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Sunday, October 9, 2016 at Advent Lutheran Church in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. 21st. Sunday after Pentecost. The ten lepers and being a refugee.
QUESTION:The focus of the Gospel Lesson today is not about Leprosy, and it is not about being grateful although both of these things are present in the story. It is a metaphor and a critique of the religious community which was an extremely exclusive group. To be excluded from the community was to be treated as a leper.
You have no doubt heard the phrase; “Dark night of the soul.” It originated in the 16th. century with a poem that was written by St. John of the Cross, even though he never titled his work with that name. It has come to mean any spiritual crisis or feeling of disconnect or despair.
There are two pitch black moments of memory in my mind that surface now and again. Both of them are disturbing because of their darkness. Both of them happened at a time when I was not certain if I had a future or not.
One of them is so vivid that I can see, smell, and hear the sounds of what happened 48 years ago. The place is Da Nang, Vietnam in the holding camp from which newly arriving U.S. Army troops were deployed to their service areas for the next year or more.
I had no idea what my assignment would be, and each morning before sunup we were called into formation and the crackling sound of the wartime speaker system would bark out names and assignments. At about 3:00am., I woke to the sound of someone entering the tent where I was sleeping and saw a soldier, obviously back from the bush, covered in mud as he fell onto a nearby bunk exhausted.
I wondered at that moment if that would be me in a few weeks just as the horn that was the signal to gather in formation blasted its rude awakening sound as soldiers emerged from their tents like so many locusts.
The sergeant who read the assignments stood on a riser a black silhouette with no features as the spotlight behind him made us squint.
“Kinens, 54979188, 27th. Transportation Battalion, Quin Nohn.”
Although I had no idea what awaited me in that place, there was this sense of relief that for good or ill, my fate was sealed with at least by knowing the place where I would likely spend the next year of my life.
It reminded me of the other pitch black time when the future was uncertain and the night was deep. That time was 66 years ago and the memories are a series of snap shots like the still frames of a movie.
The first frame is of twisted steel beams, burned out shells of cars with bullet holes rusting among the rubble of destroyed buildings the significance of which I would only realize many years later when my parents told the story of how we moved to 8 different displaced person’s camps in the first 4 years of my life.
The next frame is from the deep, dark, hold of a ship where makeshift beds were constructed from shelving on a converted battleship that now served as a transport shop bringing thousands of war displaced immigrants to the United States.
All the memories from that journey are either black or grey with the exception of bright green Jello that was served with dinner, perhaps because I had never seen anything like it before.
I was too young to know or understand that our family had been sponsored and the terrible uncertainty like what I felt in Da Nang before my assignment was lifted from my parents and they were grateful that at least that part of their fate was known.
I tell you this because the Gospel lesson for today is not so much about magic healing, Jesus does not even touch the ten lepers to make them whole he just tells them to show themselves to the priests, so they could be accepted back into the community.
Because my whole life began, speaking metaphorically, as a leper, I understand the deep and poignant meaning of this message. There are many lepers in our society still today yearning to be accepted, respected and embraced.
It is only recently, and not without pain and struggle that our LGBTsisters and brothers have finally, legally, been embraced, and yet there are still so many people who will not acknowledge equal justice for all and are actively working to reverse the progress we have made.
As always the church, our church, has been a Johnny come lately in passing legislation allowing ordination and marriage for same sex couples. To not see them as lepers is to miss the point that Jesus makes in today’s Gospel. It is precisely why he says a Samaritan, a foreigner, is the only one who returned to give thanks.
As a result of that long overdue act of compassion and faith the ELCA, your church and mine, lost roughly 1,500 congregations because they did not agree with the decision to embrace all of God’s children equally!
Being grateful for the gift of health and wellness is synonymous with being restored to the community. The community that is the birth right of every child of God.
Anytime we treat the poor, the mentally challenged, the elderly,people of color, the Native American, women, the powerless as foreigners we render them lepers, and so we must ask how would Jesus treat the foreigner?
The answer is in our Gospel today, he embraces him, and by so doing shows us what we are to do as well.
I find that in the times in which we live, it is often those who proclaim their deep love of Jesus who are the most judgmental of all, sending our modern day lepers away instead of embracing and healing them.
You can, and have the right to believe whatever you want about people who are different from you – but if you judge and exclude them from the same rights and privileges you demand, practice and revere for yourself, then you cannot call yourself a Christian.
Otherwise what Jesus teaches is irrelevant and words have lost their meaning.
Jesus asks the question;
“Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?” Apparently they did not understand what had just happened to them, and they were the in siders.
And when he says to the foreigner;
“Get up and go your way; your faith has made you well,”
I believe Jesus means that being restored to the religious and social life that was denied him also carries with it the responsibility to treat others the Jesustreated him. That is with mercy and compassion.
When I re-live the dark, even pitch black memories I share with you today I am reminded that every generation almost exclusively has to learn the poignant lessons of history all over again.
There are already some young Latvian people of my generation that are expressing their hardline anti-immigration views based on what they see in the media, most of it either inaccurate or politically biased forgetting that they would not even be here if it were not for the kindness of strangers.
My grey, black and white images burst into living color in April of 1950 when a Jewish co-op near Cloverdale, Michigan called Circler Pines Center embraced the Eastern European immigrant family pictured as our thought of the day in the bulletin, from a country, by the way, that among others had murdered Jewish people while under German occupation.
These Jewish sponsors of ours knew what it means to welcome the stranger and heal the leper!
AMEN.
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