Your faith has made you well
When we say that our lives are our practice, we affirm that each moment offers us an opportunity to practice gratitude. Rather than seeing our spiritual practice only as a way to fix a problem or achieve a desired result, we learn from Jesus how our entire lives can be transformed. In this way, we are truly made whole.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Give us eyes to see you. Give us ears to hear you, oh, God. And give us hearts that can stretch large enough to live into your dream for us and for this world. Amen. Just a few thoughts on this morning’s readings as they continue to chew on us and inform us and challenge us. So when I was a little kid, we were members of Egypt Missionary Baptist Church, back in the southeast corner of Arkansas in the Mississippi Delta, God’s country. And one of the things that I have a memory of is we had a custom at Egypt, where Brother Louis Dean Huffman was the director of music. He was the song leader.
You know, you have to have a song leader. He was the song leader. Brother Louis Dean was, and one thing that he did is the first Sunday of every month he would come forward and he would pick a hymn, and we would sing the hymn, and all the people who had birthdays during that month would come forward. And there was a little plastic church, white building with a blue roof and a little steeple that they would set on the table at the front. And anyone whose birthday was during that month would come forward, and they would give a special birthday thanksgiving offering. So as a child, I never understood. I was thinking, I thought that wasn’t fair because I thought birthdays were times when you were supposed to receive things. And here they flipped it on us there at the church. But I would sit often between my grandmother and my grandfather. I like to do that because my grandmother kept peppermints squirreled in the zipper pocket of her Bible, and I would steal them, and she would act like she didn’t see it. She would look over and I would take them and just chew them. But she also gave me quarters and usually it was two, sometimes three quarters. So as a little kid, when we would sing that hymn and it got to the first Sunday of August, it was my time to go forward and I would go forward and walk up. And I was so proud, so proud, but still trying to figure out why it was that the rules shifted and it was my birthday, but here I was giving something. But I went along with it and we would all do that.
When I look back on that now, I see the brilliance of that move because I can see in my mind’s eye my great grandmother, who I had the good fortune to grow up with. She didn’t die until my freshman year of college, so I can see my great Grandmother Craig, sitting there in the pew, and I can see my great aunts and my great uncles all sitting there. And even though I was the spoiled little kid who wondered why it was that I was being asked to give something on my birthday, I can imagine more now what it would have felt like for them to have been their age and get to the month that celebrated their birthdays, and to see them each get up with canes and walkers and go forward and give a thanksgiving offering on their birthday month. Brother Louie and the others knew what they were doing by inviting us and challenging us to adopt that practice.
So that memory came swirling back in when I, as I’ve been sitting with this morning’s texts, particularly looking at the one from Jeremiah and the gospel. So I think one of the things that we’re challenged to do in these days, that we continue to find ourselves is to ask ourselves, how do we foster a practice of gratitude, of gratitude, recognizing where we are in the world, where we are in our lives, how we struggle? Yes, and also all of the things that we have to be thankful for and to find ways to nurture that posture, that practice of gratitude. If you open up your bulletin and look at the Jeremiah text, the Jeremiah text that we have this morning is a challenging one in that sense. Cynthia and I talk a lot about this, as does Brandon and Meg and Sister Genevieve and all of us. We continue to reflect back on, we all live in the days in which we live. From a certain point of view, we are where we are. We’re here now, and there have been times in the past that have been challenging times, and these are our times. This is where we live. And so we find ourselves, where we find ourselves, and we’re always invited, challenged, empowered, and encouraged to ask ourselves how we can discern the Spirit’s presence in our lives where we are at this moment in time.
So this first reading from Jeremiah, from this great, great prophet challenges us. So the back story of this reading is by this point in the book, all of the people, so to speak, have been taken into exile. They’ve been taken out of their patterns and their customs that they have known so well, ways that they had grown used to their life, ways that they had felt in control. They’ve been taken out of that, and they’ve been moved into a different state of being, a different space, that is very unusual for them. At best, very oppressive of them. And they struggle. I don’t know about you, but when I moved out of spaces where I felt in control, I want to return to them. I want to go back to those spaces where I feel more in control and feel a sense where I’m more grounded. But this morning’s reading challenges us because what does God speak through the prophet to the people? Given where you are, given the space and time in which you find yourselves, what are you called to do? You’re called to live. You’re called to live. You’re called to build houses. You’re called to have gardens, to have lives to make families, to encourage, to raise your children to make families of their own. You’re called to ground yourselves where you are, to sink your roots in this moment in time and to flourish, to thrive, not to just subside and get through, shoulders to the gear stone, whatever, so that you can return back to spaces where you felt much more comfortable and much more in control, but to be where you are in that moment and to ask yourself, what does living a faithful life in this moment look like? It’s a challenging piece for the prophet to ask us to do that, to find ways given where we are, to ground ourselves and ask ourselves how in the midst of this, can I practice gratitude? What can I be aware of, of how the spirit is at work in my life, making me aware of the blessings that I have, the choices that I have to live and to thrive, and to share compassion and peace and hope in the world around me?
That’s the first piece that gets me is this text from Jeremiah, this image. The second one is the gospel. If you look at the gospel reading, it’s a fascinating story. Short, but there’s a lot in it. Jesus is standing there, and I always pay attention, I don’t know about you, I always pay attention to those gospel texts that describe Jesus in in-between spaces. Did you catch that? Jesus is notorious for doing this, for moving outside of well defined and controlled spaces into in-between spaces where things are messier, less certain, often at risk, and in those in-between spaces, that’s where the transformation happens. And so we see him there this morning between Samaria and Galilee. Galilee, in some sense a safe zone. Samaria, not so much. And so the text sets itself up right off the bat in that way. Jesus is in what we would call a liminal space and at risk space, a transitional space. And in that space, he encounters ten lepers. Now, think about when I was a kid, there was this story about this boy who heard that the wrong way. This is what he heard: there were ten leopards that approached Jesus, and they kept their distance. Thank God that the leopards stayed over on that side. But the story says ten lepers, which is another clue. Lepers were ostracized, rejected, kicked out of normal society. They were people who could only live in in-between spaces. Spaces of risk. Spaces of less certainty. And in that space, Jesus encounters wounded, at-risk people. And they ask him to be healed. And Jesus says, “go show yourself to the priest.” Which is another clue. Go show yourself to the institutionally-charged ones, to the ones who feel they have a good handle on how things should go. Go back into that safe zone, that certain zone, but disrupt it. Let them see your life transformed and watch what happens to them in that process. So the ten of them go, and on the way they realize that they’ve been cleaned, that they are clean. They’ve been healed. And one of them, the text says one of them was conscious,and paused and turned and went back to Jesus, thanking God for the healing that had taken place in his life. And the final line is the catcher for me. “Go. Go live your life, for your faith has made you well.”
Here’s the thing that we see when we read it in English, those are the words that we see. And when we see the phrase, “they were made clean” and we hear the phrase, “your faith has made you well,” we think that those say the same thing and they actually don’t. They say two very different things in Greek. The first one, “your faith,” “you have been made clean,” is basically saying you have been made clean in a sense of saying the problem that you presented has been fixed. The problem that you saw a solution for has been resolved. That issue has been fixed. But that final line that we see where Jesus says, “go live your life or your faith has made you well, your faith has healed you,” that word is σῴζω (sozo), and that word is the root word of where we get our word salvation. Very different, very different meaning.
So what we learn from this text is in that space, when they become aware of where they are, the struggles that they face, all of them were made clean. Notice that. All of them received a solution to the problem that they presented with. One of them realized that that wasn’t the end point, that there was something even beyond that space of being made clean. And what was beyond the space of being made clean was the reality of being healed and made whole, which is something different entirely. And he came back and recognized that in himself.
So where this text leads me is asking myself some really difficult questions. When it comes to my practice of faith, do I approach it? Am I content to just think that there’s a series of issues and problems that I need solved? And if those issues and problems are solved, then I can go about my life as I’ve always gone about my life and go back to the typical, normal way of being? Is that what I understand my practice of faith to be? Or is there something deeper? Is there something even more profound beneath, within that, beyond that fixing of a problem? I think there is. And I think what Jesus and that one leper invite us to see is that beyond fixing our problems, our practice of faith calls us to explore what it looks like to truly be made well and healed, to truly be saved, to have a transformed heart that reorients the way we live in the world. So that, as the choir is going to sing shortly, so that we embody that compassion of God that is made real in us, leaving us the only response that we have, which is gratitude. Being thankful for the transformed lives that we have, for the ways that we can share God’s blessing, God’s peace, God’s hope in a struggling world. So as we go forward into these days, let these stories continue to chew on you and ask yourself, what would it look like if we stepped beyond just having a problem, fixed and celebrated the fullness of God’s love that always promises for a full healing and a life marked by salvation?
Amen.