Changed Lives: The Grateful Leper
Changed Lives: The Grateful Leper
Luke 17:11-19
In the Church Ladies group this week, we asked two questions. First, how has your faith changed? As a child, our whole enterprise in life was learning. We absorbed experiences and interactions. We tried to figure out what was happening. We came up with early theories. Then, when we had new experiences. We revised our theories, over and over again. It didn’t matter whether we were trying to learn how to read or we were trying to figure out how friendship works or we were figuring out our place in our family. Our working theories might have been wildly wrong. However, we were young enough to be adaptable. When we found out our beliefs were wrong, we changed what we believed.
This was probably true of what we thought about God, too. Maybe your thoughts on God were shaped by the prayers you said at night with your mother. Maybe your family never talked about God. Maybe you had a great Sunday School teacher. Maybe you never went to church at all. Maybe you went to church but the whole experience left you cold. Maybe the most sacred place for you was the woods or a lake or a river. My hope is that wherever your sense of the sacred started that somehow it also has grown.
Really, your understanding of God should change! If I still think what I thought when I was 4 about anything, something’s wrong. Some days, I may long to feel the way that I used to feel about my country or my family or my church. However, it seems obvious that over time what we think and feel grows more complicated. This is not us becoming cynical. Accepting life’s complexity keeps us humble, after all. Over time, we learn to say things like, “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure.” We live with our limits.
As our understanding of all sorts of things changes, we are changed, too. This is the second question: “If your faith has changed over time, then how has your faith changed you?” There is a saying that I like: “We become our image of God.” If what unfolds for you is an understanding that God is a judge, chances are that you will be a judgmental person—just helping God do God’s work, right? If you understand God as a loving God, you are likely to be a more loving person. Our core values are reflected in our image of God. Those values are what we intend to live.
How does faith change us? Our belief in God will “tune” us, if you will. As we grow, our understanding of what it means to be a loving person grows more complex. (Love doesn’t mean just being nice and saying what people want to hear…) Being a loving person can be complicated. However, God’s steady calling to love can be what we orient to in chaotic times: “What does it mean to love now? What does it mean to love this person?” This is why what we are taught about God as children matters so much. If we were taught to be afraid of a judging God, in challenging times we may be paralyzed with fear. If our “default” sense of God from childhood is of a loving God, God’s steady presence can comfort, and make us confident enough to make the next loving choice.
Of course, sometimes life can just be brutal. We may have been given the gift of a loving image of God as a child. That belief may have led us to believe that we live in a loving world, a belief that may have been supported by the presence of our loving family and friends. Over time, though, enough hurtful experiences accumulate, or a really unfortunate accident happens, or a truly terrible diagnosis comes our way and it feels like like our understanding of our world and God is challenged to the core. Bad things happen and we think, “What if I’ve been wrong this whole time?” It’s not that hard to believe in a loving God when everything’s good. What happens, though, when the hard things come after us or after the people we love.
In Jesus’ day, one of the worst things that could happen to a human being was to be deemed a leper. How would this happen? You would develop one of any number of skin conditions. Leprosy was a far broader set of diseases than the disease that we know as leprosy today. If you had eczema or vitiligo or bad hives or pretty much any other skin disorder, you were a “leper." This would be declared by a priest when you went to him for healing. When he couldn’t heal you, he labeled you for life.
As soon as the priest labeled you a “leper” you were immediately banished from the community. You couldn’t have contact with your family. You couldn’t go to the town well. You couldn’t hang out with your friends. You couldn’t work. You had to live on the edge of town. Often you were required to wear a bell around your neck so that people could hear you when you were moving. And if you were moving, you were required to call out, “Leper! Leper! Leper!”
What motivated this banishment was fear of God’s judgment and fear of getting sick. These skin diseases were very infectious. They were incredibly disfiguring. It was obvious who was sick. It was equally obvious that no one wanted to get what they had. So, the community conclusion was, “We’re not going to have anything to do with you, no matter if you were my friend, no matter if you were my son or daughter. God judgement on you isn’t going to spread to me!”
A long time ago, when I thought about the lepers, I thought of folks with AIDS. In the time when the worst thing that could happen if you had sex with someone was that you might have a baby, suddenly the facts changed to include, “You might die.” People with full blown AIDS had lesions that made their illness obvious. In leu of any real medical understanding, people shunned not just those who obviously had AIDS but all the people whom folks thought might have it, including pretty much the whole gay community.
More recently, our fear has been of COVID. Especially early on, because we didn’t really know how the disease was transmitted, we went to extremes to try to stay healthy. (I remember wiping down my groceries. I remember wondering what outdoor transmission was like: “Am I at risk when I see someone in Open Lands?” I remember going to drop off some care packages at the hospital and being aware of how anxious I was just to be close to the building.) We all struggle when we face unknown threats in this life.
There certainly has also been stigma and isolation attached to COVID. Thanks to the miracle of vaccination, we no longer experience the same threat to our lives. Still, most people who get COVID talk about how sick they’ve been—for several weeks. And almost all of those people seem to have some sort of regret or shame attached (“I shouldn’t have flown”…or… “The crowd at the ballgame did me in!”) Hear me: There’s no shame in getting a virus. However, we still isolate when we have it and that extended period of isolation can really change how we see this life. We feel cut off.
So, in our text, we have ten lepers, a group that would have been known as, “everyone’s worst nightmare.” It’s bad enough to have one leper out on the edge of town. You could keep an eye on one. Ten lepers? That’s some sort of gang. That’s a whole lot of “yuk” that you’re going to have to avoid. What if they surround you and overwhelm you? What if seeing a bunch of lepers together makes it harder to fight the fear that I could end up a leper, myself?
When Jesus draws near, this gang of lepers, this mob, becomes a choir, basically singing out in one voice, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” Truth be told, the “have mercy on us” was the standard cry of those in need to anyone within ear shot: “Can you show a little pity here? Can you give a man a hand?” It’s the “Master” part that makes the cry distinct. Generally, it was Jesus’ closest followers who called him, “Master.” This gang knows Jesus by name and they declare his place as their master.
Our text says that Jesus takes a good look at them. This is such a powerful thing. People who make others uncomfortable, who are suffering in some obvious way, whose suffering scares the heck out of us, share one common trait. We treat them as if they are invisible. It’s the mentally ill person who steps into your train car. It’s the obviously homeless person on the street. We think, “Just act like you don’t see them.” Jesus, instead, takes a good long look. What he sees are people and these people matter.
What does Jesus do? Jesus doesn’t lay hands on them and heal them. Jesus doesn’t quiz them on their faith or ask them why they think they are lepers. No, Jesus tells them to go to see the priests. Some people think that this is Jesus’ way of sticking it to the priests and making them acknowledge Jesus’ power. That seems a little petty to me. Remember, it was the priests who had banished these “lepers” from everything that mattered in life. It was the same priests who would have to declare that they were clean and could resume living. The sooner these people made it to the priests, the sooner they could be welcomed back to life.
Long before the lepers get to the temple, the lepers are healed. They are clean as a whistle. In fact, I’m convinced that none of them actually even went to see the priest at all. Why? When someone treats you as less than human, you’re kind of done with them. I think they headed straight to their families and friends, all of whom would have been perfectly capable of seeing that they weren’t sick any more. Wouldn’t we do exactly the same thing? Forget what I’m supposed to do! I’m going to go do every single thing I’ve missed doing for so long! (Isn’t this what we’ve all done ourselves as the COVID restrictions have changed?)
Here’s the kicker. There were ten lepers. We are told that nine of those lepers just get on with their lives, making up for lost time! This is a miracle! “Run! Don’t look back!” However, one leper did something different. He remembered the man who noticed him, who cared for him, who helped him. He paused long enough, even as the miracle unfolded, to remember the person who made the miracle happen. He went back to find Jesus. He threw himself on his face at Jesus’ feet. He thanked him from the bottom of his heart.
Here’s the rest of the story, the part we only learn in the end.. Before this man was ever a leper, he was already an outsider, someone who was judged. He was a Samaritan, a small group of our ancestors in faith who rejected Jerusalem and the temple and believed that the faith of mainstream Jews had been corrupted. This meant pretty much every non-Samaritan around hated him. Talk about two strikes: a leper and a Samaritan. This former leper is still of part of that group that believed that they were keeping the faith, which it turned out, this day, he was actually doing. Having received God’s healing grace and love, he’s grateful. He takes the time to thank God—pretty much the definition of faith. It turns out that he has not only been healed. He’s been made whole. Jesus says, “Get up! Your faith has healed and saved you.”
His faith has changed and his faith has changed him.