Returning to Jesus (Proper 23C; Holy Baptism)

 

Returning to Jesus
Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 23 Year C RCL)
9 October 2016--8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist, 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist with Holy Baptism

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c; Psalm 111; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel is a familiar story to most of us:  Jesus heals ten lepers and only one returns to him to thank him.  It is used in many Sunday Schools as a teaching tool for basic politeness:  being nice and following Jesus means always remembering to say thank you.  And that is what most of us remember about the story. 

But many things in the story suggest such a reading is too simple.  It story starts with the puzzling “Jesus was going to Jerusalem, and was in the territory between Galilee and Samaria.”   The two territories abut each other; there is no corridor between them. But the storyteller wants you to know from the start that this story is about something that happened between two opposing lands.    It is a story of what happens on the border, the metaphorical space in between. 

Jesus heals the ten men and women with the contagious skin disease. Keeping with the teachings of his Jewish faith, he tells them to go to the Temple, and seek out a priest to inspect them, perform a ritual, and declare them healed or clean.  All go, but one returns to thank Jesus.  The one who returns is a Samaritan.

The nine are following Jesus’ instructions because they can:  they are Jewish and, even if leprosy keeps them at a distance, they can go and do exactly what Jesus asks them.  But the Samaritan is in a fix:  he cannot go to Jerusalem, and a priest there would most certainly not perform the ritual and declare him clean.   Samaritans were considered to be permanently unclean and forbidden access to the holy sites.  The Samaritan, hearing Jesus say, “go to a priest,” hears Jesus commanding him to do the impossible.  He has nowhere to go.  But when he realizes he is well, the joyful gratitude that overwhelms him drives him to turn back, go to Jesus, and thank him.   Jesus notes ironically:  what about the nine others? 

How often do we find ourselves in a like situation, where we find we are just completely unable to do what Jesus tells us, what God commands?  Usually this makes us feel unworthy to come back into Jesus’ presence.  It makes us reluctant to want to engage him, since it looks like it’s a losing proposition.     But then grace happens and we return to Jesus, if only out of gratitude and thanks. 

At the conference of my religious order, the Society of Catholic Priests of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, in Atlanta this last week, former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold shared with us this quote, from French poet Charles Péguy:  “Grace is insidious.  If it doesn’t come straight, it comes bent.  If it doesn’t come bent, it comes broken.  If it doesn’t come from above, it comes from beneath.  Grace is insidious.” 

If it doesn't come bent, it comes broken.  Broken is how God gets in.  The ground is broken before you plant it; then when you harvest wheat, you break the heads of wheat and then the grains themselves as you  grind flour and meal.  You use the broken grain to make bread.  And the broken bread is what feeds you.  Brokenness lets God in. 

It doesn’t matter if you can’t do what Jesus asks you to do.  Just think of all the blessing and good he has given you.  He still comes through and gives you grace and love, and if you take time and be quiet, you’ll notice.  And you will be thankful.  And gratitude will drive out fear, guilt, and, one way or another, whatever it is that made you feel guilty in the first place.   If grace doesn’t come in just the right, expected way, it will come, nevertheless.  That’s because grace comes from God because of the way God is, not the way we are. 

That’s why in today’s collect we ask God to send us grace, both to precede and to follow us.  The grace that comes before—prevenient or, as the old Prayer Book calls it,  “preventing” grace—makes us able to yearn for God and love Jesus despite ourselves.  The grace that comes after—what theologians call “effectual” grace—is what empowers us to actually accomplish God’s will and accept the limitations that God gave us when we were created.  

It’s one of the reasons why we baptize little children like we baptized George today:  we recognize this is not just about how we feel or think, or how well we have made decisions.  We all rely on the grace of God, and the grace of each other.  It takes a village to make a Christian, just as it takes to raise a child.    On our own, without help from the community and from God, we cannot make it.  This is not because of ingrained contamination passed on by birth, it is just the way we are.   We talk about baptism as a sacrament, an outward sign of an inward reality, and not just a sign pointing to something else, but in some ways actually accomplishing it.    It is the beginning of our life in Christ, a life which is nourished and fed by the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.  Again, this is all in community, the body in which the Spirit takes flesh. And this body itself is composed of broken people.  We help each other; and we cannot expect perfection or an absence of brokenness.  The Church is made of us, but as the embodiment of Christ, it helps us as we help each other.  

When Jesus says “and where are the nine others?” he is saying that sometimes it takes the feeling of being rejected—of not being able to do what we ought, not able to make it on your own—to awaken us to the presence of grace and kindle gratitude in our hearts.  And gratitude, once burning, is what lights the fires of service and generosity so that we become means of grace to others. 

What has Jesus asked you to do that has proven impossible so far?   How can you turn this into yearning for him, and awaken your sense of the grace that is being poured out upon you?  How can you let it turn you back to him in gratitude?   

In the name of God,  Amen.