Gratitude of the Outcast
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 9, 2022
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c • 2 Timothy 2:8-15 • Luke 17:11-19
“Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.” Amen.
First Century Palestine was a hard place to live, made harder by unbending rules of honor and shame. The honor/shame culture permeated life in the First Century, and it was built into the political, religious, family, and civic structures of the day. This system meant that every person knew their position relative to another. Based on order of birth, gender, ability, and lineage, the honor/shame system directed each person on where they could live, what trade they could pursue, what they could wear, how they could worship, and what access they had to assistance and mobility. So important was the honor/shame culture that it was even stronger than the family unit - a person could be abandoned by their family if they brought shame.
So, in First Century Palestine, people suffering from leprosy were as close to the bottom of the social order as a person could be. They were not even allowed to beg, as other disabled persons we encounter in our Gospels. People suffering with leprosy were banished from towns, forced to live in the wilderness to fend for themselves. No one dared touch them, cross their path, even reach out to help them.
We know more today about Hansen’s Disease than they did in antiquity. Despite the way people affected by leprosy were treated then, and the intense fear that even being near such a person would result in contagion, we now know that it is very difficult to contract. Extended contact - months, not minutes - with an affected person is needed to pass on the bacterial infection.
I can hardly imagine the shocking scene when ten such afflicted people approach Jesus as he enters the unnamed village. They knew enough about their place in society to keep their distance, as the story tells us, yet they still asked for his attention.
The ten are healed by faith and by mercy. This parable could have gone like any of the other healing narratives, but Jesus does not want this lesson to just be about miracle and power; he gives us an even more important lesson. Gratitude.
You would think that this would be a no-brainer. Something life-changing has just happened - people forced to live on the fringes of society would have had a never-in-a-lifetime chance to go back to their families, re-enter civic life, be seen in the marketplace, go to the Temple. Yet, only one turns back to express his thanks.
And the one who turns back? The most unexpected of all - the Samaritan. To the First Century hearers of this story, they would pick up immediately on the profundity of this moment. The Samaritans were hated by the faithful Jerusalem Jews of the day. They were not simple heathens, as the other populations living in Canaan, but they had once been a part of God’s chosen people, among the Tribes, and a theological difference in where and how to worship YHWH led to a schism between the Temple-focused majority, and the mountain-focused Samaritans. So, these people were even more repudiated than others who fell outside the religious life of Jewish culture. That means that this particular sufferer of leprosy was doubly outcast.
And so the hearers of this parable were shocked, as well as they were rebuked and reminded that the appropriate response to God’s faithfulness and love is one of gratitude. How much more, then, are we grateful for what we have received? For that simple acknowledgement of thanksgiving, this parable continues on in the Canon.
The word outcast is a terrible word. It is violent. Casting something is active, it’s forceful, it takes intention. When we take something and we cast it out, it’s more than simply tossing it, throwing it, moving it. It is a psychic movement away from us - out of sight, out of mind. Outcast, when used to refer to people, reduces them to objects, things we can get rid of simply by removing them from our proximity. Republican performative tactics and buses full of migrants might come to mind as a modern appropriation of how disgusting it can be to treat people as things that can be cast out.
But this has happened throughout history, our story today from Luke’s Gospel is one such example, and it is almost a foregone conclusion that it is acceptable to cast people out, to banish them to the fringes. The practice isn’t called into question by Jesus, rather he merely heals this group of ten. He doesn’t end the practice of casting people out. And neither does any other prophet, institution, government, or leader before or since.
This week in 1998 there was another example of an outcast that has as powerful a message to our society as the parable we read today in Luke’s Gospel. The outcast I have in mind is a 21- year old gay man, just beginning to dream of his life, who was kidnapped, dragged to the countryside, tied to a split-rail fence, pistol whipped, and left for dead in the Wyoming night.
On October 7, 1998, Matthew Shepard did not come home. After questions and a short search, he was found. The deputy first on the scene described that his face was red with blood save where his tears had washed the blood from his cheeks. It would take Matthew’s body five days to finally give in to his injuries and on October 12 he was declared dead. These are the days we remember as the Passion of Matthew Shepard, and this Sunday falls right in the middle of it.
Matthew, like many of us who are LGBTQ, was an outcast. Not in the sense of our First Century example, Matthew still had a home and a family, but there were many in his Wyoming town, many across the world, who would not have, and did not welcome him.
Before I go further, I want to offer a brief disclaimer that while I am drawing a comparison between Matthew and the un-named person suffering from leprosy, I am not suggesting that any of us who identify as LGBTQ are in any way suffering from a disease or in need of a cure. But I am making the comparison in the way society can imagine casting a human out, and our cruel indifference to that as it plays out in our world.
Matthew’s family have told us a little about him and his life before the hate-crime that would end his life, and it was most revealed in the victim impact statement made by his father, Dennis, at the sentencing of the murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russel Henderson.
“Matthew’s mother, Judy, is against the death penalty,” Dennis began. “And so was Matthew. He hated the idea that a life should be taken for another life. But I am not against the death penalty,” Matthew’s father said. “I would like nothing more than to see you die, Mr. McKinney, Mr. Henderson. But I give you life. I give you life, Mr. McKinney and Mr. Henderson, because I am grateful for the life of my boy. I give you life even though you took the life of my son, my hero.”
In 2018, on the 20th anniversary of his death, his remains were interred at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Matthew’s grave. Among the flowers and other wishes laid on his marker I saw a simple note on a yellow post-it. “Thank you,” it read. I wonder what the writer of this prayer intended?
In the stories of the leper cured of his disease, and two murderers given an opportunity to live when their lives could have been taken, we see examples of the way that society is quick, even efficient, to cast us out. In a place where once-contagious people can be welcomed back, and the murderer’s life spared, we still imagine that some can be forgotten, sentenced to death, removed from sight, hidden away, left as someone else’s problem.
I wonder what part of you feels hidden, forgotten, unseen? I wonder if you sometimes feel that you are or have been cast out, your opinion overlooked, your love rebuffed, your work disregarded, your intentions misunderstood?
You are here today in a place that will welcome you. All of you. Even the darkest, most hidden parts of you.
You are here today in a place that will love you, as you were made to be, no changes.
You are here today in a community that does not judge you for who you were or that sees you for the mistakes you have made in your life.
You are at Holy Innocents because you are welcomed. You are given an opportunity to share and show your love and to receive it fully.
As we begin our Stewardship Campaign this year, you are in a place where we proclaim our gratitude for you, just as you are, with all the gifts you have to share, and with all the worries you bear, each and every day. And through your sharing we will be here next week, and next year, and throughout your life.
“Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.” Amen.