Year C
 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
 Psalm 111
 2 Timothy 2:8-15
 Luke 17:11-19

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

We talked last week…  about how faith…  even the size of a mustard seed…  is enough… because our lives…  our work…  our challenges…  our successes…  our formation…  and maybe especially our growth into boundlessness…  are lived out in concert with…  and according to…  God’s will for us…  and we’ll be reminded about this again…  when in our seven-week Advent…  we direct our gaze to God’s plan for all of creation…  before we allow it to move to the manger itself…   but a little bit of faith is enough…  because we continue to live and move and have our being…  in God’s inescapable presence…  and in God’s boundless love…  and a little bit of faith is enough…  because it allows us to use our free will…  to choose to breathe in…  to inspire…  the Holy Spirit…  and co-create God’s will for ourselves and for each other…  or to hold our breath in the face of it…

But today…  I want to talk briefly about entitlement and gratitude…  and the way I want to do that…  is to first share just a bit…  of what Rabbi Jonathan Sachs said…  years ago…  when he spoke to the Bishops of the Anglican Communion…  the Rabbi was invited to speak about covenant…  but in order to do that…  he also had to speak about contracts…  and transactions…  and ultimately…  about transformation… 

He said that power and wealth generate contracts…  agreements between two or more people who are pursuing their own interests… and there are commercial contacts which create economic markets… and social contracts which create the state…  but a covenant is something entirely different… in a covenant… two or more people come together in a mutual bond of love and trust…  to share their interests… and maybe even their lives…  by doing together what neither of them could do alone…  and that’s not the same as a contract at all…  because while a contract is about interests…  a covenant is about identity…  while a contract is about transaction…  a covenant is about relationship…  and that’s why…  he said…  contracts benefit…  while covenants transform…

The lectionary has skipped over vv.4-6 in today’s reading from 2Kings…  but what we’ve missed is this…  Naaman’s king in Aram…  Ben-Hadad II…  has sent a letter to Israel’s King Joram…  asking him to cure Naaman of his leprosy…  and that’s why the king of Israel tore his clothes…  and said…  Am I God…  to give death or life…  that Ben-Hadad sends word to me to cure Naaman of his leprosy…  but Elisha intervenes…  and asks Joram to re-direct Naaman to him…   Naaman went…  but expected Elisha to come out to meet him…  and to wave his hand over his dis-eased skin…  so he’d be healed…  wave his hand…  as though it were a magic wand… Naaman wanted something complicated to be done for him…  perhaps something in line with his standing in the king’s army…  but Naaman’s servants…  those with no social standing…  pointed out his stubbornness…  his sense of entitlement…  and they clarified that God works with our simple…  small faith…  and when we remember that 2Kings was written during the Babylonian Exile…  this story may have also served as a way to emphasize God’s inarguable omnipresence…  and God’s self-emptying humility and unpretentiousness…  which can evoke wonder and gratitude in us…

Because wonder and gratitude are antithetical to entitlement…  to the contracted transactions which create power and wealth…  and there’s nothing about wonder that’s possessive…  it’s like seeing the aurora borealis…  which we can’t own…  or the new images from the James Webb telescope…  which are beyond our reach…  or a caterpillar becoming a butterfly and emerging from a cocoon…  which transforms itself in secret…  or a baby taking its first steps…  which brings awe to our hearts…

In today’s Gospel…  Jesus is in the borderland between Galilee and Samaria…  he’s effectively in no man’s land…  which also means he’s in every man’s land…  and in a village…  he encounters ten lepers…  who keep their distance…  because during that time…  people lived in dread of leprosy…  it gave some people skin which looked like a corpse’s skin…  and nothing defiled a person…  made them unclean…  like death did… 

Pastor Martin Billmeier points out that Samaritans and Jews had a longstanding animosity going back hundreds of years…  so ordinarily…  nine Jewish men would not put up with a Samaritan hanging around with them…  and the Samaritan would not want to hang out with them…  but this dis-ease…  leprosy…  may well have been enough to create a common bond between them…  and the word itself…  loosely defined…  described any skin blemish or eruption which looked suspicious…  and which made one unclean… 

And so the lepers themselves are in the borderland between life and death…  leprosy forced them out of community…  which was to die…  and as they cried out for mercy…  Jesus simply told them to go and show themselves to the priests…  and they were made clean…  and it didn’t happen all at once…  it was as they went…  that they were made clean…  at least clean enough on the surface level…  that they could show themselves to the priests…  at least clean enough that they could work again…  be with family again…  be in community again…  but internally…  they continued to be formed…  though I wonder if the priests would have seen the Samaritan…  affirmed that he too had been made clean…  or if he was too much of an outsider for that…

Later on in Luke’s Gospel…  after Jesus’ Ascension…  in 24:51 it says…  While he was blessing them…  he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven…  Jesus didn’t bless them…  and then stop…  and then get carried up…  his blessing continued…  so I think we can safely infer that as we too continue along the way…  the faith we have is enough to make us well…  to open our hearts and minds…  and that that process too…  simply continues…

The pandemic out of which we’re still emerging…  has been…  in some ways…  like having leprosy…  cut off from family out of fear of infecting them…  from community…  from church…  having to work from home if we were able to work at all…  some of us masking or keeping physical distance…  even while many of us are still not fully healed from the trauma of the experience…

So we find ourselves in a place of asking quite a wide variety of challenging questions…  about the spiritual forces at work in the world around us…  and how they inform the many facets of our lives…  to know what drives and motivates us…  and how we discern God’s will for us individually and collectively…  to what…  if anything…  we are entitled…  and for what we ought to be grateful…  and determining the answers which will inform the direction our lives take…  Biblical scholars point out…  that the Bible uses the concepts of wellness…  wholeness…  and salvation…  almost interchangeably…  and being grateful and saying thank you…   are at the heart of God’s hope for humanity…  and God’s intent for each one of us…

Author Anne Lamott says her two favorite prayers come in the morning and at bedtime…  after waking…  she prays…  Help me, help me, help me…  and before sleep she prays…  Thank you, thank you, thank you…  her prayer reminds us of our dependence on God…  reminds us that our journey continues…  reminds us that it’s on the way that we are made clean…  and that even the outcasts know that we need to return in gratitude to the One who heals and transforms us…  and like the Samaritan…  to give thanks…