Your faith has saved you
Proper 23, Year C
Grace Church
October 10, 2010

I have a confession to make. I hate talking about stewardship. I hate thinking about stewardship, I hate preaching about stewardship. OK? I hate doing it as your rector. I hated it when I was on your side of things and sat in the pews listening to sermons and stewardship appeals and the like. It’s one of those things that come around every year and makes us uncomfortable in so many ways. We feel guilty for not pledging, or not pledging enough. We may feel guilty because we think we ought to be tithing and we know in our hearts that’s never gonna happen because we live from paycheck to paycheck with never quite enough money for the necessities of life, let alone to give to those worthy organizations that need our support, and to give to our church. A pledge is one of those obligations, those duties, one of those things I think I need to do. So I tend to put my annual pledge in the basket with feelings of guilt and often resentment.

But today is stewardship Sunday so I have to preach about it. Fortunately, this morning’s gospel helps us think about stewardship in somewhat different light. It’s one of those familiar miracle stories which, if you spent any time in Sunday School as a child, you probably heard dozens of times. Jesus cleanses ten lepers; he tells them to go to the priests to be certified as clean , and then to go back home. Only one of them returns to thank him, and it turns out to be a Samaritan who responds to Jesus’ acts with gratitude. On the surface, and this is probably the way most Sunday school lessons about it go, this story is about etiquette, about giving thanks.

If you’re as old as me, your standard image of leprosy is probably shaped largely by old movies, perhaps James Michener’s Hawaii, or even better, Ben Hur—leper colonies with people grossly misshapen by Hansen’s disease, having lost limbs and the like. In fact, the word translated as leprosy in the bible has nothing to do with Hansen’s disease. Rather it seems to have been a number of possible skin conditions, even something as simple as psoriasis. And the biblical injunctions were not about keeping physical infection away; rather they were about purity and cleanliness. That’s made clear by what is a very curious element in the discussion of leprous diseases in Leviticus. You were only unclean if the condition was partial, that is to say, you were unclean if you had spots of the disease on your body. If it made you white from head to toe, the priest would certify you clean.

The important thing about leprosy is that it excluded you from the community. Leviticus dictates that a person with leprosy must live alone, away from human habitation, that lepers were to wear torn clothes and cry out “Unclean, unclean,” when anyone approached.

Given that context, the story as Luke tells it, takes on added significance. In fact, there’s a whole lot more going on here than a comparison between one healed leper who has good manners, and nine who don’t. Luke begins by reminding us that Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem. What’s odd about that is the very first time Luke mentions Jesus going up to Jerusalem, back in 9:51, he also has an encounter with Samaritans. On that occasion, a Samaritan village refused to let him visit them. But now, he is traveling between Samaria and Galilee and coming to the end of his journey to Jerusalem and as he goes, he encounters ten lepers who plead with him to have mercy on them.

Jesus heals the ten lepers and then instructs them to go to the priests to be certified clean. This is was in perfect keeping with Jewish law as laid out in Leviticus. Nine obeyed him; one did not. The tenth came back, praising God with a loud voice, and thanking Jesus. Luke adds, as if in a marginal comment, “And he was a Samaritan.”

So the story is about more than manners. It is about religious norms and values. The Samaritan was doubly unclean in the eyes of Jews. As a leper, he would have been excluded from the community, shunned. And as a Samaritan, he would have been reviled for the religious traditions he followed. What is puzzling is that his being a Samaritan takes on significance only after his leprosy is cleansed. Jesus told all ten to present themselves to the priests, what the law required. But of course, as a Samaritan, he would not have had that option, or indeed, it would not have been necessary. No certificate from any priest deeming him free of leprosy would make him a part of the Jewish community. Perhaps that is why he came back to Jesus. He realized he had been cleansed, and that was all that mattered.

By contrast, the other nine needed the priests’ certification of being leprosy-free before they could rejoin their community and assume a role in the religious life of Judaism. There was more at stake for them. Still, whatever their motives, whatever Luke’s motives for telling the story in this way, what intrigues me here is what Jesus says in response to the actions of the Samaritan.

The nine lepers did nothing wrong. They cried out to Jesus, asking, “Jesus, master, have mercy on us!” Luke is careful to point out that they did not transgress any boundaries. They stayed as far away from Jesus as they could; they respected the boundaries set up in the law. When Jesus told them to go and present themselves to the priests, they obeyed without question. They followed the rules, and no doubt, they were quite happy that they were cleansed.

The Samaritan turned back, he glorified God, fell on his knees and thanked Jesus. We might think such a response would be natural, but isn’t it the case that most of us would follow the rules laid out? We would do whatever it took to be restored to our families, our livelihoods, and our religious lives? It was only the Samaritan who responded differently. He acted as unexpectedly and extravagantly as Jesus himself did. He came back; and because of his response, he was rewarded extravagantly. The NRSV , “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.” In fact, a better translation would read, “your faith has saved you.”

It’s the not just that the Samaritan was cured of his leprosy. He was saved. He recognized in the healing of his body the gracious power of the one who healed him. He looked beyond himself to Jesus. In so doing, he becomes for Luke, a model of faith. The ten lepers had pleaded with Jesus, “Have mercy on us.” But only one, the Samaritan, the outsider, the foreigner, recognized and acknowledged their master, only he came to faith. In fact, only he was truly, completely, transformed by the experience.

These past few weeks, one of the themes that I come back to again and again is gratitude. We have seen repeatedly as we work our way through the gospel of Luke the importance of giving thanks for what we have been given us by God. It’s an appropriate theme at any time, of course; but it is particularly appropriate today as we think about the stewardship of our resources and how we will support the work of God in this place.

It’s easy to see stewardship, the giving of our financial resources as a duty or an obligation. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about our offerings almost like a membership fee—something required of us in order to belong to the church. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. That’s approaching belonging to the body of Christ as a consumer—you get what you pay for, to put our relationship with God into the context of a business transaction. But when we do that, we miss out on the depth and richness of our experience of God in Jesus Christ.

What we see in the encounter of Jesus with the ten lepers is something quite different. They appealed to Jesus to have mercy on them; he healed them and restored them to their loved ones and to their community, and in response one of them came back and thanked him in an act of spontaneous joy. That joy should be the heart of our experience of Jesus Christ. That joy should transform us. Everything in the world around us teaches us to approach life as consumers. We are prone to see all of our relationships in terms of what we can get out of them. Administrators call college students consumers and when we begin looking for a new church, we go church shopping. It’s hard not to approach our relationship with Christ in the same way. We want to know what we can get out of it, what the pay off will be.

Like the ten lepers, we cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Like the lepers we hope that our cries will be answered, that Jesus will heal us. But the tenth leper, the Samaritan reminds us that whatever we might expect to receive from our encounter with Christ, there is a real possibility that it will transform us in ways we can’t imagine. Even more, it is our gratitude, our loving response as we accept the gift of that encounter, that completes our transformation and makes us whole.