Luke 17:11-19
As your bulletin insert indicates, our gospel lesson this morning is taken from the seventeenth chapter of Luke. This is the first sign of any activity on the part of Jesus in about three chapters; these three chapters can generally be read by an individual in only 10 or fifteen minutes, but takes the church a whole ten weeks! No one has ever said the church ever moves quickly. Ten weeks of parables, brain teasers and word plays; ten weeks of double entendres; ten weeks of nuance and at times pure complexity. We’ve heard parables ranging in subject matter from lost sheep to dishonest stewards; from battle-ready generals to up-rooted mulberry trees. Finally we have a little action, something’s going on here! Jesus is walking and healing; he’s talking, but not in ways that are perplexing but in words that are direct and candid. And at first glance it appears that what Jesus is healing are the ten sick lepers; but look closer, look beyond the words. The true thing being healed in our Gospel this morning is complacency and ingratitude; the cure is mercy and a loving heart; the thing restored is a thankful soul.
So often our faith gets bogged down with the details. For the nine who went away to do what was ritualistically proper, they forgot the simple act of thanking the man who had shown mercy on them. The surprising thing in this story is that the one who went back to thank Jesus was a Samaritan, an outsider a lost sheep of the House of Israel. This is another time when we are presented with the difference in doing what is right in the eyes of ritual-- from what is right in the eyes of God. It is the outsider, the one who wasn’t supposed to know any better who knew better; and it was the nine insiders who should have known better. Yet Jesus still healed them; he was there. Jesus healed them all without question, whether ten came to thank him or only one.
In our Old Testament lesson from Second Kings we have another story of the baffling power of simplicity. Naaman, the wealthy and much accomplished Assyrian general, is also suffering from leprosy. After traveling for miles in hopes of a cure for his ailment, he is enraged by the simplicity of Elisha’s prescription to simply wash seven times in the Jordan’s streams. But Naaman heeds Elisha’s words and is healed, not through any death-defying antics or curious sacrifices, but by washing in the River Jordan—far more of a creek than what we think of as a river. After Naaman is cured he turns to go home back to Syria, back to his home in Aram, back to his life. For this outsider of the faith, our God was there.
Of course these vignettes of health, restoration, and the persistent presence of grace are about more about us than about Naaman, the nine who went away or the healed Samaritan. As always the story behind the story before us each Sunday is about our faithful response to those stories. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this very thing in her memoir, Leaving Church. She notes:
If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape. Neither I nor anyone else knows how these stories will turn out, since at this point they involve more blood than ink. The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.
That is why we’re here this morning. For all the exciting drama and miraculous turn-of events, we are here to witness that conversion of ink into flesh and blood. The ink is here in God’s Word before us and the blood flowing within us has great potential. That is why we continually come back to this building-- to witness the on-going conversion of not only our own lives but the lives of others, that even in the hardest spots of religion, that we can be inspired by the dramatic conversion of others when we aren’t able to see it; and in effect capitalizing on the great potential of our own flesh and blood.
Several weeks ago Salon magazine interviewed the English-born, Duke University physicist, Freeman Dyson. Now, be sure to know that Dyson is considered by some a genius and by others a quack, but for all his vocational life spent pondering quantum mechanics, he is a Christian. And when asked about the faith of his parents, loyal members of the Church of England, he states that they were practicing Christians but not believing Christians. And when the interviewer asked, What’s the difference? Dyson states: ‘A practicing Christian is somebody who lives a Christian life and likes to worship in common with a lot of other people and considers the church as a community to which to belong, but you don’t inquire closely as to what the others believe. Of course, some people take belief very seriously, and others don’t.’
I am persuaded, dear Church, that Professor Dyson creates a false dichotomy. The church is the Church because of those who practice Christianity and because of those who believe in Christianity—there is no difference in the levels of our membership to Christ’s body. We exist not in spite of these two groups, but because of both believers and practitioners; for so often and so very easily these two roles become switched whether it be through tragedy or joy; family crisis or individual angst; agnostic uncertainty or fervent certainty. The Church is still here because we are still here in all our various conditions, broken, fractured or whole.
That is why we need you and all the many gifts that you bring to us. We need your time and talent, yes absolutely, your treasure in order to make this place—this community of faith—present and available for ALL. This place exists whether its for the one Samaritan or for nine of God’s most religiously correct.
This morning at the 9 o’clock service we will bless loaves of bread and volunteers from among you will take that blessed bread and will give it back to you. For those who receive it, you have two options: 1) you can say thanks and eat you fresh bread or 2) you can take that break and in thanksgiving let that bread be a catalyst for conversion, your conversion. Allow the ink of God’s Word, and the bread of life, to convert you, your blood, into the blood of Christ Church’s mission.
Be converted with great haste and with much joy and return thanks to God for the great mercy shown to us in the life of Jesus our Lord and brother, who is the head of the Church and author of our salvation.
AMEN
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (San Francisco: Harper Collins ,2007), p. 107.
