October 13, 2019 - Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost - The Tenth Leper Turning Back

In hie sermon Pastor Ray preached on the dis-ease of being uncomfortable in your own skin and likening that spiritually to the physical disease of leprosy, which does not plague the society we live in. He said many things can make us uncomfortable in our own skin and listed some of the seven deadly sins by name, particularly envy and the feeling of not being good enough compared to others.

Perhaps this hinges on gratefulness alone as expressed by the tenth leper. When I consider this I think about Martin Luther, when he was asked to describe what true worship looks like, said; "The tenth leper turning back." He may be suggesting that worship, at heart, can be expressed as a gratitude to God that defies what we think we are commanded to do in the structure we follow for worship.

Look at the details in this Gospel lesson. Jesus enters a village that the lepers approach but, also, simultaneously keep their distance.  They are not in community with the village. The lepers call for mercy. Jesus sees them and says, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." According to the gospel, as they went, they were made clean. One of them, seeing that he was already healed, turned back, and praised God with a loud voice.

The Holy Spirit reveals more than expected here. In turning around to show gratitude, one leper disobeys what Jesus just commanded when saying “go show yourselves to the priests.”  This leper first follows what Jesus says, then turns.  He changes direction because he knows he is healed and has faith he no longer needs to show himself to the priest. The other nine lepers go to the priests to follow precisely what they have been told to do.

Now, as Pastor Ray observed, this is not a rebuke of the other nine. Jesus can only tell the one "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well." because he is still present.  Obviously "your faith has made you well" involves a recognition that something is happening beyond the healing for this one.  I also appreciate, because of this, the King James translation of this verse "Your faith has made you whole", making clear the tenth leper who gave thanks is healed twice, or more precisely healed and transformed. At least momentarily.

The sermon focused on moving from skin-level life to a deeper way of seeing and a new direction when describing this transformation. As Pastor Ray preached on this I thought about how the body of Christ might relate to this "skin-level life" and what D. H. Lawrence once wrote about Edgar Allan Poe:

There are two loves: sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual.

In sensual love, it is the two blood-systems, the man's and the woman's, which sweep up into pure contact, and almost fuse. Almost mingle. Never quite. There is always the finest imaginable wall between the two blood-waves, through which pass unknown vibrations, forces, but through which the blood itself must never break, or it means bleeding.

In spiritual love, the contact is purely nervous. The nerves in the lovers are set vibrating in unison like two instruments. The pitch can rise higher and higher. But carry this too far, and the nerves begin to break, to bleed, as it were, and a form of death sets in.

The trouble about man is that he insists on being master of his own fate, and he insists on oneness. For instance, having discovered the ecstasy of spiritual love, he insists that he shall have this all the time, and nothing but this, for this is life. It is what he calls 'heightening' life. He wants his nerves to be set vibrating in the intense and exhilarating unison with the nerves of another being, and by this means he acquires an ecstasy of vision, he finds himself in glowing unison with all the universe.

But as a matter of fact this glowing unison is only a temporary thing, because the first law of life is that each organism is isolate in itself, it must return to its own isolation.

Yet man has tried the glow of unison, called love, and he likes it. It gives him his highest gratification. He wants it. He wants it all the time. He wants it and he will have it. He doesn't want to return to his own isolation. Or if he must, it is only as a prowling beast returns to its lair to rest and set out again. 

I had never thought about this and relating it to the body of Christ but I can see how Lawrence's description could apply.

In any case, the Gospel also indicates another vision of life that may be illustrated in the plot of the 1945 American drama film Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. In a pivotal moment of the story the entire town of Fuller Junction is coming to the aid of a proud farmer who has lost his livestock when lightning struck and burned down his newly erected —but uninsured— barn.

The responses of individual town members start off small and clearly will be of only minor relief to the farmer until a young girl, who highly values her pet calf, generously donates this calf she prizes to the impoverished farmer. At that moment the town reconsiders the aid they were giving and give through a different spirit, inspired by this change from some of their harsher views that spring naturally in their insular community. There is a transformation and their faith in one another is rekindled.

Amid the ordinary something has changed.

The towns first response to the farmer's hardship is sensible, reasonable and  ordinary. In essence this is comparable to what the nine other lepers did.  Nothing wrong with this response, we do what we see as expected and required.  The response is default and on automatic pilot.

Through generosity, the town momentarily glimpses something beyond this response - a key to kingdom of God. The root of their collective action in this case comes more from generosity and relationship, rather than justice.  The spirit of what was portrayed in that moment would never be captured in a law that could be enforced by an institution.  It involves individual insight, recognition and that transformation. We both have faith in what we can do together and recognize that often we feel we need to act from what is sensible and reasonable.

So I keep in mind Lawrence's words "There are two loves: sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual." I live, sometimes as the body of Christ and sometimes at skin-level. I can live no other way.