Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 14, 2007
2 Kings 5:1–3, 7–15c
Psalm 111
2 Timothy 2:8–15
Luke 17:11–19
Proper 23
Lectionary 28
Year C
I.N.I. (In the name of Jesus)
Dear friends:
Today as each week we bring our whole selves to God, our longings and desires, our hopes and our dreams, our anxieties and our woes.
Our rituals, the things we do over and over in worship, are connected in a very real way to the stuff of everyday human existence.
We tell stories from the Bible as if to find our way in the world, just as family stories about the time we made the cross country trip together or Junior took his first baby steps help shape identity and belonging.
We eat bread and drink wine as if we are slaking thirst and gorging our appetites, just as feasting on turkey and stuffing with a toast of the bubbly or even the more ordinary breakfast of juice and toast reminds us that food is fuel for the journey of life.
And with supplications like Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy!), and thanksgivings (Holy Eucharist), our prayer is an expression of the wants and needs of human existence poured out and given over to one whom we acknowledge to be the Author and Giver of Life.
Don Saliers, deep thinker and creative writer from the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, wrote a little book called Worship Come to its Senses. In it he honors both the traditional and creative spirit of worship while crying out for its relevancy. The framework for the book is based on what he calls “four essential qualities that characterize true and relevant Christian worship, which are awe, delight, truthfulness, and hope.”
I want to dwell today a bit on hope. There is certainly so much going wrong, wars, violence, and suffering that the response for some is to wallow in despair, which at its root means without hope. But very often, those who are in the trenches of poverty and oppression, in their cry for a change, in their plea for help, in their wailing for mercy, by their giving voice to their plight are praying with lepers and with church-goers alike, “Kyrie Eleison!” Lord, have mercy.
Don Saliers puts it this way:
Human beings do hope, even in the midst of despairing circumstances. How else can we account for the survival of African Americans under the humiliating yoke of slavery? How else can we account for the long history of the hope for Zion? How else can we account for the diary of Anne Frank, or for the survival of so many South Africans under apartheid? Even under such immense pressure against hope, do we not desire to be hopeful, beginning with small, everyday things?
He goes on: We hope for good weather, we hope our children are kept safe, we hope for a time of rest, or for many simple pleasures. All this is part of the weave of everyday life for most people, whether poor or not. Out of everyday wants and wishes, and weekend hopes, a faint glimmer of linkages with Christian hope may spring. Out of the child’s “Now I lay me down to sleep” emerge the conditions for more enduring hopes, for this world and the next. None of this should be ignored by the church.
--Worship Come to its Senses, by Don E. Saliers (Nashville: Abingdon Press, © 1996), p 69.
In today’s gospel the storyteller Luke recounts a group of ten wailing for mercy, Kyrie Eleison, who were afflicted with a contagious skin condition. The set-up, the context is Jesus on his way to the cross. With Jesus’ own suffering and death as a shadow in the background, as he is described once more as on his way to Jerusalem and in a border crossing between the north (Galilee) and the south (Samaria), the lepers approach him. Now, what do you think? Were the ten lepers were in despair or did they have an inkling of hope?
There are chapters of protocol in Israel’s law about the conduct of lepers and their primary care providers, who in those days were the priests. Leviticus 13-14 reads more like an operator’s manual than a story of hope, when it prescribes
The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.
Want to hear more?
When a person contracts a leprous disease, he shall be brought to the priest. The priest shall make an examination, and if there is a white swelling in the skin that has turned the hair white, and there is a quick raw flesh in the swelling, it is a chronic leprous disease in the skin of the body. The priest shall pronounce him unclean; he shall not confine him, for he is unclean.
I think you get the idea. I think you have a sense of what those ten were up against, and how Jesus with a wave of the hand, like writing a script for the pharmacist, provided the cure and kept within protocol. Like the old saw take two aspirin and call me in the morning, Jesus sends the ten on their way.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s where the hope is sparked, like a fuse igniting faith in one out of ten. Rather than going to the priest, then back to his family, back home, one went back to the source of his healing, to the source of his hope. Rather than life as usual, it was life as never before, as if the leper was now a new man had come to his senses! He goes crazy with his liturgical posturing, enough to make stuffy Lutherans blush, bowing and scraping, lowering himself at the feet of Jesus, and doing what? Giving thanks! Giving praise! Offering worship! Connecting his experience of hope into health, well-being, and new outlook with the Author and Giver of life. His new found physiology led to a bubbling over doxology. He made a giant leap from protocol to praise.
Pause. Pregnant Pause. Long Pause…for effect.
And he was a Samaritan (gasp)! He wasn’t just an ex-leper, now bound back to his family in Galilee. He was an ex-leper who was still a Samaritan (ick! ), worse than Gentiles (oy! ), not someone normal law-abiding Jews would have anything to with, for Samaritans parted with normal Jewish practices centuries ago and the two, Samaritans and Judeans were more like the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Sunis and the Shiites, Lutherans and… let’s say, Pentecostals.
It was not lost on Jesus. He asked three questions in a row, boom, boom, boom. They were all rhetorical, as in, duh!
Were not ten made clean? (Duh!) But the other nine, where are they? (duh, not here!) Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? (duh, no)
And then the kicker, that makes us say, I want to have what that Samaritan guy had, what if our lives could be like that, as Jesus recognizes the man in front of him as wholly well, not just disease free but gratitude-full, thank-full, not only cured but safe, and saved! And the truth is, we do have that, we are recognized wholly and awe-fully for who we are by Jesus?
Do you get it? Living with hope, we give voice to our deepest desires. Living with disease, with any legion of lament, Jesus is only too willing to engage fully with us, fulfilling what God sent him to offer, new life, salvation, the whole enchilada, even hope against hope. On his way to Jerusalem, facing head-on hatred and rejection, betrayal, trial, and a death sentence, Jesus gave himself wholly to God on our behalf, and by his outstretched hands and feet on the cross opened the way to hope to all, Samaritans and lepers, sinners and saints, Lutherans and Pentecostals, you and to me. This is a gift free for the sharing.
How we realize this gift will differ from person to person, as grace and blessing are poured out on all sorts of teeming humanity, even those I wouldn’t wish it on. Why some find cure and others don’t is a bigger mystery and head-scratcher than I can take on right now. What I do know is that Eucharist is important, because its root is thanksgiving, meaning we gather around the table for many things, for forgiveness, to be one with the body of Christ, to taste heaven’s joys in the here and now, but that it is all bound up in an ancient and modern attitude of gratitude. Whether we wave our hands high or link them together close to our chest, whether we shed tears or do all we can to stop grinning, that ex-leper outcast Samaritan who figured out that Jesus’ own attentiveness to human need and want in praise and thanksgiving is a model disciple, a worshiper par excellence, and someone who really and truly can go on his way from hope to hope.
Let us pray.
Almighty and most merciful God,
your bountiful goodness fills all creation.
Keep us safe from all that may hurt us,
that, whole and well in body and spirit,
we may with grateful hearts
accomplish all that you would have us do,
through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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