First United Methodist Church of Reno

¹These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. ….

⁴Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ⁵Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ⁶Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. ⁷But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

¹¹On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. ¹²As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, ¹³they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” ¹⁴When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. ¹⁵Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. ¹⁶He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. ¹⁷Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? ¹⁸Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

There are two classic ways to encounter a stranger – someone who’s radically different from you or me. The French existentialist philosopher^³, Jean-Paul Sartre, claimed that when we encounter a stranger, we come upon a “look” that we all too often find threatening, because this “other” shocks us into being forced to redefine who we think we are – the perceived threat becomes directed at our own sense of identity and freedom. It led Sartre to say, “Hell is other people.”^⁴ The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, asserts that when we encounter a stranger we come upon a “face.”^⁵ A face is nothing more than the expression of the way another person is in the world – of her or his way of relating to or experiencing the world. The face of a stranger may shock us, Levinas says, but it’s our one chance of becoming truly human.

You might say that our very salvation is wrapped up in the face of a stranger. We will never find the ultimate meaning and purpose of life by just looking deeper into ourselves. We’ll find it in encountering the face of the other. Think about it. That reality begins to happen very soon after the moment of our birth as we gaze into the eyes of our mother, then our father, and all of those who follow. That’s the very beginning of life. It’s the appeal of the one who is first a stranger – but then known, trusted, and maybe even loved – that gives you and me the opportunity to be free, to know right from wrong, …to be fully human.

Those of us who’ve been given the privilege to hold leadership positions in this church want to talk with you all about this encounter with the “other” among us. More than that, though, we want to ask you, “What would it mean for us to welcome this one into the inclusiveness of our fellowship?” Point 4 of “The 8-Point Welcoming Statement of Progressive Christianity” states that…

By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to): believers and agnostics, conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, women and men, those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, those of all races and cultures, those of all classes and abilities, those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope.^⁶

We invite you to join us here in the sanctuary, right after the worship service, to be part of the dialogue. We want to hear from you.

This is what makes our story here in Luke of the ten healed lepers so compelling for us this morning. It’s the story of Jesus looking into the faces of ten people who were considered shameful and were excluded by the community. In their alienation they are people with no faces. They can’t look up. They can’t look out. They’re even required by the strict customs of their day to hide their faces, to ring a bell if others should come too close to them, and cry out loud a warning: “Unclean! Unclean!” Unrecognized by the community, they have no story. They experience a kind of living death. As the lines from Dante’s Inferno speak for them:

I did not die, and yet I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
What I became, deprived of life and death.^⁷

Jesus calls them out and away from their shame, isolation and hiddenness into recognition, communication, communion…community. Jesus gives them faces, the very gift of life.

What do you suppose the faces of today’s “lepers” look like? The fourth point of The Center for Progressive Christianity’s “8-Point Welcoming Statement” suggests a partial list. But surely it would include that homeless man – that I often see seated at the edge of our parking lot under the redwood tree – who spends his day rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself in a desperate attempt to calm his dementia. Surely it’s the alcoholic whose presence is smelled before it’s seen. We might also include the elderly migrant worker whose back is bent from season after season of labor in the vineyard, or the refugee who lives in fear that the next knock on the door might come from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.^⁸

Would we include ourselves on this list? Who among us hasn’t felt at least some measure of helplessness in the face of the awful malaise of depression? Isn’t there something in each of us that we think would make others turn away if they only knew about it? Maybe it’s just something from our past; but maybe it’s a secret compulsion that, try as we might, we just can’t seem to overcome – like a festering skin disease it would repulse others if we lifted up our bandages. The fact is that we are all lepers. Each of us stands in need of the healing touch of the rabbi, the priest, Jesus. Maybe we ought to look for those moments of healing together, instead of distancing ourselves from each other’s diseases. We need to look to the welfare of the city – and all of its citizens who live there – because in its welfare we will find our own.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu – better known now by the name of Mother Teresa^⁹ – said later in her life:

I think the work of the Church in this developed and rich Western Hemisphere is more difficult than in Calcutta, South Yemen, or other areas where the needs of the people are reduced to the clothes needed to ward off the cold, or a dish of rice to curb their hunger – anything that will show them that someone loves them. In the West the problems the people have go much deeper; the problems are in the depths of their hearts.^¹⁰

The Samaritans were a test case of the gospel’s inclusiveness in those early years, and yet their positive response to Jesus’ reconciling invitation paved the way for the church’s mission to people of all nations and cultures, all races and religions. They, and those like them, ought to challenge our conventional answer to the question, “Who is welcome in the Kingdom of God? Who belongs…and who doesn’t?” One of the lepers returns to Jesus, knowing full well whom he should really thank for his new life. Behind him lay a half-life of ostracism in an “antisociety” of the unclean. In front of him lies…what? He’s still a Samaritan in a world where “clean” and “unclean” continue to operate as categories that will exclude him. And yet he is unshakeable in his faith that he has received nothing less than a gift of new life.

A story appeared in the British press over twenty-five years ago of a royal wedding at Westminster Abbey. It was attended by kings and queens, heads of state, government officials and ambassadors from around the world. Although there were many Roman Catholics and high-church Protestants present, only one visitor turned to reverence the Christian altar: the ambassador from Japan.

There were jewels glinting on well-manicured fingers and flashing from ear lobes, medals softly clinking on the chests of spectacularly uniformed military officers, gold chains drawn across tailored suits, designer dresses of elegant cut and pure color, shoes of the softest leather, muddled thoughts plagued by jet-lag, the echoing grandeur of the abbey sanctuary, worries about civil war back home or from the country next door, termites in a guest house, wayward children, the unbearable itch on one person’s big toe that could not be scratched without removing a shoe and releasing an unwelcome fragrance to the prince standing at her elbow.

Before the wedding rite, one gentlemen bows before making his way to his seat. One out of a thousand? One out of ten? Only one of those who were healed in Luke’s story offers the proper response to Jesus’ gift of life. All ten, surely, are in his debt; but being “in debt” to us who live in market economies means that something has to be paid back. Can a gift of life be paid for? All that we need to do is stop, come to our senses in the present moment, turn and see Jesus. That’s all the difference between the narrow and the wide way, the exclusive and the inclusive way: turning around and seeing the face of Jesus – who sees us.

1 Prior to the Babylonian conquest, a prophet named Jeremiah castigated the rulers and people of Jerusalem for their misplaced confidence. He warned them not to count on God to protect them. For some time they’d refused to change their ways – particularly with regard to their acceptance of false gods in the city. This message earned Jeremiah imprisonment and severe beatings. When political miscalculations led to the deportation of the city’s elite in 597 BCE (but still ten years before the city was utterly destroyed and the whole populace sent into exile), Jeremiah’s message from God changed. It became a message of hope.

2 As has been mentioned before, Samaritans were seen as “half-breeds” by the Israelites of the first century. They weren’t thought of as Jews nor Gentiles. They may have some of the Jewish religion “right” – they accepted the Torah, the first five books of scripture, but they didn’t accept the writings of the prophets or the psalms. Worse, they didn’t worship in Jerusalem. So the Jews were taught to avoid having any dealings at all with these people. Jesus, however, had a more progressive understanding of the word “reconciliation” – of what it means to truly welcome the outsider into the neighborhood, into the community.

This story is far too similar to the story of Naaman in 2 Kings ( 5: 1-17) to just be a coincidence: lepers come to a famous holy man for healing – then it was Elisha, here it’s Jesus – and instead of doing something dramatic, he simply tells them to go and show themselves to the priest.

One other thing: of all the diseases in the ancient world, leprosy was the most feared and misunderstood. Even though, for some, it may have been the flesh-eating horror that we now call Hansen’s disease, the term leprosy also came to be applied to all kinds of skin diseases – some that were curable. Eczema, psoriasis, shingles and even hives often fell under the feared category of leprosy; oddly enough the term was also used to describe mildew in clothing and on the walls of homes. So pervasive was its impact on the people of the ancient world, though, that two whole chapters in the Book of Leviticus (13 and 14) gives detailed instructions on how to determine whether or not a person or an object is leprous. They also describe the rites of purification for those who claim to be cured – sacrifices that include birds, lambs and offerings of precious woods and spices. Some of the rituals even extend to the purification, not only of clothing, but houses. But that’s another story.

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

October 14, 2007