Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

God only loves one type of person: sinners. Thank God we’re all sinners. Sometimes the trick is just acknowledging that’s what we are, and that’s what the tax collector has over the Pharisee. The full force of this parable might be dulled a bit for us because we are so accustomed to viewing the Pharisees as the “baddies” since Jesus frequently had run-ins with them. But not all Pharisees were like the ones that were trying to entrap our Lord. Most of them were just very faithful, very scholarly Jews who concerned themselves with following the Law as well as they could do. These were, as the late great Robert Farrer Capon said, the sorts of people from whom we’d be pleased to receive a pledge card, and we’d probably ask them to consider standing for election to vestry. If we had a Pharisee in the congregation today, I’d probably ask him to lead Sunday School for me this morning, because I know he’d do a better job than I, at least in terms of having all the relevant biblical information front of mind.

The tax collector, on the other hand, is a bad hombre. He’s a traitor to his own people because he extorts money from them on behalf of the Roman Empire. He survives on a twisted form of commission, whereby his livelihood consists of all the extra shekels he can wring out of the Judaean taxpayer which he doesn’t actually owe but which he thuggishly extracts anyway. So he knows he’s a bad guy, and that’s why he realizes he can’t save himself. The Pharisee can’t save himself either, but his own good works and respectability blind him to this reality.

Several Protestant churches observe today as “Reformation Sunday” which has always made me a bit uncomfortable, and I’m grateful that it’s not a feast on our calendar. Some sort of church reform and realignment was no doubt necessary in the Sixteenth Century, but I for one have always viewed this as a necessary evil, the reality of church disunity is a sadness and a scandal which we should pray God will heal in his good time, and it baffles me that the schisms which gave us so many “flavors” of Christianity should be celebrated.

So, I have issues with Martin Luther (and with Henry VIII for that matter, lest you think I can’t see the beam in my own eye). That said, he had some ideas that I think were pretty good, and I particularly like some of his most shocking statements—not being a controversialist myself, I guess I enjoy living vicariously through historical figures who stirred the pot. So, in order to spite the devil who wants nothing more than for us to trust in our own righteousness and thus despair, Luther suggested one should commit a small sin from time to time, just to remind ourselves that we’re covered by Grace. I would not personally recommend this approach, because I think we’re going to sin whether we make our minds up to do or not, but I do appreciate how edgy he was being.

More famously (or infamously), Luther is charged with saying “sin boldly.” Well, yeah, if you take two words out of context, this sounds bad. But here’s what he actually wrote:

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are in this world we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says, we look for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13). It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day

In other words, consider the publican whose sin can convict him, who can be convinced he needs a savior. Thus, our own good deeds can become a stumbling block. The Pharisee’s approach is all well and good so long as he is perfectly righteous, so long as he is not a sinner. The problem is he is a sinner, he was born that way, he just can’t see it.

We often twist this parable by imagining that in being justified, the tax collector goes on to lead a virtuous life. He gets better, he acts more kindly, perhaps he pays back all those people from whom he extorted money. He certainly resigns from his inherently dishonest career. But Jesus doesn’t say that. That’s not part of the story. What if, instead, after a day or two, or maybe just as soon as he left the temple, he roughed up another taxpayer? And then the next week he shows up again praying for mercy. He can’t escape his wickedness. His chosen profession gives him plenty of opportunity for sin, yes, but he’d sin no matter what he was doing. Does he leave the temple justified after every penitential visit?

Yes he does, and we don’t like that. We love stories about reformed sinners who have a conversion and never mess up again in some way, large or small. But those people don’t actually exist. What we really want is for the tax collector to become the Pharisee. That satisfies our desire for fairness, but it deprives the publican of the possibility of justification.

There is a rubric in our prayer book which allows for the occasional omission of the general confession. I’ve known of places that omitted it for the entirety of the Easter season, which in my opinion suggests a gross misunderstanding of the meaning of the word “occasional.” Anyway, I understand why one might choose to omit it on Christmas and Easter Days, but I won’t do it because maybe those who only show up on Christmas and Easter could use the opportunity for confession and absolution as much as the rest of us. (On the other hand, maybe the people who only show up a couple times a year do so, because they’re so holy they only need that much church, unlike you and me.) I, for one, benefit from a daily reminder of my own sin and God’s amazing grace in calling me worthy in spite of it. Maybe I’m a slow learner. Or maybe I am, maybe we all are, a bit more like the tax collector than we’d like to think. And I’m actually glad of that, because, like I said at the beginning—God only loves one type of person: sinners. Thank God we’re all sinners.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning’s lesson from Genesis ends, I think, one verse too early, at least considering the thing I want to talk about this morning. When you hear it, you might think it a peculiar detail and understand why it may seem irrelevant, but I for one tend to think that even the most obscure bits of scripture sometimes have something to say to us. So, Genesis Chapter 32, verse 32:

Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh, because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh on the sinew of the hip.

In other words, the sciatic nerve of an animal is not Kosher, and this is a reminder of the injury Jacob sustained while wrestling with the angel.

Now, fast forward fifteen chapters. Jacob is an old man, his sons had all their drama—selling Joseph into slavery, reconciling, all emigrating to Egypt together—and just before he dies, Jacob calls his children and grandchildren to him to bless them and say farewell. And how do we find Joseph in this scene? We are told that he is leaning against his bed’s headboard. Why this detail? Maybe just to remind us that Jacob is old and decrepit, though that would seem to go without saying. Perhaps, though, it’s because he’s still suffering the limp he got from wrestling all night all those years ago. Surgical interventions to treat severe sciatica were about four millennia away, after all.

So maybe Israel himself might not have needed a reminder of the lasting effects of wrestling with God, there was always a literally painful reminder. But the generations which followed would require such a reminder, which became enshrined in their dietary law. Striving with God and man may leave a mark. Growing in virtue, subduing vice, wrestling with the demons in our own souls may create real, if invisible bruises; they may last a while, and they may not always be the most pleasant of reminders.

I should avoid getting too far into the weeds of theodicy, that pernicious problem with which theologians have wrestled since Job. The most basic answer to the problem of evil is that sin entered the world through human transgression, not divine appointment, and insofar as God allows bad things to happen, we have to come to terms with human agency, the cosmic nature of the fall, and the Will of a Providence which we cannot possibly understand and whose designs are as yet obscure to us. That may not be satisfying; join the club. When we start talking in terms of what seems fair and what seems unfair, we are responding in a natural, human way, but we may not like how far down we find ourselves by delving too deeply into that for too long. I may fancy myself a bit of a theologian, in my own dilettantish way, but I’ll leave that task to the honest-to-God mystics, the spiritual athletes among whose number I’ll never be able to count myself.

Instead, I’ll leave you with an uncomfortable question, or rather a series of them, to keep in a little cupboard back of your minds. Ask it of yourself when you know you find yourself in fine fettle, spiritually speaking, and maybe leave it in that cupboard when your soul is in some sort of acute pain. How might that sore spot be a gift? In what way was I wrestling with God? What did I learn and how did I grow spiritually? What am I given the courage and strength to do today because of this experience that I didn’t have before? Do I need this reminder—whether it’s guilt from a minor youthful indiscretion, trauma from a genuine tragedy, or something in that broad spectrum in-between—do I need this reminder still for my growth as a Christian and as a human being, or do I need God to take it away? The answer to that may be either option, that’s between you and God.

I suspect that for whatever reason, Jacob needed that reminder. Maybe when he was blessing his famously ill-behaving progeny, he needed to remember that he had been no saint himself, and maybe this made him a bit more understanding, a little more long-suffering, a little more loving.

I had a church history professor back in seminary who was trying to explain the justification for the doctrine of purgatory which developed in the middle ages and he used an interesting analogy. This by the way is not to argue for or against that doctrine; classical Anglicanism rejects it (the Article of Religion call it “a fond thing, vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather Repugnant to the Word of God”) but there have been plenty in the church since the catholic revival in the Church of England and here in Nineteenth Century that have sought to argue for it. You’re not going to get excommunicated or something for saying there is or isn’t a Purgatory, and my own opinion on the matter is neither here nor there. The point is that this professor of mine used a good analogy that I think is apposite this morning.

So the question was, how can purgatory be justified if Christ paid the wages of sin on the Cross? The best argument (at least to my mind) was that it’s not so much about doing one’s time to compensate, as it were, as it was about repairing the effects those actions had on our souls. The analogy was that of autobody repair. So the fender bender (moral evil) or the hailstorm (natural evil) made some dents, and purgatory popped them back out like a garage.

I like that image whether you think God has incorporated the Purgatory Auto Body Shop, llc. or if you believe that he can probably take care of that at the resurrection without it. I like it because I’m a bit like an old car that’s picked up some nicks and scratches over the years, body and soul. Sometimes they’re worth getting repaired and sometimes they’re just a good reminder (“don’t do that again!”)

We have some very minor damage on our car from a person who rear-ended us about six months ago. It was entirely the other driver’s fault, her car got it way worse than ours, and nobody was hurt. Long story short, the other driver was working for one of these delivery services and she didn’t have insurance, and she started freaking out. I was pretty indignant, and had it just been me, I would have proceeded to call the police at this point. But Annie was with me talked me down and we just let it go. I’m not advising anybody else to make the same decision in similar circumstances, but that felt right, and it feels right in retrospect, and now the car has a little, barely visible reminder that I married a more Christian person than myself.

So, maybe consider those dents and dings and scratches from your past run-ins, whether they’re entirely self-inflicted or the marks of an all-night wrestling match with God. You may be surprised what you learned and what you still need to.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So if you’ve ever heard a sermon on this Gospel text before, including from my mouth, it’s probably been about gratitude and how the Samaritan was able to show it because he was an outcast among the outcasts, and all of that is good and true, but you might have heard it a dozen times before. So I want to talk about leprosy instead. But first, I want to talk about that most exciting of all topics, bible translation.

I was recently talking to somebody about the fact that one can no longer access the New Revised Standard Version of the bible online, as it has everywhere been replaced by the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. This rarely affects me, because in this parish I have us using either the Revised Standard Version or the Authorized (or King James) Version, since I find them almost invariably superior translations, both in terms of aesthetics and, at least as regards the former, accuracy. So when Deborah or I need to cut-and-paste readings into bulletins, it’s easy to do.

I recently needed to do this procedure with the NRSV, though, as I was putting together a bulletin for a diocesan function, and though this is only one of several canonically approved translations for use in our church (the Updated Edition is not yet), its use as the “standard” has become almost ubiquitous, and I didn’t want to have to justify my curmudgeonly idiosyncrasy to somebody “triggered” at hearing the word “brethren” instead of “brothers and sisters.” Anyway, this meant I could not cut and paste, I just had to type it out. It only required five minutes to do, but it was galling, since nobody would have complained if I’d just used the Updated Edition despite the fact that I would thereby technically be breaking church law. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that the majority of parishes who put the readings into their bulletins instead of paying for lectionary inserts (which is a thing) are inadvertently breaking canon law, but I suppose it would not be wise for me to start bringing people up on charges in the ecclesiastical court.

I mention all this because I had a suspicion about how this week’s Gospel would be rendered in the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, and this suspicion was immediately confirmed. As of four years ago, the NRSVUE having been completed in 2021, Jesus no longer heals ten lepers. He heals ten people suffering from skin diseases. Now, my ill-humored whinging aside, this may technically be more correct. We don’t know if these ten people suffered from Hansen’s Disease (proper leprosy) or from common acne or from something in-between. We don’t know if what they had was so communicable that society was at least partially justified in discouraging close contact with them or not. We all experienced in recent years just how complicated and difficult it is to humanely balance public health and the need for human connection, so we’d better be really circumspect before we start judging an ancient society who didn’t even have the germ theory of disease for how they dealt with these things.

In all events, this is an instance, I think, of a translation which may be more technically accurate but less helpful. “John suffers from a skin disease” evokes sympathy. “John is a leper” might evoke fear or disgust. Set the moral content of that reaction aside for a moment and you’ll be in the mindset of an ordinary, healthy first century person who’d rather avoid a similar fate. That ordinary, healthy first century person, no matter how naturally kind and empathetic, would need to really stretch his empathy muscles to see “person suffering from skin disease.” His immediate reaction would be: “Danger. Lepers.”

Now, set your Christian faith and worldview aside for just a moment (don’t worry, you’ll pick it back up in just a few minutes). Set aside for just a moment your knowledge that God not only loves the most unlovely but touches the untouchable. These lepers are now not just dangerous. They are ritually unclean. They are forsaken by God, who does not visit them, and—excepting the possibility of an honest-to-God miracle like the one experienced by Naaman the Syrian in this morning’s Old Testament lesson—they always will be.

This is an exceedingly controversial thing to admit in our age of interfaith understanding but I already kicked the hornet’s nest when talking about bible translations, so why not. I’m increasingly convinced that insofar as those phenomena we tend to lump together and call “religion” outside our Judeo-Christian inheritance came into being, they came into being from a concern with safeguarding purity by constructing barriers between ourselves and “dirt” in every sense of that word. I say “phenomena we tend to lump together and call ‘religion’” in the opposite sense from the way some evangelicals tend to claim Christianity is not a religion. I mean to say (and this is the really controversial thing, probably the most controversial thing I can be accused of believing) that Christianity and Judaism are religions proper, that some sects and heretical movements have religious elements insofar as they have taken them on from either a Judeo-Christian past or at least an interaction with religion proper, and these other anthropological phenomena are not religious per se and were mostly thus categorized because nineteenth century anthropologists didn’t know what to do with them. It’s controversial not just because it implies that religious studies departments shouldn’t exist and comparative religion courses shouldn’t be taught (because you’re only left with theology and two religions to compare), but because it makes people awfully angry when you say you believe Christianity is true and other worldviews are false, which is basically what I believe. You can’t bring me up on canonical charges for that one, but you could get me ratioed on Twitter if I were on it.

Anyway, all of this is to say that we have a preternatural drive to protect ourselves from all that we find potentially polluting, and so strong is this drive that we’ve developed our most complex socio-cultural norms around avoiding “taboo.” I pulled out my copy of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger which is not only the most important analysis of this phenomenon, but also one of the most important works of anthropology ever written, and found in her preface to the 2002 edition (the book was originally published in 1966) admitted one retraction, which might sound minor, but it essentially covered an entire chapter, in which she dealt with the dietary codes found in Leviticus. Just as her forebears had projected Western Judeo-Christian assumptions onto African and Asian tribal cultural norms a century before, Douglas made the same mistake the other way round. She made the natural mistake of assuming the uncleanness of certain animals to pertain to their unsuitability as safe and healthy food rather than as a function of the elaborate relationship between God and Israel and the relative suitability of animals as sacrificial offerings based on parallels between God and the covenant people. To say more gets us too far afield, but it is one more bit of evidence for the distinction between God-given religion and the enforcement of taboo prohibitions.

Now, one danger to my admittedly religiously exclusivist position is that we might get the idea that being a practitioner of “true religion” exempts us from the danger of erecting dividing walls for the sake of maintaining purity. Just looking at our track record should be enough to disprove this assumption. Despite Christianity having no purity code as such (all things are lawful, even if not beneficial) we too often translate our natural fear of “dirt” to other things and justify exclusion which amounts to a fear of “moral contagion.”

In any event, we need to focus on what Jesus does when approached by the lepers. Normal, healthy, pre-Christian purity minded man would understandably shout “stay back” for all the reasons already stated. Knowing what we do about loving, fearless Jesus, we might expect him to do exactly the opposite–walk up, touch them, heal them on the spot. But he doesn’t do that. He says “go, show yourselves to the priests.” This is precisely what they’re not supposed to do. Yet, inexplicably, they obey. All ten of them, not just the one Samaritan leper have the mustard seed of faith that we heard Jesus tell the apostles they needed. We heard that last week, but the Apostles might have heard it about five minutes before the lepers came into sight, and their faith would have shamed them for their lack of the same. So all ten did well, even if one did better. In one command, in four little Greek words as a matter of fact, Jesus bid these roaming outcasts to show that their faith was greater than the apostles and the whole system of purity keeping. He told them, in a sense go break the purported religious law on what looks like a rather grand scale, while my scrupulosity wouldn’t allow me to bend one about bible translations (in my defense, I hope I would have done if Jesus appeared to me and told me to, but I don’t know for sure).

And yes, the one who returned may have been more grateful, but what else? The priests wouldn’t have seen him if he showed up in Jerusalem at the temple. He was ritually outcast by virtue of not being a “real Jew”, only a Jewish-adjacent Samaritan.

I don’t do sports metaphors, but I’m going to try one for the first time today. Ten football players with torn ACLs were hobbling by the roadside, and one was a Michigan Wolverine. They all cry, have mercy on us! And Jesus says, go present yourselves to the athletic trainer at Ohio Stadium and coach will put you back in the game to play for the Buckeyes this Saturday. Nine did as they were told, and the Wolverine had nowhere else to go. Maybe he could have hitch-hiked all the way up to Ann Arbor or Mt. Gerizim, but he found a new team with a better coach.

You see, the nine had enough faith to see Jesus and recognize him as Lord and Master. They were rewarded because they did just as he had told them. That’s good. One took it a step further. He realized then and there that this was God and he had changed everything, not just his life. And so he took the better part, just as Mary had done better than Martha, as nice as Martha’s efforts and intentions might have been. It was meet, right, and the bounden duty of those nine to go get checked out and to make the appointed sacrifices of thanksgiving. But it’s also a good idea to go right to the source of health and salvation and say “thank you” from the heart. Then those sacrifices will be truly acceptable and pleasing to God, as they will be an act of spiritual worship.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.