The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“They found each other, these ten lepers…They drifted from garbage heap to garbage heap finding only rags to wear and scraps to eat. When the wind was right, their collective odor announced their approach and people scattered before them.

The sight of healthy people running in such terror from this rag-tag mob was ironic. The ten lepers had no strength; they were practically starving. There was no cure, no prevention except to keep it away and pity the poor ones who had it. They had each other and that was it. But somewhere along the way they heard about a man who did not run from lepers, who was a healer and he was coming their way.

October is AIDS Awareness Month. We don’t hear much about this awful disease these days. Modern medicine has, thankfully, made the symptoms of HIV/AIDS manageable and kept those living with AIDS relatively healthy and longer. Preventive medications now reduce the possibility of being infected with this virus.

Back in the day when the picture was not so bright, I worked in the AIDS Care Program at Yale-New Haven Hospital where I counseled patients coming for HIV testing and helped nurses and physicians deal with the stress treating young people who may not survive and explained the latest information available about transmission and safe sex education. It was rewarding but hard work mainly because I saw so many young people die.

The reaction of some people to those living with HIV was not much different from the suffering of those lepers. Some medical facilities refused to treat them. Funeral homes refused to bury them. Families abandoned them.

The very first sermon I gave on this Gospel was at Christ Church, New Haven, where sadly the rector at that time had just been diagnosed with HIV infection. It was about the same time I joined this congregation on my journey to being received into the Episcopal Church.

When Jesus looked at the lepers he didn’t see their disease. He saw wives without husbands, homes without mothers, siblings without siblings and important work that was not being done. He saw people whose dreams had crumbled within them as their bodies crumbled on the outside.

He saw helplessness and absolute despair. And he told them, ‘Go show yourselves to the priests’ and as they went their way they were cleansed, cured. Crippled feet began to sprout toes where stumps had been. They began to strip away rags they no longer needed to cover the sores.

Nine of them ran on to the village, but one stopped and looked at his former colleagues as they disappeared into streets that led them back to life. This one turned and looked back to Jesus. Slowly this man realized that before he ran to meet his future, there was something else he had to do. He fell down on his face at the feet of Jesus, giving thanks. And he was a Samaritan.”

Luke’s inclusion that the tenth leper was a Samaritan, a double outsider—not only by virtue of his leprosy but also by his being non-Jewish—shows his sympathy for outsiders and makes the point that God’s mercy extends even to those we might consider unworthy.

I would like to add another slant to the text. I wonder if we might see in this story the gift, maybe the miracle, of the encounter with another person or community that can affect a major life change, gives us a new and refreshing perspective about ourselves, even, perhaps, open up a new world to us.

That’s really what the experience of the lepers was all about. They suffered from a disfiguring contagious disease that created great hysteria among the people. They wore bells around their necks to warn others of their approach. Beyond their physical deformity was the pain of utter loneliness and isolation from the community. They lived in exile.

Have there been times in our lives when we felt isolated from the mainstream, disregarded by individuals, society, even the church? The world can be cruel to us if we don’t have the right body type or if we have obvious flaws or are somehow different. We may be type cast and undervalued. It may hurt deeply.  

But have there also been times along our journey, when we may stumble upon a savior, a deliverer or liberator, in an unexpected encounter with someone or some community that affirms our goodness, helps us to see God’s desire for our wholeness, and sends us off to show ourselves to the world, reconciled, healed, and restored? Like the ten lepers?

The final words: “Your faith has made you well.” I suspect that Jesus was not just speaking about leprosy when he said that—at that point the man was already cured—but rather about a different kind of wellness. He was teaching us that deep-rooted human divisions and the failure to recognize one another as unique and beloved children of God is a terrible malady. This grateful Samaritan would have understood that even better than the other nine.

We may not bear the scars or deformities of those lepers, but there may be parts of us that are hidden in the borderlands of ourselves where we may least want to be seen and most need to be touched. Jesus, who is not afraid of borderlands, does not mind meeting us in those places, and it may be that by recognizing him there, we will find in ourselves a new outpouring of the grateful love that makes all well.