Proper 23C 2007

Luke 17:11-19

Being sick sidelines a person faster than most other things that happen to us. We go as far as we can without consulting the doctor – we visit the pharmacy and self medicate – we hope it will go away and it does not. Finally tired of the struggle and the worry of it all, we go to the doctor and he/she sends us for more tests. Days pass, we wait, the tests are interpreted somewhere in the inner circle of medicine, we hear nothing, we feel worse, we begin to worry that this is something really serious – perhaps even fatal. Our friends and companions argue that all will be well, some may offer prayer, some may bring food, others may find a few minutes to visit and wait with us. Most of the time between falling ill and being told what is wrong we spend imaging the worst, planning how to spend our remaining days. We may be admitted to the hospital for a day or longer and there we feel even more isolated from our world of activity, family, community. What seems like a long time passes and time is not passing as it did in the real world of work and play. Finally the doctors come and tell us what is wrong and what they will do about it. Our trust is that they know how to treat us and restore us to health. The therapy can mean a long journey into an unfamiliar and uncomfortable world of health care. The diagnosis and therapy is often unpleasant and more isolating. A limb or organ may be removed and the recovery can be very long, if at all.

Cancer may lead to chemotherapy and the accompanying side effects that change our appearance and our social interactions. In sum being sick puts us at the margins. If we are here today, we are among those for whom medical science has made us better if not well. We may be here to praise God for our life, for our health, or for someone dear to us that is recovering, or some of us may be here to cry out to Jesus for mercy and healing.

The ten lepers who met Jesus on the road called out to him as they were required to do: “unclean” and “Jesus, have mercy on us”. Jesus in this instance did not touch them but told them to go and show themselves to the priests. According to the Law of Moses, anyone with leprosy lived outside the community (Numbers 5:2-3). Such a one was expected to cry out, “Unclean,” in order to warn anyone nearby that they were sick (Lev 13:45-46). Anyone with a skin disease could only return to the community by permission of the priests (Lev 14:23). Jesus acts within the Levitical-code of conduct. He orders then to “Go and show yourselves to the priests” and they run off. On the way they are made clean. One, recognizing that this has happened, turns back, praising God and thanking Jesus. Oh, and he was a Samaritan.

Maybe the nine who were not Samaritans went on to the Temple and did get “re-integrated” into community according to the approval of their priests. Maybe they did thank God in the temple, in the Levitical-correct manner. Maybe they were faithful, traditional Jews and they thanked God in one-way or another. We aren’t told what they did. What they did not do was to equate Jesus with God or return to thank him.

In the Lukan account Jesus praised the 10^th leper for his faith and then adds, and he was a Samaritan, a foreigner. The Greek term, allogenes, means foreigner and it only occurs this once in the gospels. Other sources tell us that the word was part of an inscription in the temple in Jerusalem: “No foreigner is to enter”. In the Greek Septuagint the same word allogenes or foreigner was used to forbid outsiders from coming near the tabernacle – with a death penalty for those who did (Numbers 1:51, 3:10, 16:40, 18:4, Ezekiel 44:7). The tenth leper who would not have been allowed in the inner areas of the Jerusalem Temple is allowed to worship at the feet of Jesus!

Samaritans were “other” to the Judean Jews. A Samaritan was a person from Samaria. During an ancient Israelite war, most of the Israelites living north in Samaria were killed or taken into exile. A few of them were so unimportant that they were left in Samaria. 2 Kings 17:24 tells us that the conquering king forced people from 5 foreign cities to settle in Samaria. These foreigners intermarried with the Jews and they brought in the worship of their own gods. By the time of Jesus, the “true” Israelites considered Samaritans half-breeds. They had corrupted, contaminated, and tainted the pure people. They looked to Mt. Gerizim as the place of worship, not Jerusalem. They interpreted the torah differently than the southern Israelites. The animosity between the Judean Jews and the Samaritans was so strong that many would walk for hours and go miles out of their way to avoid walking through Samaritan territory.

The 10^th leper understood at a deeper level that the person who healed him was God or at least God’s agent. Therefore, rather than going to the temple, which he could not enter, he went to the place where he experienced God. In some wonderful way the 10^th leper was willing to be humble. In his honor-shame culture, the practice of saying thank you was not merely good manners, but held other significance. Saying thank you to a person meant inequality, so the Samaritan did not think himself equal to Jesus. It also meant closure – when you thanked a person for helping you it meant you no longer needed help and in this case – his healing was accepted as complete by faith.

Who do we regard as leper? It may be people infected with HIV, a disease that so often brings social isolation as much as it also means continuous treatment and no cure. Standing from afar the lepers were made to call out, “Unclean”. We do not require persons with AIDS to cry out nor to we require everyone to be tested. Whatever the skin disease the “lepers” had, the visible effect of the illness was evident.

Who is the Samaritan to us? Is it the immigrant whose first language is not English? Is it the stranger who begs on the street corner while we look the other way, busy with our cell phone or something needing rearranging in the car?

Traveling in foreign lands is a wonderful way to discover what it means to be “other” because as soon as you are out of the airport you are now the foreigner. In Uganda, the few other “white” faces in the hotel were all “foreigners.” In the hospital wards the only strangers were the visitors with the pale skin. Even “English” sounded like a foreign tongue in some cases. While we may travel to a distant land and gain a little insight into being “other” we can return home where we belong.

For the past four weeks my secretary has been going back and forth to Baltimore with her son, Brian, who is the same age as my older grandson. Brian began having pain in his arm late in August and by the time she was able to schedule tests, the first doctor referred them to a specialist and that led to more waiting and testing, then a biopsy, then two pathology consultations, then an oncology consult, then more waiting. Last week they disclosed that he has lymphoma. This week he will have a bone marrow biopsy and a line inserted for chemo. The department is as supportive as we can be but none of us can erase the fear or worry of a mother fearing that the miracle of modern medicine might not return her son to his former status.

The Greek word for heal also means save. We want, pray and hope that medicine will save us. Only God can save or heal. Medicine does its share in the treatment of our bodies but the essence of our being is healed and saved by the mercy and grace of God. We all have experienced God’s saving grace, no matter what condition our bodies may be in now. We can give thanks to Jesus for his gift of salvation, for the grace that promises God’s love is abundant and present with us in all conditions of our lives and that our future rests in God’s abiding love.