18 Pentecost, C proper 23, October 13, 2019
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c Psalm 111
2 Tim. 2:8-15 Luke 17:11-19
The Bible is a story about how God is for everyone but God makes appeals to everyone in ways that are relevant to each people and each person.
The Hebrew Scriptures are about how God became relevant to the people of Israel. It is also a story of their failure to properly appreciate what God wanted them to do.
Sometimes they totally forgot the One God and went after the other gods and goddesses of their neighboring tribes or their conquerors.
Sometimes in fear of being too compromised with outsiders, they made their rules so legalistically tight to keep the community totally separated and isolated from foreigners.
And when they become too exclusive, when being a foreigner became the equivalent of being an unclean person and a sinner, there were prophets and seers who arose to remind them that even though God did something special for Israel, God also was special to other people, to foreigners too.
The story of Naaman is a story about the natural bias for each person and religious group to believe that God is so special to us that we begin to think and act that we are special to the exclusion of others. The prophet Elisha offered that God's healing touch was available to foreigners too.
All are made in the image of God; not all are fortunate enough to be born into conditions of knowing what that means.
Naaman, like all human beings was vulnerable to what can happen to human beings. Even though he was a general in Assyrian Army, he was dreadfully ill, so ill that he was desperate enough to go outside the medical practices of his own country. An Israelite slave captured in war told him about a holy prophet in Israel who could help him get better. He went and begrudgingly submitted to the total folk remedy, and he was cured. And he knew that God loved him, the God of Israel, to whom he would be loyal even when he had to pretend to be religious in his own country.
What connection for us in this sermon could Naaman, the Assyrian, have with a Samaritan leper who was healed by Jesus?
They were both foreigners to people who thought that God had chosen them so exclusively, that outsiders could not be let into the wonderful secret of God's favor.
The Samaritans were remnant people of the divided Kingdom of Israel who experienced the onslaught of the Assyrian forces, and they inter-married with their captors. They forsook their "ethnic" purity, and they were rejected by the Kingdom of Judah where residents believed that they maintained the true tradition of the Torah, and partly because they had been carried away into captivity in Babylon and Persia.
The Samaritans had a Torah based religious practice centered on the Holy Mount Gerizim. In the time of Jesus, the Gospels presented the Samaritans as notorious enemies who were avoided by the Jews.
What is the textual function of the appearance of the Samaritans in the Gospels?
The Samaritan in the Gospel highlights the universal needs of all humanity. No one wants to be foreign to inclusion by God. No one wants to be an outsider to significant community. What can separate us from community? Sickness and disease. In other times and places, and even in our own time, sickness can separate people from caring society. A really bad sickness can be regarded as a "curse;" even a curse from God. And if God has a curse on someone, they must be defiled and quarantined from full inclusion in the community. After all, if such people can be contagious; the curse can be contagious. So sick people are both physically and socially shunned.
Jesus Christ came as the reconciler between God and humanity. He was the one who proclaimed that being sick was not a curse from God; it was only being vulnerable to an entire range of things that can happen to any human being.
And what can separate us from the love of God in Christ? Can sickness? No it can't. Can being a foreigner or an immigrant separate us from the love of God in Christ? No.
St. Paul was the architect of the paradigm of God's favor coming to the Gentiles, to the Samaritans, to the sick, to the shunned, to the neglected.
The early Christian communities were communities which practice a fuller inclusion than did the synagogue communities.
The early preachers believed that Jesus was a reconciler for the people of the world and so they did everything they could to show how the inclusion of Gentiles and foreigners was central to the message of Christ.
A Samaritan leper was doubly oppressed. He was just of mongrel ethnic heritage; and he was defiled with leprosy which required that he be quarantined from society.
But what is the punchline of the Gospel? The Samaritan was one who returned to offer his thanksgiving for being healed. He was symbolic of all of the outsiders who had come to receive the healthful salvation of the message of Jesus Christ. He is the second Good Samaritan of the Gospel of Luke. He is an outsider who is more diligent in his thanksgiving than those who behaved as those who were "entitled."
What is perhaps the chief crime of entitled people? Entitled people do not think they have to say thank you, because they live as those who think that deserve to be exempt from bad things happening to them.
Are we living lives in such entitled ways that we do not think that we have to take time to offer thanksgiving? Why did God ask us to keep a sabbath? To remind us that we can never be so entitled as to forget to return and say thanks, and not just in private, but also in the community of other thankful people.
What is this event at the altar called today? It is called Holy Eucharist. What does Eucharist mean? It means thanksgiving. Thank you for not presuming that your salvation entitlement makes you forget to be thankful. Thank you for returning here today to offer the chief Christian event on Sunday, Holy Eucharist, Holy Thanksgiving.
And what happens because we chose to return to give thanks? Jesus says, "I give you my body and my Spirit in an affirming presence of my salvation in your life." Thank you for returning to say thanks. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment