October 14, 2007 - 20th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST - FATHER ANDREW GREEN

FIRST READING: Second Kings 5: 1-3; 7-15c
SECOND READING: Second Timothy 2: 8-15
GOSPEL: Luke 17: 11-19

Over the last two days, I have spent 16 hours in a board retreat - a B - O - A - R - D retreat. One of the things the facilitators did was that they had little toys at each place. They had magnets with all these little metal things that were in the shapes of x's and o's, and you could build stuff. They had things that were linked together, and you could pull them apart. There were balls between them that were magnetized, and you could build stuff - and I did. Then they had these balls that you squeeze to get rid of tension. On day one, I had a more or less solid plastic ball that had about 18 or 25 holes drilled all the way through it. It was a soft plastic, so you could squeeze it, and it made a really gross sound whenever you did it - and I did. But, on the last day, I got moved, and there was another squishy ball. It was one of these that has a fairly flexible covering on it, but it has something inside that squishes, but then eventually releases. So, it wasn't a powder, but I didn't know what it was. I worried that sucker for eight hours! I stretched it out. I did all sorts of stuff with it, and then, just about hour six of the day, I am just squeezing the daylights out of it and . . . . Squish! . . . Evidently, the stuff in it was something like white putty - all over my hands - and I am sitting right in front of where the facilitator is speaking. So, all of a sudden, I am covered - almost leprous! Were you wondering where I was going with this? Trying to clean yourself off from a semi-sticky paste that doesn't really wipe and doesn't seem to be soluble in water, while not disturbing the lecturer, and everybody is watching you - well, it is an awkward experience.

Jesus has an encounter with some lepers, but I would like to frame it with the collect, the prayer that we have at the beginning of the service: "Your Grace precedes and follows us". Now, this prayer is a very ancient prayer. How many of you grew up with the 1928 prayer book? Anybody out there? I grew up with the 1928 prayer book. How did they translate that in the 1928 prayer book? "That thy Grace may always prevent and follow us". And, as a child, growing up, I really felt the need for Grace to "prevent" me from stuff, but, in fact, that wasn't what it meant. It meant exactly what the new translation says, to go in front of - the idea that God's grace is there, before we need it, and is following after to enable and empower us and to send us forward.

Well, Jesus, as I said, is dealing with these lepers. He was not the first to heal lepers, and I don't think these were the first lepers that He healed. Elisha, the follower of Elijah, healed a leper. Now, he didn't just pick ten lepers off the street, like Jesus did. The leper he healed was the general of the army for the people who were somewhat hungrily looking at Israel. Now, I think that is something to think about. Imagine, for example, that maybe Canada got all their army together, and then some, and were standing at our northern border with designs on our territory, and the Commanding General of the Canadian army came and said that his boss, the President, said, "Heal my commanding general". So, you can imagine what the King was thinking, "They are setting me up". But, the other part about this is that this wasn't somebody who was kind of on the street, down and out, or excluded because of his leprosy; this was someone who, despite his leprosy, had been judged good enough to get past all the barriers that people of every culture and religion, at that time, had for lepers. So, he was a pretty important person, but he was also somebody whom the people in Israel would have feared greatly.

And what does Elisha say to the King? He says, "Tell him to come to me; then he will know there is a prophet in Israel". Now, when we make statements like that, and when we make those kinds of ultimatums or challenges, we are usually doing it in kind of a knock-this-chip-off attitude - "Yeah, I dare you! Let's see; let's go out in the back, and we will . . . ." But here is somebody saying, "He will know that there is a prophet in Israel", and he heals the guy. He takes someone who is an enemy of the people of Israel, but who was in need, and he offers him healing. Now, this is the challenge. This wasn't just like healing somebody who was, as I said, down and out or in need, somebody whom we could somehow generalize was a worthy person for our care and love. This was someone who, if you asked the King, would just as soon wished that Naaman was dead, right? And Elisha heals him.

So, now we are back to Jesus again. We can't go anywhere else, so we have to stick with Jesus now. Jesus is walking along in the area between Samaria and Galilee, so we are talking about the northern part of what today is Israel. It is about 85 kilometers north of Jerusalem, and it is important to keep that in mind. He encounters these ten lepers. They are respectful. They stand a ways off, because they know that, if they get too close, they will have violated a taboo, and they will be in trouble. Everybody that they get too close to will be unclean like them, and they will have to go through rituals to become clean again. Now, leprosy, in those days, was probably not the same as the leprosy we think of today, like Father Damian in Hawaii. It was perhaps any of a variety of kinds of skin diseases that caused the skin to break open and stuff to ooze out. Rule of thumb in the Old Testament - if something oozes out, it's bad and makes you unclean. No matter where it starts, if it oozes out, it is not a good thing. So, these lepers were excluded because no one who touched them or got near them would be able to go to worship within a particular time frame because of being touched by them, so they lived separately. They were excluded from community activities, and they were outcasts. So, they called to Jesus, "Son of David (or Master), have mercy on us". Now, Jesus didn't do an intake interview with them. He didn't find out where they came from or what their needs were. He didn't ask for their identification. He didn't want to make sure that they actually were appropriately leprous. He just said, "Go show yourselves to the priests". He didn't even promise to heal them, but they knew, because, if you were a leper, if you ever got well, the way you were judged to be well was that the priests had to tell you that you were clean. Now, where did the priests reside? In Jerusalem, 85 kilometers south. So, He sent them off to show themselves to the priests and present themselves in the temple, where, as a side benefit, they could worship, which they had been excluded from for some time. And they went off, and, as they went, they were cleansed along the way, and they found that they had been healed (this will make sense later). And one turned back when he noticed that he was now clean, and, immediately, he began praising God. He returned back to Jesus and offered himself, essentially, as a servant to Jesus, throwing himself at Jesus' feet, because of the amazingly wonderful thing that Jesus had done for him. Jesus had taken him from somebody who was excluded and had to live far apart from everyone else, and even had to have a bell ringing as he walked around so that nobody would stumble on him unawares and become unclean. Jesus had rescued him from that and had brought him back into a life where he could have a family, where he could work, and where he could be productive again. So, he was giving himself to Jesus and saying, "This is fantastic!" The story tells us that this guy was a Samaritan. This guy wasn't quite as bad as the people Naaman and the general came from, but almost. They weren't particularly violent, but they were kind of an off-shoot of the Jewish people from the time of the exile, and they had kind of grown up and gone separate ways - kind of like Bosnians and Serbs and Bosnians and Muslims. They were still very closely connected, genetically, but they couldn't stand each other.

And so it was the Samaritan that came back. It was not the religious Jew who came back and said anything to Jesus, but the person who didn't even worship in the same place that the rest of them did. In my mind, all of these things reflect back on this idea that God's Grace goes before us, and God's Grace follows us. There are three words in this Gospel for healing. This is one of the sometimes-inadequacies of English, but, mainly, it is just the inadequacy of usage of the English language. The first one, where, as they walked, they were cleansed - and I am actually going to give you the Greek on this - it is catharidso. Have you ever heard of a catharsis? They were catharidso - they were cleansed. And then, they noticed that they had been healed - different word, which I am not going to tell in Greek, because it is not cool. And, finally, you get to the last place, where Jesus says, "Where were the rest of them? Why didn't anybody else say thanks? Go on your way. Your faith has made you well". That word is sodso, and that is the word that we use in other places, like, If you believe in the Name of the Lord Jesus, you will be saved. Being healed - being saved is the same word. So the thing is that they went from being cleansed to being healed to being saved. What stands in the middle of all of that? We have God's Love on the front end, that they were cleansed. We have God's Love on the back end that they were saved. What stands in the middle of God's Grace of the front and the back? It is in the lesson! "He stood up and gave praise and thanks to God". Gratitude is what is in the middle. If God's Grace precedes us, and God's grace follows us, our responsibility is to be grateful in the middle! Our responsibility is to acknowledge God's Grace by giving thanks. Our responsibility is to prepare for the Grace that God has in store for us by praising God and offering ourselves to God for whatever service God might have in mind for us. One of the problems that we sometimes have is that the Samaritan could have said, "Oh wait! But I am a Samaritan; I can't come near you because our families have been fighting for centuries". How many times do people who have some bit of Grace - either forgiveness, or healing, or some kind of love that comes to them from God - begin to tell themselves, "You know, I really don't deserve this". How many times has something good happened to you, and you have talked yourself out of it, because you didn't deserve it. Well, it's not rocket science - we don't deserve it! But God gives it anyway. Even to enemies of His chosen people, God gives Grace and Healing and Love. We don't get Grace because we are at St. Paul in the Desert, and it is the place for Grace. We get Grace because God loves all whom God has made, and God desires that His Grace would go before them and lead them to a place of sincere gratitude and praise, and then might follow them to guide them, and heal them, and make them a part of God's own people, all along the way.

So, whether you are Naaman, and you have it all, but you have this little leprosy problem going on; or whether you are the ten lepers that are excluded and nobody wants you to come over for dinner; remember that it is God's Grace that will cleanse you. Now, when I say cleanse, immediately, we are going to start thinking about sin, but notice that nowhere in this passage did anybody accuse anybody else of being a sinner. These perhaps were all really pretty good people who had a problem, and the problem kept them from community; and God cleansed them. Sin is something that we need to be cleansed from, from time to time, but hurts, thoughts, and actions that we take that are harmful to ourselves and others are things that sometimes we need to be cleansed of, without getting into calling it sin. God starts there with Grace, to clean us and prepare us. We have two choices. We can be cleaned and go off as if we don't know the difference, or we can respond to what God is doing to us and give thanks.

Now, people long before I got here thought this was a really good idea, so the Christian Church, from the earliest days, has organized its worship around giving thanks. What is the service called? Do we call it the mass? The Lord's Supper? or Holy Communion? - or is it the Eucharist - the thanksgiving? When I stand behind the altar and start trying to sing later, that is called the great thanksgiving. We practice, week by week, inviting people to come here to say thanks. Now, one way to prepare for that is to go through your life and think of all the times where you have been rotten and nasty, and then promise never to be that way again. Sometimes, that is an important thing to do, but the Scriptures that we have today would indicate that we need to look to the places in our lives where God's Grace has prevented us, or God's Grace has followed us, and we show up here to say thanks, to offer praise to God. And, when we do, and when we come forward to the rail, kneeling or standing, when we put out our hands, we receive Grace upon Grace. We receive the sign and symbol of the promise of God's everlasting Love and Grace for us in the Body and Blood of Christ. So, if it wasn't enough that it worked for Naaman; if it wasn't enough that it worked for the Samaritan leper; remember that God offers God's own Divine Life for us through His Son, Jesus Christ, when we participate and say thanks. So, my hope is that, little by little, every single one of us, from the Bishop of our Church on down to everybody here to the youngest child, would know that the practice of being a Christian is a day-by-day practice of learning thankfulness. And I invite you today to come forward to the rail and to remember at least one, if not a dozen things for which you are truly, sincerely thankful. Offer it up to God, and be prepared to receive, even more abundantly, God's Grace in return.

AMEN