Reading Luke 17 • Sermon from Sunday, September 15, 2019
The disease of leprosy is one in which the largest organ of the body—the skin—enters a state of dis-ease, unable to perform its function of enclosing the individual and defining what is internal and what is external to that person. Our skin allows us to be individuals, and when it is healthy, it is soft and supple, breathes with the world, but also protects and helps define what is not-world. When it is unhealthy, as in the case of leprosy, the integrity of the skin is affected—skin sores and the breakdown of peripheral nerves. It is a disease that has affected people since times of old. Though today it can be treated with antibiotics, people traditionally believed it was extremely contagious, and those with leprosy were cast out of the community; they had to live on the edges of society. People saw sickness and sin as completely interwoven, and did not want to be affected by either from their fellow human beings.
The story of healing portrayed in this gospel about forgiveness describes those who are cast out of society for their illness—the ten, suffering from leprosy, who beg for mercy.
The 17th chapter of Luke’s Gospel gives us Christ the Healer, but it begins with Christ the Teacher, who leads his disciples to work in the depths of humanity, on the edges of humanity, anywhere individuals are no longer in healthy relationship to themselves and to others. “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks will come,” He says. But what are the real stumbling blocks? For those who are ill, for those who sin— surely they suffer stumbling blocks. But indeed it is in how those who are sick are treated—whether in body or soul or even spirit—who therein create the greatest stumbling blocks.
Disciples of Christ are schooled in forgiveness. Where there is any movement to return to the community, to change one’s thinking and feeling—to REPENT—then the answer is always to forgive. Not to sit in judgement whether he means it, but to make the leap of faith into forgiveness. The Disciples, knowing they are not quite up to this task, beg the Lord: INCREASE OUR FAITH!
And here is the great secret: Faith is not a passive gift. It is an activity as mighty as the faith of a mustard seed. Within each seed—the mustard seed being one of the humbler examples of the brilliant creation of the seed—is an unending potential to create anew. Not just one new plant comes from a mustard seed. But generation upon generation of the capacity for regeneration! Faith that healing from sickness and sin is an active engagement with the creative principle of the world.
In this longest “in-between season,” we hear the Trinity prayer spoken from the altar: “He creates in ALL that we create. Our existing is his creating. Our life is his creating life. He creates through us in the soul’s creating.”
When we come to his altar in all humility—knowing we are all beset by stumbling blocks—we pray that evil be taken from our words, and in the act of offering, that the FIRE OF LOVE be born, which is creative of being.
We are all sinners; we are all sick. These are not judgments, they are simple descriptions of the human condition. We do not live in total ONENESS with the divine creative word. We are cut off from the fullness of community with the divine and from the fullness of our own spirit-filled individuality. We are not yet one with God in every moment. But we are given the gift of the potential, for many things, including free speech. We have the possibility to fill our words with spirit, with a consciousness which returns our brothers and sisters to wholeness because we choose to see them as whole--imperfect but always with the potential to be made new.
If we have ever experienced being made whole ourselves, then our gratitude may remind us to seek to offer this wholeness to others in how we look at them—because the Kingdom of God truly is within us. Living this truth is the only thing that can unite us, sinners all.