A Whole New Life

A Whole New Life

Text: Luke 17:11-19

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 10-9-2016)

          As a child, my grandmother lived in a one bedroom studio, adjoined to our house by a breezeway. I would walk into her kitchen and smell the sweet aroma of apples simmering on the stove and hear the crackle of chicken frying in a cast iron skillet. Those are delicious memories, to be sure.

          On a less pleasant note, my grandmother was a real stickler for good manners. These included writing a thank-you note for any and every gift my brother and I ever received. There are few more tortuous tasks for a ten-year-old who wants to go outside and play baseball than having to sit down in his grandmother’s living room and compose a thank-you note.  

Some read the story of the healing of the ten lepers as the definitive biblical justification for writing thank-you notes. A nice, Southern reading of the story tells of ten lepers whom Jesus healed, only one of whom had the decency to write a thank-you note and hand deliver it, while the other nine get so caught up in the remarkable moment of their healing that they temporarily forget their manners. That might be a fair reading of this story if the story stopped a few verses before it does.

The keys to this story are not just paying attention to the last verses but also to the first ones. Luke makes a point of telling us where Jesus is. He is on his way to Jerusalem, the holy city of the people of God, but his GPS has dangerously malfunctioned. Luke says that Jesus is traveling through the borderlands of Jewish and Samaritan territory, in other words, Jesus is traveling through a bad part of town. No Jew of good repute travels here, visits here, or lives here. Not only a location full of filthy Samaritans, wanna-be Jews according to those who live in Jerusalem; it is where filthy lepers live in a refugee camp. “Someone fix the GPS and get us out of here now,” should be what Jesus tells his followers.  

Jesus makes no such detour. He does not do what many of us do when someone asks us for some money when we are walking along the mall in Charlottesville; we pretend not to hear their requests or we simply cast our eyes in another direction. Jesus sees the lepers, hears the lepers, and tells these ten shouting souls to go where they should not go – to go and visit the priests, even though Jewish laws tells them that they are ritually unclean and have no business there. All ten obey Jesus, at least initially, and on their way to visit the priests, all ten are healed.

This would be a great way to end the story. If ended here, faith in Jesus would lead to being healed of the most dreadful disease. Luke, though, does not end the story here. Faith does involve obedience says Jesus but it involves far more than that. All ten lepers are obedient, all ten believe that Jesus has the capacity to heal their broken bodies and all ten trust Jesus when he tells them to go see the priests and all ten are healed on the way.

I say “all ten,” but listen again. Only nine lepers fully obey Jesus. One leper finally does not. He does not go to see the priest as clearly instructed by Jesus; he turns back, falls at the feet of Jesus, and sings the Doxology, sings praise to God, with thanksgiving in every breath.

And, oh, by the way, says Luke, this healed leper who turns back in thanks to God is a Samaritan. He is the second Good Samaritan we meet in Luke. To add insult to injury, Jesus says to the healed, thankful, good, Samaritan leper, “Your faith has saved you.” If there could be anything more offensive than the idea of a “good” Samaritan, it had to be the notion of a “saved” Samaritan.

Another way to translate the last words of Jesus to the Samaritan leper is:  “Your faith has made you whole.” Remember, all ten lepers go, at least initially, as Jesus commands. All ten lepers are healed. Only one, though, is made whole. All his life, the Samaritan leper has been isolated not only by his gruesome disease, but by his religious and ethnic identity. He has never had to wonder what people thought of him and even after being cured of his leprosy, he never will. He has been doubly cursed all his life: a leper and a Samaritan.

When this “good Samaritan” runs back to Jesus, falls on his face, and shouts “Alleluia,” he knows better than most that faith and gratitude live in the same house. The Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, once said, “What else can we say to what God gives us but stammer praise?” (Church Dogmatics, III/3, p. 564.) Anne Lamott says her two favorite prayers are, in the morning, “Help me. Help me. Help me,” and at bedtime, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Faith and gratitude are housemates to be sure. Grace and gratitude are close kin. Granny, you were right!

Look again at this story. It surely links grace and gratitude, but it dares to take us to a deeper place. In a marvelous reading of this story, Debie Thomas writes, “What does [the Samaritan leper’s] otherness enable him to see that his nine companions do not? He sees that his identity—his truest place of belonging – lies at Jesus’ feet. He sees that Jesus’ arms are wide enough to embrace all of who he is – leper, foreigner, exile. Ten lepers dutifully stand at a distance and call Jesus ‘Master’. One draws close, dares intimacy, and finds his lasting home, clinging to Jesus for a better and more permanent citizenship” (Christian Century, Sept. 28, 2016, p. 20).

What do you suppose happens on Day 2, when the healed, thankful, joyful, no-longer-a leper Samaritan gets up off the floor, heads home, and awakens to a new day? From the outside, little has changed. He is still a hated Samaritan. Like the other nine, he has been cured of his leprosy, but he has not been cured of his “Samaritanism.” Yes, he is healed, but you know how suspicious people are about germs and sickness. Surely some wonder if this is just a temporary healing and they had better keep their distance from him. So, the next day, he is still the one always on the outside looking in.

Tell that to the oh-so thankful, no-longer-a-leper Samaritan. Tell that to the one who disobeys Jesus, who stops in his tracks on his way to the priests and return to Jesus to sing the Doxology. He wakes the next day to know the power of God in Jesus, to know that even if he will never belong in the Jerusalem temple or be accepted in “healed,” polite society, he belongs to God, he is a beloved child of God no matter what he looks like, no matter where he lives, no matter what label people put on him before they ever know him.

The oh-so thankful, no-longer-a-leper Samaritan is found wherever exclusion and solation rule, where “not welcome here” signs are posted in concrete. He is found not heading to church, but standing in solidarity in the bad side of town with all who are the cast-offs in the world. He is not deterred by other’s hatefulness. He is the one teaching praise songs to people who have been told that their sexuality is distorted or are wearing the wrong shade of skin, those who weigh too much or who learn in ways not considered “normal,” and sadly, have sometimes been told these things by the church. He is the one who knows that the wideness of God’s mercy is far more expansive than you and I can begin to imagine, much less to practice.

Flat on his face, with his mouth wide open, the story ends with a disobedient, oh-so-thankful, no-longer-a-leper Samaritan being blessed by Jesus and getting up to lead a whole new life. I wish I knew his name. I wish I could tell him how his story inspires me. I wish I could also move beyond all the broken places within me and be blessed by Jesus with a whole new life.

If I read this story right, maybe a whole new life awaits anyone daring enough to follow the disobedient, thankful, no-longer-a leper Samaritan back to the feet of Jesus, back to the God who makes all things, makes all people, makes every last one of us new.

AMEN