Ten lepers banded together
forming a community of pain.
They did not choose to have leprosy,
they did not choose to be separated from their families,
nor did they choose to stand some distance off the road,
where the well, the clean, and the holy ones might pass by
and offer, out of compassion or guilt, some sign of charity.
People with leprosy had no choices at all.
The code of Leviticus dictated that they wear torn clothes,
let the hair of their heads hang loose,
and that they cover their upper lips while crying out a warning to others,
“Unclean, unclean!”
They were also supposed to live alone outside the cities and villages,
but, no one could blame them for staying together with their own kind,
making a colony of outcasts,
for they had in common the disease, the stigma, the ritual uncleanness.
They fell in together, forming, as I said, a community of pain.
So here were ten men with leprosy,
drawn together by that that very thing
which drove them away from any other social or religious community.
And it’s reasonable to assume that without connection to a religious community,
there would be great difficulty in feeling any connection to God.
To be counted unholy was to be completely cut off from the Holy God.
Indeed, in Jesus’ day and place,
such disease and disability were considered divine punishment for wrongdoing,
God’s way of pushing the sinner away from the holy community of holy people.
But that is about to change.
Jesus is traveling their way,
and Luke is about to tell us how their community will be transformed...
completely and forever.
Allow me to fill in something Luke has found unnecessary to tell us.
These ten men were not without hope.
We can imagine that when they sat at an evening cooking fire,
or as they walked together from one back road to another,
they spoke of hope, and release, even healing,
for they had heard of Jesus of Nazareth.
They had heard of his mighty acts and his authoritative teaching.
And it appears that they had heard he was coming their way.
For when he came through the borderlands of Samaria and Galilee,
as he entered their village, they recognized him and called him by name.
They called out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”
You don’t think that was just another way of asking for a handout, do you?
To anyone else, they might have called,
“Hey you, have some pity! Toss us some coins!”
To Jesus, they plead for something they believe he is capable of giving:
compassion, healing, restoration, new life.
So the community of pain acts as a community of hope.
This should not be a strange thing at all to us.
Today, those in pain still gather together to find strength and support.
It has become a cliché to speak of sharing pain,
but it is more than a worn out figure of speech.
Is it not better for us to hold hands, whisper reassurances,
and embrace those who know our own pain, because it is also theirs...
is that not profoundly more desirable than suffering alone?
There was a group that met in our church back in Virginia,
a group called Compassionate Friends.
Every member of the group had lost a child through death,
and many of those folks would witness that
without the love of that community to surround them,
they might not have made it through the darkness of their loss.
Just going to the meeting the first time, and then the second, and again...
that transformed the community of pain into a community of hope.
There were ten who called out to Jesus,
ten whose shared pain and hope called him Master and asked for mercy.
And look at what Jesus did not do next.
He did not ask their creed or demand a confession of faith.
He did not make a paste of soil and spittle to apply to their sickening sores.
He did not offer an incantation or even a prayer.
Nor did he touch them, as he had touched a man covered with leprosy,
in an earlier story in this gospel. [Luke 5:12 f ]
Here is what he did do.
He said, “Go, and show yourselves to the priests.”
That was what was required of those whose leprosy had somehow become cured.
Sometimes the work of physicians had accomplished healing;
and sometimes the body simply healed itself.
So if the body healed, the next step was to go to the priest and have it confirmed,
or rather, have the priest go outside the city to examine the leper’s claims.
Then various offerings would be made,
including the sacrifice of a male lamb “without blemish.”
There would be the bathing of the body, the washing of clothes,
shaving, and, if all went well, symbolic blood and oil
were placed on the person’s ear, thumb, and toe, again according to the Levitical code.
The whole process might take a week or more.
But here was Jesus, responding with compassion and mercy
to the pain and the hope of these ten men,
without a word or touch or treatment,
simply saying, “Go, and show yourselves to the priests.”
As if the process of healing were somehow accomplished.
And it was!
And Luke says it so matter-of-factly:
“...and while they were on their way, they were made clean.”
And this community of hope is transformed into a community of healing!
They ask for mercy, and there it is.
The old gospel song “Trust and Obey”
might have been written for just such a story as this.
Again, Luke’s economy of words leaves out details we might visualize.
Don’t you wonder what took place in that brief moment
when the community moved from hope to healing?
The ten cry out for sympathy.
And Jesus says, “Go on to the next step and see the priests.”
Certainly there was a moment of confusion, some expression of doubt.
Or, did the ten simply turn on their heels and say, “Oh, fine; we’re off to see the priest.”
Luke implies trust, obedience, that leads to healing and transformation —
and in doing what Jesus told them to do,
there is grace taking on flesh! (Literally, I suppose!)
The ten did nothing more than plea for Jesus to pay attention to their plight.
And Jesus did no more than “grace” them
with exactly what they wanted more than anything else in the world.
They were made clean.
And when that happened, however it happened (and God only knows),
they were changed from sick to well,
from broken to whole, from unclean to clean,
from separated to connected, from outcasts to “invited back in,”
from men who hid behind shrouds
to men who paraded their restored bodies right down Main Street.
For the first time in ages, no one would be afraid to come near them
to touch them, to hold their hands, to embrace and hug them,
to welcome them home.
When God’s people ask for mercy, God’s grace says Yes.
That’s the way it works.
That’s the way it worked then; that’s the way it works now.
And when God offers us such grace,
unholy ones become holy.
Maybe Thomas Aquinas overstates it by putting it this way:
“Grace renders us like God and a partaker of the divine nature.”
If that’s putting it too strongly for you,
Aquinas also said, “Grace is nothing else than a beginning of glory in us.”
The community of pain and suffering,
all of us who are afflicted and conflicted
(and all of us are at one time or another...)
throw ourselves on the mercy of God
and Paul’s words to the Ephesians speak to us anew:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith,
and this is not by your own doing, it is the gift of God.” [Ephesians 2:8]
To accept this gift is to step into a world that is larger, deeper, richer, and fuller.
[thoughts found in Spiritual Literacy by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
To accept the gift of grace is the beginning of glory in us!
I know that some of you have come through heavy shadows of suffering.
Some of you have walked through the valley of the shadow of death.
And here you are greeting a new morning, beginning a new week, yes,
but living and breathing the grace of God
that has moved you into the community of healing.
Whether you consider yourself a survivor
or count yourself one of the blessed people of the earth,
you are a witness to the power of the grace of God still at work today.
And Luke’s story may have a special moral for you,
something like, “Don’t hide your light under a bushel.”
Give God the glory.
May Sarton has written a book called Recovering, A Journal.
She is part of the community of healing.
And here is a vignette that leads us to the next part of Luke’s story
of Jesus and the ten men with leprosy.
She writes,
I woke before dawn with this thought. Joy, happiness, are what we take and do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections, to sort out what is what, to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.
See, here’s the link with the gospel lesson.
The ten were connected in their affliction and in their healing,
and nine of those took and did not question the joy and happiness
that came out of this miraculous event.
But “one of them, finding himself cured, turned back with shouts of praise to God.”
One of the ten was not about to take his new found joy for granted.
While ten were healed, nine took the gift and marched off to see the priests.
Only one of them knew and acted on the purpose of his healing,
that is, to glorify God and to praise God.
And Luke says he did it with shouts of praise!
This one knew that God had acted through Jesus,
so he pulled himself away from the others,
and threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.
Suddenly this wonderful idea of community with which I’ve been framing this sermon
breaks down!
And it was moving so well...
from the community of pain, to the community of hope, and then healing.
The next move could be toward the community of praise.
But only one is so moved by this experience
that he cannot help but turn around and fall at the Master’s feet
and gush his thanksgiving.
Jesus and this one man make for a very small community.
Especially when Luke then jabs his readers with a not so subtle twist,
one that we read right through,
but one that would have stopped Luke’s first readers cold.
“He threw himself down at Jesus’ feet and thanked him.
And he was a Samaritan.”
Remember, even if he is cleansed of his leprosy, a Samaritan is still unclean.
Even if a Samaritan is made whole,
he is still considered a racial and religious half-breed.
Even if he is acceptable to God, he is still a foreigner in the eyes of the Hebrew culture.
And it is he, of all persons, this one unclean, half-breed, foreigner,
it is he who recognizes in Jesus the power of God’s grace.
It is the outsider who shouts his grateful praise and kneels in worship before Jesus.
Luke means this to be a surprising irony.
It twists the story away from being just a good lesson about thanksgiving,
about the need to remember to thank God for simple gifts and profound signs of grace,
to a lesson about the new community that Jesus is bringing in,
a community of grace, and joy, of faith and, dare we say it, salvation.
In noting that only one expressed thanksgiving and praise,
Jesus then says to the man,
“Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has cured you.”
The New Jerusalem Bible picks up on the other meaning of the Greek word for healing.
It has Jesus saying, “Your faith has saved you.”
Ten were healed; one was saved. [as in Fred Craddock’s Interpretation, Luke]
One truly restored, reconciled to God.
One who finds himself in the new community of faith,
sometimes called the kingdom, or realm, of God.
And once again, we find a story about the least likely people
finding their place in God’s family.
Look around you this morning.
Look at our little community gathered here to praise God.
Look at your brothers and sisters in Christ.
We are people whose faith is the size of a mustard seed,
and we are people who have moved mountains.
We are people who have suffered the silence of God,
and we are people who have been blown away when God has blessed us
with some divine “Yes!” in answer to our prayers.
This is what we have in common in this community of pain, hope, and healing:
we are a people too slow to say thank you to God,
and too quiet in our praise of God’s grace toward us.
Not one of us says thank you enough or loud enough
to bear witness to the good news of the coming of the kingdom.
Lively faith and boisterous gratitude go hand in hand in the kingdom of God
that we only glimpse on earth.
And God means to teach us that lesson through some of the most unlikely people!
Who are the lepers and outsiders and unholy ones and foreigners
of our day and our neighborhood?
Watch what happens when they cry for mercy!
Look at how God draws them inside and welcomes them and transforms them,
and hear how they sing God’s praise with an enthusiasm and joy we have forgotten.
Why does God work through them to teach us our lessons for living?
Maybe to keep us from thin piety or thick complacency!
Maybe just to keep us off guard, lest we think the community is just fine as it is.
+ + + +
Martin Luther wrote,
(and the whole congregation will say in unison)
“I believe that God has created me and all that exists.
God has given me and still preserves my body and soul with all their powers.
God provides me with food and clothing, home and family,
daily work, and all I need from day to day.
God also protects me in time of danger and guards me from every evil.
All this, God does out of fatherly and divine goodness and mercy,
though I do not deserve it.
Therefore, I surely ought to thank and praise, serve and obey God.
This is most certainly true.”
Yes, Martin, it is most certainly true.
But this story from Luke reminds us that
there is more to thanksgiving than the first person singular.
There is a wide and holy world out there,
filled with pain we can help bear, hurts we can help heal,
hunger we can help fill, captives we can help free,
and strangers we can welcome in the name of our Master,
all as God gives us grace and empowers us with love,
and introduces us to the most unlikely co-workers.
Let our lives be a doxology sung with joy-filled gratitude
for the welcome God extends to us and through us.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
Praise the Lord!