Oct. 9, 2016

Luke 17:11-19

I have three stories that I would like to share with you this morning.  The first is just this: When I was a student at Yale Divinity School I dated a genius (shocking, right?)  She was from the School of Graduate Studies, and I don’t just mean that she was smart.  I mean that she had an incredibly high IQ.  You could not win an argument with her.  She was a card carrying Mensa member.  In fact, her three other siblings were as well.  They were a whole family of geniuses.

She had a picture of herself as a child – maybe 10 or 11 years old – with her head turned toward the camera the way LifeTouch positions you when they are doing those church directory pictures.  The memorable thing about this picture though was her expression; it was so clear, so distinct, so evident.  I said, “You look like girl who knows something here, like you have a secret understanding that the rest of us haven’t yet discovered.

She said, “I did.  I knew that one day I would be a woman.”  That was the secret knowledge that powered this young girl through her years and into one of the most highly selective programs in the world.  As just a child she knew her body and her mind and her dreams and her visions would mature into something very real and very wonderful.  She didn’t need to know what exactly that would be, because what she knew was that it would be.  And, it was that secret that her face wouldn’t conceal; that was the secret that smiled deep within her.

Here’s another story.  This one is shared by Scott Hoezee in his reflections for Calvin Seminary’s Center for Excellence in Preaching.  He writes

“In her novel, Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler introduces us to Delia Grinstead. Delia is a lovely, loveable, and utterly giving wife and mother who regularly does her level best to keep her household running smoothly. But as her children grow up, they become “great, galumphing, unmannerly, and supercilious creatures” who ignore Delia and who flinch from her hugs. What’s more, they expect that their favorite foods will always be in the pantry or the fridge, but they never thank Delia for purchasing these sundries (though they will complain loudly should she forget one day). Meanwhile Delia’s husband is so wrapped up in his medical practice that he, too, brushes past Delia day in and day out, regularly failing to notice the spic-n-span house, the clean laundry, the warm food set before his distracted face each evening.

After years of this neglect, Delia begins to feel like “a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges.” Their ongoing lack of gratitude has killed something in Delia–not all at once, mind you, but day by day Delia dies a little, wilting like a flower that receives too little moisture. She doesn’t even realize how dead she has become until one day she meets someone who is kind, who thanks Delia for a little something. This stranger’s kind gratitude is like a few precious drops of water applied to her soul–a few little thankful droplets that reveal just how dry, cracked, and barren the landscape of her soul had become.

Finally the day comes when Delia just walks away from her family. She’s taking a stroll on a beach and just keeps on going. Once her family realizes she is missing, they have a curiously difficult time describing Delia to the police. They just can’t seem to recall the color of her eyes, her height or weight, what she was wearing when they last saw her. Of course, they’d never really seen her to begin with. They had been blinded by ingratitude.

And, here’s the third story.  It is shared by Debie Thomas in the lectionary reflections of the latest Christian Century.  Debie recalls a family trip that she took as a child to her parents’ homeland, India.  At the train station her brother pointed to two figures hunched in the corner and asked, “what’s wrong with them?”  She notes that in her two weeks there she had observed plenty of  people who were homeless, people who were begging, people seemed desperate.  She recalls handing out lots of spare change as they made their way.  And then she writes:

“But these two figures were different.  Though I guessed they needed help, too, I didn’t approach them.  Their faces were distorted, eaten.  Their fingers were half-missing, and their feet were scary, mottled stumps.  ‘They’re sick,’ my father answered after a quick, pitying glance in their direction.  ‘They have leprosy.’

The train station was crowded that day, swarming with the travelers, vendors, and beggars.  But what struck me about those figures huddling in the shadows was how alone they were.  It was otherworldly, profound and impenetrable in a way I could barely comprehend.  It was as if some invisible barrier, solid as granite, separated them from the rest of humanity, rendering them wholly untouchable.  Yes, their disease frightened me.  But what frightened me much more was their isolation, their not-belonging.”

Luke, in his telling of today’s gospel story, doesn’t quite capture for us the horrible isolation that the lepers must have known, and which his first readers surely would have understood.  Jesus, in this moment on the border between Samaria and Galilee (a no-man’s land, if you will) doesn’t just cure the crumbling bodies of these ten broken people; rather, he restores their identities.  “He enables their return to all that makes us fully human – family, community, society, intimacy.  In healing their withered skin and numbed limbs, he releases them to feel again – to embrace and be embraced, to live and worship in community, to reclaim all the social and spiritual ties their disease stole from them.”  Jesus restores their personhood; he brings them back home to themselves.

Ten lepers are cleansed, but only the grateful one is made well.   Maybe it is a stretch to say that the 9 are like the husband and children who never saw Delia for the loving person she was.  Maybe that is saying more about them than we really can.  On the other hand, Jesus has been talking about discipleship.  He’s been talking with Pharisees and he been talking with those who would be his followers, and he’s been challenging them to think about whom it is they wish to be, whom it is they are becoming.  Are they becoming like a rich man who is blind to the poor right at his own front door; are they becoming those who care more for law than for the people of the law; are they becoming those who cling to power rather than those who are able to witness God’s power?

Delia’s family shows us what is at stake.  They show us the sad blindness of missing out on the grace that is given.

The grateful leper on the other hand is like the little genius girl who knows a deep truth about herself, a truth that fills her, a truth that smiles within her and propels her through life.  The grateful leper knows not just that he’s healed; he knows the source of his healing.  He is well because his gratitude has opened his eyes to grace, and when it is grace that we see – holy, divine, eternal, merciful, faithful, and amazing grace that pours itself upon us, knows us and claims us – then we too have a most powerful secret, a truth deep within, that empowers us to move through this life with peace, and love, and hope.  Thanks be to God.