Coming clean

Luke 17: 11-19
Heritage United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
October 9, 2016

Jesus is walking the line between Galilee and Samaria, between homeland and no-man’s-land, doing his high-wire act on his way to Jerusalem.  On his way Jesus encounters all sorts of people: a man with many demons, a girl on the edge of death, a woman with a hemorrhage, these ten lepers.  Through these people, the author of Luke shows us what kind of person shows faith, what kind of person responds to Jesus and his message of forgiveness.  It was not the leaders, the in-crowd, the longtime believers who were showing faith, but outsiders who were responding to Jesus’ message with shouts of praise and gratitude.

            In this story there is only one healed man out of ten that returns to give thanks and praise, and he is a double outcast: he not only suffered from leprosy but he is also a Samaritan, an illegitimate child of God.  He is outside the covenant and thus, not even bound to go show himself to the priests, those who have the power to restore those who are healed to community.  Yet he obeys anyway, and when he sees he has been healed, he turns back, falls at Jesus’ feet and thanks him profusely.

            Yes, the other nine did as they were told and were also healed, but it was the faith of the Samaritan that saved him.  In other translations the word ‘whole’ is used in place of ‘well’:  “Your faith has made you whole”, implying more than physical healing.  It is through his faith that the Samaritan has been restored to God’s beloved community.

            Just who are these Samaritans?  Jesus lifts up individual Samaritans:  this one for his faith, the one in the parable for his extravagant caring and giving, the woman at the well for her thirst for living water.  Yet as a whole, faithful Jews avoided them.  They were outsiders, considered unclean because they worshiped God on Mt. Gerizim, not on the temple mount in Jerusalem.  They weren’t just weird, they were bad blood.  They were Them, of the family feud Us and Them.

            Samaria was what was left of the northern kingdom of Israel.  When King David and King Solomon were in charge, it was one big happy family—Israel’s golden age.  After King Solomon died, the kingdom was divided in two:  the southern kingdom of Judah with Jerusalem as its capital and the northern kingdom of Israel and King Omri, who created its new capital, Samaria.

            Samaria was cosmopolitan.  Its people worshiped not only YHWH but also had a temple to Ba’al and other deities.  The king’s palace and the houses of the rich were decorated with ivory carvings.  For orthodox Jews, this lifestyle and religious ethic was unacceptable.  Thus we have a number of stories of the prophet Elijah preaching against King Omri, then King Ahab and his queen Jezebel for their flagrant disobedience of the one true God. 

            Meanwhile the southern kingdom carried on the house of David, trying to keep hope alive with the glory days.  Even though both the northern and southern kingdoms were conquered by foreign empires, their people carried off as spoils of war and made to worship foreign gods, it was the southern kingdom that ultimately remained monotheistic.  When the Jews came home from exile, which they viewed as punishment for their unfaithfulness, they returned with a renewed vigor for their faith and righteous living.  And when they made plans to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, the Samaritans offered to help, but the Jews resentfully turned them down.

Can you think of another story in Luke’s gospel that sounds like this one?  One family that is divided in two.  One goes off and spends great wealth on dissolute living, while the other stays home, works hard and is faithful, with a father who wants everyone to be at the welcome home party.

Every time Jesus tells a story with a Samaritan in it, he is not only retelling the parable of the prodigal son, he’s pointing out the painful history of Israel’s past.  He lifts up the faith of the Samaritans as a reality check that no one has a hold on God; no one has a firm grip on righteous living.  We all fall short.  The other nine lepers, as soon as they are healed, ditch their Samaritan half-brother.  They don’t wait for him or turn around to see what he’s doing.  They had no choice but to hang out with him when they were all unclean.  But as soon as they were restored to health, it was back to the same old way of living, Us and Them.  Never mind how the healing came about—Jesus who?—it was straight off to the priests who had the power to return them to the status quo.

But not the Samaritan.  Instead he throws himself at Jesus’ feet, thanking him and praising God.  It is this so-called illegitimate child of God, this outsider who shows unabandoned gratitude and praise, and it is this faith that has the power to heal, to make one whole, to save us from ourselves, and restore us to God’s beloved community.

We’d like to believe we’re the righteous older brother.  We’d like to think we’re the laborers that showed up early to work in the vineyard.  And we’d also like to think we’re the Samaritan that stopped to help a stranger, or the one who when healed, turned and thanked God from the ground up.

But none of us gets off that good.  We’re all Johnny-come-lately’s when it comes to God’s grace.  We’re that extravagantly wasteful youngin’ who goes off with Mommy and Daddy’s legacy, only to come back with our tail between our legs, willing to work off our debt.  We’re healed and made whole, but we leave Jesus and our praise in the dust.

If the rifts between human beings are to be healed, each of us needs to have the faith of an outsider, an outcast.  If there is to be only Us, there can be no more Them.  It’s not whether we’re the Samaritan or one of the other nine, but that all of us need to come clean with ourselves and with each other.

The only quasi-faith groups not having any trouble getting new members are 12 step groups.  Why?  Because it’s a safe place for people to be their broken selves and find themselves beloved.  Because everyone is an outsider, an outcast.  There is no Us and Them, only us.  Everyone is trying to come clean about who they are and what they’ve done and find a new life worth offering praise for.

Where I come from in the United Church of Christ, we have a hard time with that.  We don’t like the words “sin” or “confession”.  Forget about testimony and witnessing.  Accepting each other as we are means we’re fine just the way we are.  But that also means we don’t really know what healing means.  Or forgiveness.  Or transformation.  Or resurrection.  I once heard someone say that I’m not able to talk to you of resurrection, if you have yet to realize that you have died.  I am not able to hear the good news of resurrection until I realize that I have died.

      I sometimes wonder what would happen if we all just assumed that in any given situation, we’re the problem.  That we’re the ones in standing in the need of prayer, desperate for grace, requiring a fearless and searching moral inventory, a spiritual 2 x 4.  To take care of that plank in our own eye and leave the speck alone in our neighbor’s.  To actually allow our faith to make us whole and save us from ourselves.  

     Columnist Courtney Martin once said, “It’s an act of rebellion to be a whole person.”  Whole doesn’t mean perfect or anything close to it.  Being whole, showing up with our whole selves, means bringing our flaws and our past and our peccadilloes and our screw-ups with us as much as owning up to our blessedness, our belovedness.  How many of us feel as though it’s a skimmed-down version of us that’s loved rather than the whole package?  And yet how amazing, how life-giving, how deep-in-our-bones it feels when we know we are loved inside and out, warts and all, no matter what.  It sets us free.

That’s the kind of love that Jesus is offering.  That’s the kind of love the Church needs to be about, now more than ever. That’s what’s worth dropping down on our knees and giving God glory and praise.  Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.