Sermon from October 10, 2004

“God’s Word Is Not Chained”

Rev. Thomas Ratmeyer

Scriptures:
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19

He travels all across the land, with a group of his closest companions always at his side. However fast he may be moving, word of his coming always reaches his destination prior to his arrival, so that wherever he goes the crowds are waiting. He has long surrendered a chance for a private life. Any moment he wants to be alone needs to be taken from those who feel they have the right to access him at all times. He sneaks out once in a while, for the sake of sanity, only to then again dive into the embrace of the masses, the countless faces that each, at one point or another, have looked at him all with the same question on their mind: We have seen many speak about truth and about change, and about respect for one another—so why should we think that this really is the one that will change our lives, that will make the plight of his people better? And yet, by the time he leaves, many of them are in awe, for he speaks with authority and with the ability to make each of them feel as if he had spoken directly to them. Maybe he is the one.

What is this story? Depending on how you fill in the blanks, it is either running for president or the life of Jesus.

Not that there should be many commonalities beyond what I have just described. After all, our candidates are running for president, not for Messiah. Then again, if you look at the campaigns, much of the hundred million dollars each is spent to paint a presidential picture, in ads and now in debates, rather than to devise a political plan. They skillfully stage and choreograph the performance of a candidate so that he may look and sound like the one. And the little army of those massaging the message and advising about appearance seem to outnumber the corps of policy wonks and issue experts. “Be sure not to frown in the debate,” they say. “Keep your sentences to ten words or less.” “Be sure to smile but make it look real.” And, finally, whatever else you do, “Don’t look at your watch!” Maybe we are setting up our presidential candidates with messianic expectations and, maybe, that makes us unwilling to recognize in them the humanness that the office so desperately needs.

What contrast to the one we call the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth who, on his road to becoming the king of kings, more powerful than any earthly ruler, needed not crown nor throne nor army. You have to admire, and, probably, envy his freedom. When anybody said, “Don’t go there,” well, then “there” is just where he was headed. “Don’t go eat with the tax collectors. They are the very symbol of the collaboration with the Roman oppressors that hold our people captive.” “Don’t go eat with the prostitutes, for you will lose all credibility with the religious authorities and with those living lives of purity.” “Don’t talk to women.” “Don’t bother with the children. You don’t have time for them.” “Don’t talk to Pharisees; they are just trying to set you up.” “Don’t go home, for no prophet is received well in front of his own doorstep.” “Don’t go to Jerusalem either, because they will kill you before you can do what you are destined to do.”

And that is exactly where he is going: Jerusalem. On his way, he walks between Galilee and Samaria—another “don’t go there territory”, for Samaritans are deemed unclean, out on the fringes, and a provocation by virtue of their mere existence. It is in this border territory between Galilee and Samaria that Jesus encounters ten lepers, from afar, mind you, for they were required by law to keep their distance, to avoid anyone who came close. “Unclean, unclean,” they were to shout if anyone was coming close to their dwelling place, their place of living, if you could call it living. This time, however, they called, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” This is the call that a beggar would utter, hoping for some coins, but the lepers were not out for money. They recognized Jesus—even in this no-man’s land (no-woman’s land) between home and alien territory, the word of his coming preceded him. They recognized the one who could heal, who could restore the health to hopeless cases.

“Lepers? Don’t go there.” The tax collectors had been good company in comparison to the lepers. At least collaboration with the oppressor was not an infectious disease. Less than pure, maybe, but not infectious. Today, when one of us has symptoms of the common cold, either he or she will say, “Stay away from me today, or you’ll catch it, too” or we say to him or her, “I am not going to come near you today with that cold of yours.” Can you imagine the degree of loneliness and isolation that the lepers felt?

Where other unclean people had no hesitation about approaching Jesus, even touching him, these lepers are aware enough of their illness, their curse, to not want him near them. And the master, as they rightly have assumed, does not need to touch them. His mercy often travels with the power of the spoken word alone.

When he sees them, and Luke makes a point of noting that he sees them, he tells them to show themselves to the priests at the temple—in Jerusalem, that is—so that, in accordance with the law, the priests may testify to their healing and allow them to return to the community from which they had been banned. And they go, all but one. A Samaritan—for all we know, the only foreigner in the group—turns back to Jesus once he sees that he is healed (again the word “seeing”) and what does he do? Does he fall to the ground and thank Jesus? No, he falls to the ground, and praises God. He recognizes in the healing that happened to him not just the act of a preacher with special gifts, but he recognizes Jesus as the incarnation of God’s grace, the word become flesh.

The other nine had been healed and went the way that they were told to go, the path that their religion prescribed in order to restore their place in the community. Eager, no doubt, to gain access to the temple that had been forbidden ground for so long, eager to be back in their house of worship and in the city surrounding it, where they were banned because of their illness. Were they faithless or ungrateful in doing what Jesus had told them? No, but they had missed to see beyond the prospect of the restoration of their lives the presence and grace of God. And was the Samaritan so much more attentive? I don’t know. Their temple would not have been his temple. He would not have sought out a priest in Jerusalem, for he would still have been an outcast there, outside of society, outside of recognition, homeless and nameless and without any rights. There was reason for him to pause when the others set right off.

All the more he must have been astonished at the encounter. For not only was he healed from an illness that had alienated him from his own people and everybody else, but he had encountered the grace of God through a man who broke the laws of his people by even recognizing him, let alone by granting him the gift of a healing word. For a Galilean or Judaean who was true to his religion, the Samaritan was a non-person, chained to the shadows when the people of God were walking in the light. But the word of God that walked in the no-man’s land, was not chained. The word of God did not just heal the Samaritan—it made him whole, for it invited him into the presence of God.

“Go, your faith has made you well,” says Jesus to the foreigner, after asking what happened to the other nine. Though your faith has made you well, that was not just the faith that Jesus, the man that they had all heard about, could perform miracles of healing. That was the assurance of faith that it must be God’s doing when all the rules of captive and free, powerful and powerless, stranger and friend, ally and alien, had been overcome in this one encounter.

What is it with the seeing in this story? Jesus had seen in the outcasts a need that he could recognize, and he willfully ignored the fences of custom and common sense; yes, even the fences of religious custom and law that should have told him to keep to himself. And the Samaritan leper, the one who, for all intents and purposes, could have been blind to any evidence of grace, and dead to all hope, found in him the faith to see in Jesus the presence of God.

The miracle of healing that occurred in this scripture is that eyes had been opened to the real needs that we encounter and to the power of the grace of God that is at work if we begin to tear down the fences between us. Next time we think, “Don’t go there!”, let’s think again. Amen.