Worship > Sermon Archive

The Reverend Beth Fain
October 14, 2007

Pentecost 23c: Eleven outsiders with one grace (Ruth 1. 1-19a; Luke 17. 11-19)

One of my guilty pleasures is to watch a reality show called "Project Runway."
On it, fashion designers compete with one another creating clothes to meet outrageous challenges.
One designer finally wins a bunch of prizes which enable him or her to have the resources to begin his or her own fashion label. One of the catch lines each week is, "In fashion, one day you're in, and the next day you're out."
This is the opposite of God.
God says, One day you may think you're out, but the next day you can find out you are so very in!
In our lesson from Ruth and our Gospel from Luke, we have three stories about outsiders who find out that they are "in."
Ruth, the Moabite. The nine lepers who are healed by Jesus. The one Samaritan leper who is healed and saved.
In the years before Judah had a king (Saul, David, or anyone else), there was a famine.
Elimelech from Bethlehem in Judah took his wife Naomi and two sons to Moab, a pagan land east of the Dead Sea and south of the Jordan River.
While they are there, Naomi and Elimelech's two sons marry two Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth.
All too soon, first Elimelech and then his two sons die, leaving all three women widows.
When Naomi learns that the famine in Judah is over, she decides to return to her home in Bethlehem.
Since she has nothing to offer her daughters at home in Judah (like new husbands), Naomi releases them from their commitment to her and to the family, and tells them to stay in Moab and remarry.
Three times Naomi tells the two women to return to their homes in Moab.
Orpah finally consents, doing what Naomi has asked, but Ruth continues to state her intent to go with Naomi.
Orpah is obedient, but Ruth shows faith.
Ruth renounces her people and her gods and chooses to go to Judah as an outsider-both an alien and an unmarried woman. But she also goes as a faithful daughter in law and a believer in Naomi's God, the one true God.
Do you know the end of Ruth's story?
In Bethlehem, Ruth will marry Boaz. They will have a son, Obed, who will have a son named Jesse who will have a son named David who will become King of Israel.
Ruth, once an outsider, will be one of only four women listed in Matthew's genealogy, ancestors, of Jesus.
One who is very, very out, becomes very, very in through God's grace and her faith.
Faith being the ability to see God's grace and then to be willing to receive that gift of grace.
Hundreds of years later, on the border between Galilee and Samaria, a community of ten more outsiders live. Lepers.
In the Hebrew tradition, leprosy being a social disease-anything from mildew on houses or on clothes to a wide assortment of skin diseases.
Not unlike any disease in any society that is so mysterious and so threatening that it is met with fear and ignorance and exclusion.
Lepers lived in communities on the outskirts of town but tried to position themselves near enough to a roadway that they could call out to passersby to help them out by leaving food or clothing at a safe distance.
These ten see Jesus walking by and call out:
Master-have mercy.
Now lepers were "invisible" people; every culture has "invisible" people, don't we?
Our gospel clearly says that Jesus sees them. Jesus sees the lepers.
Jesus sees them and then tells them to follow the Law-the same priests who had declared them "unclean" and sent them to isolation are the only ones who can also declare them healed and able to return to society.
We are told that it is in their obedience to Jesus, on the way to see the priest, that they are healed.
Obeying Jesus, they receive the desire of their hearts.
There is one more outsider.
The tenth leper.
Who was a Samaritan.
Doubly an outsider.
Outside because of his illness.
Outside because his ancestors had stayed behind when the other Israelites had been sent into exile in Babylon 500 or years before; stayed behind and intermarried with pagans; stayed behind and developed a mongrel Jewish faith that the insider Jews considered heretical.
The priest would not have declared the Samaritan clean; even free of leprosy, short of conversion, nothing the Samaritan could do would have enabled him to be part of Jewish society.
Finding himself healed, the Samaritan could have hurried on home-who would blame him?
But the outsider became an insider.
The Samaritan leper, finding that he was no longer a leper, could do nothing but return to Jesus.
To jump up and down for joy praising God for his healing and falling at Jesus' feet and thanking Jesus for his part in God's healing.
With a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face, Jesus asks the Samaritan where the other nine are (knowing that they are being obedient to Jesus and the law hurrying to the priest so they can hurry back to their loved ones; like Orpah, they have done nothing wrong. They have done the "right" thing. They have been obedient.)
Jesus says that the outsider has not only found healing.
He has found faith.
The ability to see when God acts and to thank God in return.
Faith as obedience paired with thanksgiving.
Jesus' healing power made the man well.
The man's faith allowed him to see what Jesus had done and to give thanks.
Nearly one/fifth of the Gospels are stories about healing and the discussions that occur in response to the healings.
Jesus can't help but heal.
Consistently, Jesus does not heal in direct proportion to the healing we would think a person merits.
Jesus does not heal in proportion to what a person "deserves."
Jesus heals both insiders and outsiders with abandon.
When Jesus heals, he knows that in all likelihood that people will not thank him and may not even change their lives in response to the healing; he continues to heal in spite of their response, in spite of our response today.
But even greater than the gift of healing is the gift of faith.
Faith is the gift of those who truly accept and know what they have received.
In the world there are more outsiders than we can count.
In God's kingdom, there is endless room for insiders.
Faith is not about our search for God but about our accepting God's search for us.
Jesus has opened the door of God's kingdom and invited us all in.
But oh the joy when we not only accept Jesus' invitation to enter but then fall on our knees in thanks and praise.
That is, when obedience kisses thanksgiving, and there's faith.
AMEN

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