[This is a section I cut out of this week’s sermon. It was originally before the section “Faith and the real world”. While I found this section contributed a valuable corrective, it added to the length and read like a tangent. I felt it important enough to share anyway.]

Text: Luke 17:11-19

Here, we are seeing Jesus heal several people of leprosy. They are existing in the borderlands, and this is a huge part of the story. For that, I encourage you to read the sermon linked above. This is the “this moment” I refer to below.

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Let’s compare this moment and this response with what we are seeing from our own grand experience of isolation: 2020. I suspect great communal tragedies take years, sometimes even decades, before the public is willing to risk having a sober conversation; not just of the events, but of our mutual behaviors.

It took over a decade for the first American novel about World War I to be released that wasn’t jingoistic and hyperpatriotic. The first that wasn’t intended to rally support for war or portray every bit of it as righteous and for the glory of God. It was eleven years before people read Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I suspect that the protective energy is still raw for us around the pandemic and much of the partisan side of the politics is still a live wire.

As I thought about how leprosy was treated in the first century, particularly by those afflicted with it, I found both a deep resonance and a deep contrast with some of our response to our own temporary isolation. So many of us self-isolated to protect one another, to protect the community. And we often created small, found communities in driveways and park pavilions. 

And yet some wanted to place their participation in community above common protection, to not isolate themselves. And we lost many, many neighbors. Including a pastor who served just down the street from here. Who died after a long battle with COVID he contracted from a mass spreading Christian event in 2020.

Bringing this up now isn’t a question of seeking to name the one right thing to do. It is to compare and contrast our time with history. Some of us put the physical health of our community before its spiritual health. And many of our neighbors were so committed to protecting the spiritual health of their community, that they would put it above its physical health. Which is the opposite of what these people were doing in the gospel.

But what Jesus is doing in this gospel is making both possible.

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It is about both. And the challenge many of us have is understanding that such a thing is even possible.

And to that, Jesus says Catch up. That’s what we’re doing here. Both physical and spiritual. They can’t be separated.