eye, and so I’d like to spend a little more time with our Gospel.

As I read this story, one thing that jumps out is that this story involves lots of borders and boundaries. There's a geographical boundary, as we're told that Jesus is in the border region between Samaria and Galilee. There's the boundary imposed by the disease contracted by the lepers - they know to keep their distance, and Jesus doesn't step forward to touch them. There's a boundary of ritual purity, as the lepers are told to show themselves to the priests so that they can be declared ritually clean and re-integrated into society - a bit like the modern practice of requiring a doctor's note before a sick child can return to school. And there's a social boundary between the nine lepers who are presumably Jewish and the one whom we're told is a Samaritan. While the disease of leprosy created a "solidarity of survival" among the ten lepers across the Jewish/Samaritan social boundary, they would go their separate ways after being healed...after all, the Samaritan wouldn't have much reason to show himself to the priest of a Temple that excluded him and his people.

While Jesus allowed the lepers to keep their physical distance, he crossed the border between Jews and Samaritans by healing both. Both the nine Jews and the one Samaritan demonstrated their faith by making their way to see the priest.  The Samaritan reciprocated Jesus’ boundary crossing by returning to praise God loudly and to thank Jesus.

While the disease of leprosy is for us a relic of bygone days, separation of infected persons from society has been used over the centuries as a public health measure to control the spread of diseases that were not readily treatable by the medical science of the day. Some of our most senior members and friends may remember, in the days before modern antibiotics, quarantines being imposed on those who contracted highly contagious but difficult to treat diseases such as tuberculosis. More recently, in the mid-1980's, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when there was concern that the disease might be airborne, there was panicked discussion in some circles about imposing quarantines and even more invasive measures (tattoos, internment camps) on those who contracted the disease. And children are asked to stay home from school if they have head lice or ringworm or certain communicable diseases such as chickenpox and mumps….I still remember staying home from school with chickenpox and mumps when I was five or so – mostly I remember how achy and feverish I felt, and how grateful I was for parents to care for me - and now that I’m pushing sixty, my doctor tells me that I should get a vaccine for shingles so that my long-ago chickenpox doesn’t return to pay me a visit.

The thing about diseases of this sort – leprosy in Jesus’ day, TB, head lice, ringworm, chickenpox – is that beyond the physical effect of making us feel lousy, these diseases also isolate us.  Now, for a kid with head lice, a few days home from school may not seem like the end of the world.  But for someone with leprosy in Jesus’ day, disease meant exclusion from society, with only other lepers to provide community.  So in healing the ten lepers, Jesus was not only freeing them from physical disease, but was restoring them to their families and their communities.

While quarantine may in some cases have been an advisable public health measure against the spread of disease, there are also circumstances in which people are treated like lepers based not on health status, but on nationality, ethnicity, or other demographic markers, as if by possessing these characteristics they will infect society.  During World War II, many Americans of Japanese descent were sent to internment camps, because of concerns about loyalty during wartime.  George Takei, who played Mr Sulu on Star Trek, lived with his family in such a camp when he was just 5 years old. At the time, it likely seemed like a strong but necessary measure to preserve national security.  Today we look back on these internment camps in horror.  We currently have similar camps along the Mexican border and in other places, and I suspect some day we’ll be looking back on them with a similar level of horror.

Jesus healed the lepers, not only ridding them of disease but restoring them to community.  It was the Samaritan, a double outsider both by leprosy and by his status as a Samaritan, who returned to thank Jesus.  And we see this pattern throughout the Gospels:  the good religious people whom we’d expect to respond to Jesus are scandalized if not enraged.  It is the outsiders – the Samaritan leper, the centurion at the cross – who respond to Jesus. And in responding, these outsiders became insiders to the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed.

Episcopal priest, theologian, and author Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book The Preaching Life, speaks of the difference between the nine lepers and the one leper in this way:  the nine lepers are acting on a sense of duty.  They do what Jesus tells them to do, which they know is in accordance with the guidelines of their society. The Samaritan with his loud and dramatic expression of gratitude, by contrast, acts like a man in love.  And this may be a word of challenge for us.  I think we all know what it is to act on duty.  But to be in love with God, head-over-heels in love with God – what would that feel like?  I’m not calling on us to try to conjure up emotions out of thin air – I know I’m pretty emotionally flat most of the time, so I’d be in a hopeless position if salvation depended on emotionalism.  But the history of our faith is that of God being in love with us, constantly willing our good and refusing to give up on us when we mess up.  How would our lives change if we knew how much God loves us?

In Jesus’ day, the religious authorities acted as gatekeepers, separating unclean from clean.  The church throughout history has often played that role as well.  This week the LGBT community celebrated National Coming Out Day.  The LGBT community has often been treated as social lepers – and historically the church led the way in ostracizing LGBT persons – but in coming out, many have educated family, friends and community that LGBT persons are their family members, their friends, their coworkers, their fellow congregants – and are not to be hated and feared.   As I said, throughout history, the church has often been a gatekeeper against LGBT inclusion, but there have also been those Kairos moments, those God moments, in which the church has welcomed and empowered those previously considered social lepers, similar to those Kairos moments in early church history in which Gentiles were welcomed by St Paul and others into the fellowship of the church.  The UCC, along with our predecessor denominations, has a storied history of welcoming people into fellowship and leadership across lines of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

I’d like to close with some words from our reading from 2 Timothy – because they add something to the Gospel reading, and because they’re just too good to let go.  Paul goes to the heart of what has defined his ministry:  “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendent of David – that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship.” Paul speaks of being in chains. “But,” Paul says, “the word of God is not chained.” The word of God is not chained – despite the church’s efforts over the century to chain it, to impose borders and boundaries on who is welcome in the pew and at the table.  In today’s Gospel reading, the healing word of God was open to Jewish and Gentile lepers alike. 

Paul goes on:

“The saying is sure:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful--
for he cannot deny himself.”

God remains faithful, because God cannot deny himself.  It is God’s nature to be faithful, even when we mess up.  And the word of God is not chained. May we proclaim the unchained good news of our faithful God to all, not fearing to cross the boundaries of our society.  Amen.