Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-12; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
I don’t know how many of you remember the “cold war” as it was called prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. I remember back in grade school – 1965 through 1972 – that alarm would go off; not the fire alarm, a different alarm, a special alarm. We would file out of our classrooms and line the walls in the hallway. Everyone, except for the teachers who were watching us with genuine concern, would turn and face the walls, putting our hands on the back of our heads and leaning with our elbows against the wall. This was our version of “duck and cover”. It was the way in which we would hopefully survive a nuclear attack at the hands of those “godless” communists.
When I went to Jr. / Sr. High School in the 70’s we stopped “ducking and covering”, but I do remember exploring the basement of the high school after track practice in 9th grade and seeing all those “Civil Defense” signs and emblems. There were actually caged rooms filled with food rations and gas masks that in the 70’s had been stockpiled there for ten or fifteen years.
Thinking back on those days now I wonder what would have happened if that Cold War and turned into a hot one. What would have happened if the threat of nuclear war wasn’t realized but conventional warfare with the Soviets was. What if the Soviets had been able to invade our soil and were successful in conquering our “selfish capitalist” society? What if our leaders, our government, our educators and our religious leaders were taken away in exile to some foreign land, far away from Mom, baseball, and apple pie? What if we were taken away with them, off to the desolation of Soviet Russia or to the numbing cold of Siberia?
As long as we’re considering bad things, what if some religious nut had been predicting for years that exactly that scenario would take place? What if someone showed up and predicted that our contempt for the poor and our hatred of justice had kindled God’s wrath so hot against us that God’s wrath became a reality at the hands of invading communist troops?
What if we were in exile, living in a land that was like nothing we had ever lived in before, worshiping false gods, or in the Soviet’s case NO god, and obeying foreign customs, suffering the brutality of an occupied people? What if all the symbols of our country and our faith were wiped clean from our lives… no bald eagles, no stars and stripes, no strip malls or convenience stores, no bibles, and no crosses?
What if that nut-job pastor that had tried for years to warn us about the impending destruction that was coming was still living in the land we were torn from, still insisting that God was punishing us for our sins by allowing our enemies to conquer us and drag us off into exile, and now offering us advice about how to live among our captors?
What if that nut-job pastor was telling us to embrace the foreign culture we found ourselves enslaved in, calling on us to be good citizens of our foreign government? What if that kook was encouraging us to intermarry with our captors, and to allow our children to intermarry with the children of our conquerors, embracing that foreign society to the point where we would knowingly allow ourselves and our children to forget our grudges and to take the chance of losing our own cultural and religious identity?
And as the cherry on the top of adding insult to injury, what if the crack-pot prophet called on us to pray for the health of our captors and to pray for the success of their godless culture with the same zeal we prayed for our own? What kind of nut would ask such things of us? What kind of god would send this delusional prophet to us?
Today’s reading from Jeremiah is the exact same scenario for the Judeans. Jeremiah, the prophet of the true God who remains in Jerusalem after the destruction of the temple and the exile of all leaders, writes to those in exile to offer them advice on how to live in captivity until the hope of return is realized. Jeremiah, who was hated by the Jewish rulers and leaders, is now the leader of the Jewish presence in the Holy City of Jerusalem. And Jeremiah does not preach counter-insurgency against the Babylonians; he preaches that those in exile should pray for the civil society they are now living in and among – no vengeance, no hatred, no blood oaths. Can we in our nationalist American society even imagine what Jeremiah was asking of his fellow countrymen living in exile? Can we comprehend what it would feel like to have our post-modern “God is Love” creator allow us to become enslaved to those who despise us in order to teach us humility and show us God’s will? Would we recognize the kind of hope Jeremiah was trying to offer to them? Is that kind of faith possible?
Jeremiah was preaching an end to isolation and hopelessness. Jesus in Luke’s gospel is trying to do the same thing.
Ten lepers approach Jesus and respectfully keep their distance, as those banished from society because of their physical disease were required to do. It’s not clear from the initial story if these ten lepers were Galileans, those considered acceptable for Jesus to minister to, or Samaritans, those considered enemies of Jesus the Judean and not being worthy of Jesus’ offer of salvation. What is clear is that the ten are universally ‘unclean’, and that they risk their miniscule social status by bothering the “Master” with their request for mercy.
The funny thing is that when Jesus engages them he doesn’t promise them anything. He simply tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, which was required for someone with leprosy to be readmitted into Jewish society, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” The ten don’t question what Jesus said, or his authority to say it; they simply obey, and as they obey, they are made clean.
Then something strange happens. Nine of the ten do as they are told, as Jewish law requires of them, and we assume they go to the priests and are reinstated into society. But one leper comes back. This one doesn’t obey all that the master has told him to do. In the midst of their healing this leper turns around and comes back to Jesus. Not only that, but as the second half of verse 16 points out, “And he was a Samaritan!” That’s like saying to and evangelical, “and he was an athiest!” Or like saying to a Roman Catholic, “and he was a Baptist!” And we Episcopalians would say, “So what, it’s not like he’s a Jehovah’s Witness!”
The Samaritan is the one who is not Jewish and does not do, indeed cannot do what is required by Jewish tradition, and yet he too is healed. And the other nine don’t even come back to prostrate themselves before Jesus and offer thanks, and yet they are healed as well. So then who was right and who was wrong? Isn’t there usually right and wrong in these kinds of stories? The Samaritan and the nine did opposite things and yet they all were healed. How can this be so?
The Good News today is that today’s readings from Jeremiah and Jesus are life-giving lessons in faith. Jeremiah offers faith that those in captivity will one day return to the Holy Land, that the nation of Israel will one day be healed and whole again, that God has not forgotten them. Jesus enables the ten leper’s faith that simply obeying the command of the master will heal them of their disease. Both Jeremiah and Jesus are preaching the hope of an end to isolation and banishment. That kind of hope comes through faith alone: faith that God loves all of his children; faith that when the world rejects you, God embraces you; faith that God has given you the gift of salvation; faith as tiny as a mustard seed.