The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost - October 12, 2025

St. Pauls - Proper 23— October 12, 2025

We find ourselves living in a world that seems increasingly scary and unfamiliar. As every day we pump more and more fossil fuel pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere, the climate responds with more violent weather, all threatening lives of creatures on land, in the air, and in the sea. And not only are we polluting our atmosphere, we are polluting our souls with hate speech, lack of taking time to listen and understand, as well as attacking empathy. Here ‘at home’ in the United States we are increasingly a people divided…to the point where we feel we are no longer at home. We feel as if we are in Exile, or captivity.

Much of our time and energy tends to be focused on division, argumentation, name-calling, and finding ways to discredit, mock, and disparage the other – and one another. Just look at how our representatives are speaking about the government shutdown. This use of our time and energy drains us, only making us feel even less and less ‘at home’ in this world anymore. We have lost our focus on the Holy, the Divine or Spiritual dimension of life – what

some call God and God’s purposes. Out of fear of a world seemingly out of control, and of others who are utterly unlike ‘us,’ we tend to ghettoize God, the Divine, the Holy as our own possession, bending those purposes, the will for salvation – salvation, or healing, or liberation, which is meant for the whole world and everyone and everything therein – and make outrageous claims that such salvation, healing and liberation is exclusively ‘ours.’

Along comes the prophet Jeremiah – a child prophet really, in the mold of the young Samuel. The people Israel have been carried off to Babylon. They are strangers in a strange land – resident aliens far away from home, and the security of the Holy City of Jerusalem and its Temple which lies in ruins. We try to imagine what Exile must feel like. Psalm 137 describes them being forced to entertain their captors! We imagine it might be easy to give up, assimilate, disappear. Or, to be constantly planning an escape, as their fore-bearers did from Egypt long ago, and prepare to return to Jerusalem at a moment’s notice.

Instead, Jeremiah sends them a letter, advising them to settle in, build, plant, multiply, to seek the welfare of Babylon, and even to pray for its prosperity. Pray for the prosperity of their captors! Pray for the common good, rather than demonize ‘the other.’ Remember, says Jeremiah, those days in the wilderness where we were taught to love God and love neighbor – and that all are neighbors, even these Babylonians. Stay true to the traditions we have been given, even so far from home and all that home means. Make a home in the wilderness of Exile. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Indeed, thanks to a generous Gentile ruler, Cyrus of Persia, many of the exiles returned to Jerusalem several generations later, while some remained in Babylon and flourished there. It was a revelation that when God sent an anointed one, a messiah, it was Cyrus, a Gentile. Upon returning and rebuilding Jerusalem and the Temple, liturgical texts like Psalm 66 proclaimed a new understanding that their deliverance was ultimately for the sake of the whole world. That God’s promises to father Abraham was that his descendants would be a blessing to the whole world – to all peoples, to all creatures, to the very Earth itself.  At all times, they sang, God’s welfare, God’s salvation is for all peoples, even our captors as well as those who liberated us.

Be Joyful in the Lord, all you lands! … Come now and see the works of God, how wonderful he is in his doing toward all people… you let enemies ride over our heads; we went through fire and water; but you brought us out into a place of refreshment. We can go home again. And we can make a new home, even in Babylon, when we refocus our selves on the God who is our very home!

Then there is this episode in Luke. Written after the Second Temple had been demolished by Rome, Jesus, we are told, is in a no-man’s-land between Galilee and Samaria. The ten lepers subsist in a no-man’s-land, a region between. According to the customs of the day, they live in seclusion, keep their distance from passersby, sport torn clothes and disheveled hair, and announce their own contagion in loud, humiliating cries: Unclean!  Unclean! Those who were ritually impure due to a skin disorder see Jesus. They are in Exile. They cannot go home. Keeping their distance, they call out, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! They know him. He simply tells them, Go show yourselves to the priests. And as they go, they are made whole again. One stops, returns to Jesus, falls to his knees and praises God with a loud voice. He recognizes the Holy, the Divine, has restored him. And we are told that he is a foreigner, a Samaritan.

So when Jesus heals their leprosy  (all ten of them) he doesn’t merely cure their bodies; he restores their identities. He enables their safe return to all that makes us fully human — family, community, companionship, and intimacy.  In healing their withered skin and numbed limbs, he releases them to feel again — to embrace and be embraced, to worship in community, to reclaim all the social and spiritual ties their disease steals from them.  In other words, Jesus enters a no-man’s-land — a land of no belonging — and hands out ten unblemished  passports.  He invites ten exiles home.

Seen from this angle, the tenth leper’s response to Jesus resonates differently. Yes, it’s an expression of gratitude for healing.  But it’s also the expression of a deeper and truer belonging.  According to Luke’s text, the tenth leper is a Samaritan, a double other marginalized by both illness and foreignness.  By the first century, the enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans is old and entrenched.  The two groups disagree about everything that matters to them: how to honor God, how to interpret the scriptures, where to worship.  They avoid social contact whenever possible.  Given this context, it’s quite possible that the Samaritan’s social ostracism continues even after the local priests declare him clean of leprosy.

So what does he do?  What does his otherness enable him to see that his nine companions do not? He sees that his identity — his truest place of belonging — lies at Jesus’s feet. He sees that Jesus’s arms are alone wide enough to embrace all of who he is — leper, foreigner, exile, Other.  Beloved child of God.

What I see in the Samaritan’s full-hearted praise and devotion is the intimate relationship between desperation and faith.  Between yearning and gratitude.  Between high stakes and deep love.  Ten lepers are healed.  But only the one who has nowhere else to go, nothing left to lose, and everything in the world to gain, returns to Jesus. Only the one who can take nothing for granted falls in love.  Only the one who longs body and soul to find a home for his whole self, receives salvation. 

I’ll be honest: I often find gratitude a rote, inauthentic business.  Maybe this is because I was taught at a very young age to express gratitude as a reflex, as a quick and twitchy obligation.  Beautiful night sky?  “Thank you, God!”  An “A” on a math test?  “Thank you, God!”  A good hair day?  “Thank you, God!”  Perhaps this practice has its merits, but for the most part, it taught me to flatten wonder, flatten awe, and flatten attentive curiosity.  It was a version of gratitude that closed my heart and mind to God’s presence, instead of opening them.

And this is not the kind of thankfulness the tenth leper expresses.  His is the kind that wells up from the deepest caverns of his yearning and sorrow.  His is the kind that takes nothing for granted.  His is the kind that notices how rare, how singular, and how gorgeous grace is when it comes to the borderlands and says, Come on in.  Yes, you.  YOU.  His is the kind that finds God’s inclusive welcome stunning. 

Maybe, if we find gratitude difficult, we should interrogate the places in our lives where we feel most comfortable, most confident, most complacent, most bored.  Maybe we should step instead into the places where we’re the outsiders, alone and afraid.  Maybe we should sit honestly with our most profound hungers.  Maybe we should recognize once again how desperately we need Jesus to welcome our vulnerable souls and bodies home.

Ten lepers stand at a dutiful distance and call Jesus 

Mas­ter. One draws close, dares intimacy, and finds his truest self, clinging to Jesus for a better and more permanent citizenship. The tenth leper moves past politeness and finds compassion.  He discovers what happens when gratitude spills over into love. I hope you will find the same.