Where are the nine?

When today’s Gospel was written, leprosy was one of the worst things that could happen to you. Before I talk about leprosy, I want to reassure the children that this terrible disease is NOT something that’s going around in Louisville, Kentucky today. Don’t be worried--You are not going to catch it. And in far-away places where people do catch it, scientists have invented medicine that can cure it right away. Over two thousand years ago, though, when Jesus and his disciples were traveling around, doctors couldn’t cure leprosy. Everyone was terribly afraid of it. For us all to understand what it was like to suffer from leprosy, I’m going to need ten volunteers to come to the front to help me out.[1]

          OK, you all are the 10 lepers--people with leprosy--from today’s

Gospel. Leprosy showed up as terrible sores on your skin.

•    X, put this bandage on your arm to cover up the bloody, oozing sores there.        
•  X, put this bandage around your head to cover up the sores that are even on your head.
•   Lepers could also get sores on their faces, and sometimes their noses could fall off. X put this Band-Aid across your nose.
• X,  cover your ear with this bandage. Sometimes leprosy made your ears fall off.
• Sometimes lepers’ fingers would fall off, too. X, wrap this around your hand.
• X, take this cane. Sometimes, your toes would fall off, and you couldn’t walk very well.
• X, hold your arms out in front of you like you’re saying, “Stay away from me.” People thought that they could catch leprosy if they got too close to someone else who had the disease. To keep others well, when you were diagnosed, you had to leave your family and go live far away from everyone else. Usually lepers lived way out of town in dark caves with other lepers. Whenever you came into town, you had to ring a bell and shout, “unclean,” so that people would know you were coming.
• X, get down on knees and hold out your hands to beg. The only way lepers could get food was for people to bring it to them. If no one in your family could bring you something to eat, you had to beg for left-over food from strangers. As you sat there with your hands out, they would whisper and stare at you in horror as they passed by.
• X, this is all you have to keep you warm and dry. You don’t have money to buy new clothes or any place to wash them, so you have to wear dirty, raggedy old clothes.
• X, you sit down over here on the floor facing away from everyone. Hold your head in your hands and look down.  Imagine how discouraged and sad you would get living this way, often for years, with no hope of getting better. You are especially discouraged, because you are also a foreigner. Your home is far-away from here. You don’t have any family members checking up on you. Even the other lepers make fun of you. They won’t share their scraps of food with you. They tell you to go back where you came from.

          Now, let’s imagine that someone turns up who can help you. You’ve heard that a healer named Jesus has divine power that can make blind people see and deaf people hear. As you cry out to him for help, he sees you. And he doesn’t run away! He hears your desperate cries. He doesn’t throw you scraps or call you names. Instead, Jesus gives you hope. He tells you how to be well again, and it works! He makes the disease leave your body. All you have to do is to go back and show the men in charge that your skin is now beautiful and smooth. No more sores! No more bandages! See! No more pain and loneliness and death! You’ll get papers declaring that you are no longer an outcast. You can go home again! You can be with your family! You can have your life back!

          So, lepers, what will you do? Show us your happy, hopeful faces. Throw off those bandages and run home! Hug your parents. Rejoice! (Send 9 of them back rejoicing.) Won’t it be amazing to be back home with your mom and dad and brothers and sisters and pets? To play video games and rediscover your toys? To go shopping and listen to music and eat your favorite meals and play outside? Even being back at school and church might seem like a treat now! It’s as if the disease were just a bad dream.

 “Wow,” you might think, “that healer Jesus is pretty amazing. I’m never going to forget what he did for me.” Maybe some of you will even send him a thank-you note like your parents want you to. But I bet some will forget. After all, you have your life back. You want to put all those bad memories behind you. You’re back in control. And there’s so much to catch up on, so much living to do.

I remember times when I would join in the Post Communion Prayer with extra joy and gratitude. You might think that’s because I’m a churchy-priest. You might think I felt that way because I know how much God loves me. That I’m rejoicing because God has sent his Son to feed me with his very own body and blood. You might think I was grateful because I have been made whole and put on a path to new, unending life in Christ. But no, that’s not it at all, I’m afraid. I have said the Post Communion Prayer with extra joy and gratitude because it meant that church was almost over! That’s right, just one more hymn, and I could get back to my life. I could go home and do what I wanted. Church was just another thing that I did because I was supposed to. I couldn’t really see Jesus standing there pouring blessings over me at all. “Thanks be to God!” I would shout at the end of the service, eager only to dash out of the door. I can very much identify with the nine healed lepers who didn’t return to thank Jesus.

But wait! I almost forgot. What about this foreigner here? Jesus has healed her, too. She too stands up, throws off her bandages in amazement. She watches the others as they hold hands and skip home down the road. But she doesn’t belong with them-- not really. If she goes to the authorities in Jerusalem, they’re going to tell her that she’s undocumented, that she’s nothing but a dirty Samaritan. They’ll chase her out of the Temple, instead of handing her the official papers to prove that she’s healed. People are still going to call her names. Jerusalem isn’t really home for her. So she hesitates, just for a moment. And in that brief moment of hesitation, she looks back and really sees Jesus. That little pause in her life is all that it takes. Something clicks. She notices the light of love in his eyes as that love follows the healed men and women down the road. This light of love is too compelling to resist. It calls to her. She wants to be able to love them, too. Looking down at her own smooth arms and healed hands, she sees the chance for a new, different kind of life. Maybe she can become a part of what Jesus is doing? That recognition plunges her to her knees in gratitude. Right there in the middle of the road.  “Go,” says Jesus. “Your faith has made you whole.” Not just healed, but whole.

Jesus can’t help but wonder, though: “Where are the nine?” he asks with sad longing. “Were not ten made clean?”

“Here we are, Jesus. Sitting safely in our pews, doing what you told us to do.”

Hear the Good News: Jesus opens the door and waits, even for us. Perhaps, at the end of today’s service, you will join me in taking a deep breath before we say the Post-Communion prayer together. In the silence, let’s see if we can’t recognize God’s loving, strengthening presence somewhere in our lives: in a healing touch, in a moment of relief, in a loving hand, in a true word. Let’s give thanks for that moment before we head out to parish business or back home into our lives. Just as it’s the broken cracks in our souls that let God’s light enter our hearts, it’s our moments of deep gratitude that let that light change our lives. Seven hundred years ago, the German mystic Meister Eckhardt wrote this: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Thanks be to God!

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[1] This idea comes from Carolyn Brown, found at http://worshipingwithchildren.blogspot.com/2016/09/year-c-proper-23-28th-sunday-in.html

Attainment in the Headlines; Ministry in the Body

Proper 22C

Lamentations 1:1-6     

Lamentations 3:19-26

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Luke 17:5-10                                                                                            

 

When I was a young wife and mother, I used to buy lots of women’s magazines. I was worried about doing everything just right, you see. I was always comparing myself to my fellow moms: I would wonder why my son wasn’t potty-trained yet, when my friend’s children were. I would worry about why my husband worked all the time, when my friend’s husband came home early to help with dinner. So I would stand in the grocery store checkout line and read the appealing magazine headlines: “10 Easy Steps to Make Your Husband Pay Attention to You,” or “How to Potty-Train your Toddler in 2 Weeks,” or “Recipes Guaranteed to Help Drop 10 Pounds Before Bathing-Suit Season.” My heart would swell with hope, and I would buy the magazine, relieved to be taking home the answers that would put an end to all of my failings.

I would eagerly begin reading the articles. First, I would read a wonderful description of the problem. “Yes! This person understands me!” I would sigh. Next, I would gather some reassurance that other people had the same issues. Finally, at the end of the article, I would come to a paragraph summarizing the same unappealing advice that I could have thought of myself without buying a magazine:

To lose weight—don’t eat so much and exercise every day.

To communicate with your husband—talk to him.

And so on. It didn’t take me long to learn that, no matter how much the headlines on the front of the magazine spoke to my insecurities, the advice on the inside wasn’t going to be very new and exciting.

          After listening to Jesus’ difficult imperatives about discipleship, the disciples in Luke’s Gospel were apparently just as insecure as we are.  They must have felt keenly their own failure to live up to God’s expectations.

Jesus had been saying things like:

“The last shall be first and the first shall be last;”   

“Give away all your possessions;”

“You cannot serve both God and Wealth.”

 “Forgive your neighbor every time she asks forgiveness, no matter how many times she has hurt you.”  

“Don’t cause others to stumble in faith or you might as well throw yourself into the sea to drown.”

Jesus seems to be making it perfectly clear that each member of the community is responsible--responsible before God--for maintaining right relationships:

for sharing with one another,

for forgiving one another,

for supporting one another.

Such a responsible role is daunting—for the disciples and for us.

 “What if we can’t do these things?” they wonder. “What if we fail? We need more faith than we have now, that’s for sure. How can I tell if I have enough faith to be a follower of Jesus?” They cry out in consternation, “Jesus, fill us with more faith!”

          The disciples are looking for affirmation that will wipe away their self-doubts. I imagine that they are hoping for answers from Jesus that look like the headlines in those women’s magazines I used to read:

 “Ten Easy Steps to Strengthen Your Faith,”

or “How to Do the Miracles that Will Impress Your Neighbor,”

or “Recipes to Increase Love and Generosity.”

Just like we long for quick fixes for our family troubles, we dream of easy spiritual answers, quick fixes for our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn how to manage our inner resources of faith and love as easily as we keep track of our bank accounts online? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could read an article about someone who did so much forgiving and supporting in August and September that he was able to take a little break from his Christian responsibility until Thanksgiving?  W.H. Auden asks, in much more poetic terms, for “a womb or a tomb wherein [we] may halt to express some attainment…”^[1] We long to rest, even for a moment, from shame and anxiety in a concrete sense of attainment. A sense of attainment in our lives--a sense of attainment with God, in our faith--a sense of attainment in our relationships with each other, as a community--that’s what we desire, isn’t it?

Jesus’ answer in today’s Gospel, like the articles in the magazines to which I turned with so much hope, must disappoint our longing for attainment. The first part of Jesus’ answer, the metaphor of the mustard seed, is more like a poem than a magazine article. It is a double-edged metaphor, and it cuts through our thinking like a sword.

The “you” in his reply is a plural you. In Greek, Jesus is saying with a sigh: “All of y’all put together don’t even have faith that is the size of a grain of mustard seed!”

Once the apostles are reeling from that cutting remark, Jesus lifts them back up again with the hugely exaggerated, cartoon-like image of the tiny little mustard seed faith yanking up a huge tree by its complex root system and heaving it into the sea. In this metaphor, the concepts of big and little no longer make sense. It’s impossible for something tiny to heave something huge and rooted into the sea. This absurd image shows us that there is no such thing as big faith and little faith. Clearly, faith has no size. It can’t be measured and compared! God can work through anything--any size, any shape, even through a bunch of incompetent and doubting disciples—and even through us.

        Jesus then follows with a difficult paradox in the strange little parable of the “worthless slaves.” The slavery language sets off alarms in our ears these days, as it should. But the message beneath it still speaks to us today. Yes, we all have tasks to accomplish in our relationships with each other and with God. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don’t. But when we are successful in our loving, in our giving, and in our forgiving, we have no excuse to get puffed up about it. We have no cause to gloat about our own piety. We don’t need to look for special rewards from God. We have no right to tell ourselves that God loves us better than God loves everyone else. God expects us to live mindfully and obediently in all of the everyday tasks of our lives. The word “ministry,” even comes from the Latin root for “small things.” Think of the words “mini” and “miniscule.”  To do “ministry,” is to take care of small matters, to practice faith in the small steps of our daily lives. The faith that Jesus commends to us involves faithfulness in small things. It is not a smooth or easy life of attainment, but a life of watchful obedience to the everyday tasks that we have been given: tasks of forgiveness, sharing, and support for one another.

What if one of the disciples were to have reported on Jesus’ words and miracles in a magazine article on the “life of faith?”  I’m afraid that the article might seem just as irritatingly obvious and as frustrating to my drive for attainment as those articles on parenting that I used to read. The Gospel headlines might scream, “Jesus Redeems Notorious Sinner,” but the story inside will be about a woman saving for months to buy expensive ointment and then washing Jesus’ feet with it. Or it will tell about a no-count leper who totters back down a dirt road to thank Jesus for healing him. Or it will lift to sainthood a man who traded a life of easy wealth for a life of caring for animals and beggars. Or it will feature an Episcopalian who spends his free time tutoring needy children and building Habitat houses and going to endless Vestry meetings. Or parents trying to raise children who love God and neighbor. Or a local leader who fights for justice for those in need during frustrating meeting after frustrating meeting. It will be about ordinary people and their ordinary lives, stumbling along and doing their best to stay alert to God’s presence in and around them.

Hearing these stories, we might be tempted to sigh, "Oh, I already knew all that," throwing down the “Mustard Seed Gazette.”

What we always forget, though, is the sustaining presence of the God who loves us, of the God who is bigger than our duties and our everyday tasks. In Luke 12 Jesus explains, “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” While human beings wouldn’t think to invite our slaves to sit down at the table with us, God invites everyone to feast at God's table. And God gently lifts the cup of salvation to their lips.

Our sustenance, our hope, is in the presence of our faithful, loving God. So let’s not get hung up on attainment—Jesus just needs us to stay awake.

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[1] W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being--Advent”