Some Tithe
Jeremiah 29:1,4-7; Luke 17:11-19

October 14, 2001

There are times when faced with two Biblical passages which are both intriguing, we need to have them talk to one another. Here is such a situation today - a Gospel healing and a jeremiad of startling directions.

Jesus was wending his way to Jerusalem passing through the region between Galilee and Samaria, that land and people despised by the Jews as neither Gentile nor Jewish. They just wanted to pass through, or even go the by-pass if there were one, and have as little contact as possible.

Whenever you try to avoid someone, isn't that always the time they notice you and notice you loudly? On the outskirts of a village, ten lepers, men afflicted by various terrible disintegrating skin diseases, approached the company from a distance. They knew his name - "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" Virtually the same the words as in the well-known "Kyrie Eleison" sung in liturgies ancient and modern, by choirs and rock groups - the sign that we are all lepers spiritually by our need for mercy.

Jesus did not approach them, nor offer his assistance, but simply an odd instruction, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." Probably none of them had seen a priest for an eternity, so greatly unclean as they were. No priest would allow any of them to get close.

Nevertheless, they turned and headed off to the synagogue in near Pavlovian response to Jesus' directions. And in the processing of going, of turning intentionally towards the priest, they became healthy.

One of them, one out of the ten, a tithe of the lepers, turned back and gave loud and grateful thanks to Jesus and to God. This one was a Samaritan, the other nine, one must assume, were Jews. Jesus wonders out loud that it is only the religious reprobate, the Samaritan, who sees his healing as an act of God. Only one is thankful, we are fond of concluding. What a disgrace.

"Get up and go on your way," Jesus goads the healed Samaritan, "your faith has made you well." Get on with your life, do stuff; your faith defines who you already are. That's the last and that's all we hear about those ten lepers. The man who was a living tithe, the 10% of the leprous company who was thankful, we do not know what he did later on, nor of the other nine.

Being thankful, as polite as that is, is not the "lesson" of this episode. I assume that the nine unthankful former lepers went on to live perfectly happy lives, undistinguishable to the average witness from the life of the thankful Samaritan. That is the way life generally works, isn't it?

Yet this Samaritan did live differently. His faith healed him and allowed him to live each moment from then on in a tangible relationship to God. He could not do a single thing without remembering that in God and with God he is changed. A person with a faith like that would not be planning for the long future, dreading what is to come and regretting what has happened or what hasn't happened in the past. Every moment would be deliciously lived out to its fullest. No longer afraid of life, he lives recklessly in faith.

Go on your way, Jesus said.

Jeremiah wrote a letter to the exiles and their leaders in Babylon. He had a habit of prophesying unpopular ideas and indictments to the Israelites in the decaying and diminishing days of the Judean empire. All he had prophesied had come regretfully true. This letter was one more word of the Lord, but it suggested a revolutionary direction.

The Israelites could only think of how greatly they had been wronged, by the Babylonians and by God who had allowed all of this. There was brave talk of rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar, that God would bring them back to freedom in a matter of months. Looking to the terrible past and ahead to the dreamy future, they had yet to live a day in the faithful present.

The advice was parently: build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and husbands and have children. Throw yourself wholly into your every moment in your new land. Try to make Babylon a better place to live, for you and for the Babylonians. Pray to God on its behalf. for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

No one had ever suggested this way before. It must have grated the teeth of many of the elders and the professional prophets now bitterly mourning their losses in Babylon. Is God telling us to get used to being a slave? You've go to get those texts talking to one another now. Jesus would tell us to be a servant, often translated as slave, not a master.

Indeed, the Israelites in Babylon did start building houses and building families. When liberation came at the hands of Cyrus the Great of Persia and the Israelites were free to return to Jerusualem, most didn't. The great compendium of Jewish law and lore is the Babylonian Talmud, compiled by strangers in a strange land who made it their home.

It is seldom possible for us to control the great movements of history and current affairs. Ninety times ninety former ungrateful lepers surround us all the time and flourish. The tragedies and atrocities of military conquest and of September 11 are nothing we planned for and nothing we are able to affect immediately. Life is never the same after such events as we live in their shadow.

Jesus said plainly, just as Jeremiah had described more fully, "Go on your way." Live every moment in the presence of God, and your faith, despite the sickness of the world, will make you well and will change the world.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan