Luke 17:11-19                                Susan J. Barnes

St. Matthew’s, Austin                            October 10, 2004

Merrill and I went to Clergy Conference this week at Camp Allen. It was a great, learning time, with lectures and workshops led by outstanding teachers, including Professor Michael White of UT, who has spoken in our great teachers’ series. The Rev. Roger Paynter, Pastor of First Baptist Church, Austin and professor at ETSS, gave a lecture on preaching that ended with a sermon he wrote on the lesson we just heard. That sermon was a masterpiece, which I wished at the time I could simply read to you. My own reflection on this gospel has little to do with his, finally, but I want to credit Roger for opening me up to many different ways of thinking about this short, very rich episode.

The story of Jesus’ healing of the ten lepers had great power in its own time, and resonates strongly in our own. Today I want to focus on three lessons drawn from the story.

The first lesson is about relationships, about community.

The second is about recognition—the recognition of God in Christ, and of the need for God’s help.

The third lesson is about God’s response, incarnate in Jesus Christ: compassion, love, healing, and reconciliation.

First, relationships. Why relationships? Because in first century Palestine your relationships defined you. Your identity as a person lay in your tribe, your family. Those groups were the building blocks of community life, but they were barriers, too. Your class, religion, culture kept within narrowly drawn boundaries. Jesus had a kingdom vision that obliterated those boundaries—even the definition of family. You remember that, earlier in Luke, Jesus declared "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it." Jesus led his followers in prayer to "our daddy", wrapping everyone in the same huge family of love, with one common parent. And in his ministry—particularly as told in Luke--Jesus was constantly reaching out to bring the marginalized into that family, the only family—God’s family.

No one was more marginalized than a leper. Their disease shattered their relationships. Lepers were outcast from their families, from all society. Even in the 20^th century, we sent lepers to live in separate colonies, isolated from all but their own. In Jesus’ day they were exiled without care, set to wander and to beg. So it was that Jesus met them on the outskirts of a village. They were forbidden to enter.

Lepers traveled together. In a society defined by relationships—by community, the only community that they had was that of other lepers. Their disease forged a bond among them that overrode the usual divisions. So it was that among the ten was a Samaritan, a man whom Jews would normally have shunned. Ironically, his leprosy brought him as an equal into relationship with Jewish lepers.

The lepers recognized their need for healing. Their disease circumscribed their entire existence. They knew the truth about themselves. There was no way they could deny it. Knowing and admitting their own need, when they saw Jesus, they recognized him as a celebrated healer. This community, as one, cried out to him for help, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us."

Sounds simple, sounds obvious. But how many of us can do the same? No, of course, we’re not diseased like the lepers. But who among us does not need healing in body, mind, or spirit? I walked through life for years an apparent success, healthy in body, but sick and empty in my soul. I knew something was missing, but did I seek God’s healing—never! I read stacks of self-help books, instead. One title sticks in memory: "My Life is Great, Why do I Feel so Awful?" The lepers’ lesson in recognition is hugely important: recognize who you are, recognize what ails you, recognize who God in Christ Jesus is, and ask for mercy.

That brings us to the third lesson: God’s response. Once asked, Jesus responded with love, with compassion. Jesus healed— without a touch, without a word on the subject. "Go and show yourselves to the priests," he simply said. It’s important to note that the lepers obeyed. They went on, as Jesus had commanded, and it was on their way that they were healed.

There is not a person here who has not been healed by God. That’s because God made us to heal. Our immune systems throw off countless diseases, healing us before we know it. Every cold, every virus that takes hold we survive through the healing grace that is innate. We watch our wounds heal whether they’re from a scraped knee or open heart surgery. That’s God’s healing—whether we think about it that way or not.

I also think that everyone over the age of a few months has experienced God’s healing grace in the wounds of our souls. Most of those wounds, like the colds, the surface cuts or scraped knees, heal without special care. We don’t really think about them for long. But others get our attention: a death, a professional catastrophe, a betrayal, an illness, a spiral down into addiction—those are different. Those are the ones that may lead us to the place of recognition, the place where we cry out with the lepers, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." Many of us have come to that place, have cried out, and received the healing, the transformative grace that only God can give. I can only speak for myself: that’s why I’m here today.

I like the image of being healed along the way; it rings true. That is my experience. God’s healing is one of the fruits of the journey in Christ. And we aren’t just healed once for all. That is a process that happens all along the way—a process that is ongoing, like the journey itself. Each healing is a step on the journey to wholeness. Thanks be to God.

It’s that spirit of generosity that I hear in Jesus’ rhetorical question to the Samaritan: "Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" Jesus understood human nature. Nine times out of ten, if not ninety-nine out of one hundred—I take my healing for granted. I don’t stop to praise God, to thank God for the bounty of grace. But every once in a while, prayer is answered so spectacularly, or healing is so great that it bowls me over. Then, the magnitude of God’s grace is such that—like the Samaritan leper—I fall to my knees in gratitude and praise. In that new level of recognition, of God’s healing and our debt to God, we may open ourselves to a new relationship with God—one in which we embrace our dependence on God and consent to ongoing transformation—at least for a little while!

The ten lepers cried to Jesus for mercy and they were healed along the way. Nine went to the Jewish priests, where their healing would be recognized, and they would be restored to their former communities, reconciled with their families and friends. The one who came back to Jesus, the Samaritan, gave something more and received something more in return.

The Samaritan who had been an outsider to the Jews all of his life, whose illness had brought him into a community of Jewish lepers for a time, found himself healed by a Jewish rabbi. Jesus’ healing dissolved the lepers’ community, restoring to each man his original identity—freeing him to take up his life again. With his beautifully restored flesh—soft and smooth like a baby’s—the Samaritan had become a new creation. The story does not tell us what became of him afterward. But in returning to Jesus, in giving thanks and praise to God, he offered the only thing that he had—himself, his soul, his faith, and that newly reformed body. He offered the most important thing. With that recognition, with that gesture, he closed the circle of grace, and he moved that much closer to wholeness.

And so it can be, so it is with us.

Thanks be to God.