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Sermons
Outsiders
On The Inside
Luke
17:11-19
Rev. Kenneth M. Locke
The Downtown Presbyterian Church
My neighborhood in
Within this no-man’s land some
people know everyone and chat with everyone and are the eyes and ears of the
community. They’re very
involved. Other folks never go to neighborhood
parties, never wave or say hello when they’re sitting on their
porch. They’re very quiet,
keep-to-themselves types. They live on
the margin of the community. They’re inside the neighborhood but are
psychologically outsiders. And
they’re quite happy on the periphery.
They don’t need to feel like they really belong to the
neighborhood.
Churches are a lot like neighborhoods: an
eclectic, mish-mash of people from
diverse incomes and theologies and backgrounds.
They have folks who know everyone and greet strangers and are involved
in the life-blood of the church.
But there are also some who sit on the porch and
never wave and rarely join in. They
worship sporadically. They give just
enough to keep they’re conscience at bay.
And don’t ask them to come at any time other than Sunday morning
or to do anything with a committee.
Worship is their soul candy. They
get a good fix and come back when they need more. They got what they wanted from God and know
where to find God the next time.
I don’t mean to be ugly but they
remind me of these lepers. Jesus is
traveling through a border area, a no-man’s land. He meets some lepers, outsiders living on the
margin of society, no-man’s-land people.
Jesus sees them and in seeing them
knows they want to be inside the group of safe villages and happy families and
meaningful work and a loving relationship with God. They are peripheral people who want to be on
the inside.
In seeing them Jesus is cognizant of
their condition and responds by telling them to go to the priest. He gives them a command that will put them
firmly on the inside.
Or will it?
Jesus sends them away and in their
going they are physically healed. They
are made religiously clean. They move
from social and spiritual no-man’s land back to the inside of the
community.
Or do they?
On being healed, nine of them keep
going. Why don’t they come back
and praise God? Surely they were happy,
even ecstatic, about being clean. They
must have wanted to see their families.
They must have wanted to visit their friends. Maybe one of them had a pot-roast in the
oven, one had to get back to work, one had just come back from vacation and was
really tired and there was a mountain of laundry and the kids were sleeping and
you know how it is. One wasn’t
feeling well, one didn’t want to come back because the parking is so
darned complicated and what with the picnic this afternoon and one thing and
another it was just too much and I’m just not going to go back and say
thank you.
They got what they wanted, but it
wasn’t enough to really change them.
They remained outsiders, on the periphery, healed but still in
no-man’s land.
But the tenth leper came back, giving
thanks. He saw he was healed and in
seeing he was cognizant of his true condition, he could see all God had done
for him. He saw he was not just
physically healed, he was not just religiously clean, he was well.
The tenth leper, in coming back to give
thanks and praise, is moving into the circle; he is thanking and praising and
giving and sharing and reaching and proclaiming. You can tell he is something the other lepers
are not. He is on the inside. He is well.
We come to worship on Sunday morning
and we leave feeling good. God has been
kind to us. We are healed. We are cleansed. But how many of us choose to come back and
thank God? How many of us leave the
periphery and move into the center, loving God with all our heart, mind and
soul and our neighbor as ourselves? How
many of us leave the periphery and move into the fullness of what God has done
for us? How many of us choose to come
back and be well?
The margins are enough for some
folks. They are happy on the periphery,
happy with their soul candy. But at some
point that gets old. We want full
connection with God. We want to move
away from the margin and into the center.
Doing that is our choice. It means coming back and giving thanks to
God. It means praising God by how we
treat the misfit in our office. It means
thanking God by how we spend our money.
It means falling down before God by inviting the friend who hurt us back
into the center.
The good news is when we leave worship
today we will leave as insiders, people who have moved from the periphery to
the center, no longer dwelling in the margins of God’s love but fully
involved. We will leave not just
cleansed and healed but genuinely well.
Or will we?
If you listen to my sermons very often
you know I’m not big on telling people exactly where they stand with
God. We all need to figure that out for ourselves. So I’m going to end by asking us which
way we’re headed? Are we one of
the nine who’s got what we want and now we’re heading out the door
because we’re so busy and frankly the margin is enough? Or are we turning back, giving thanks,
falling down before Jesus body and soul and mind and spirit and check-book and
relationships and all we have, using it to give thanks?
Are we happy living in no-man’s
land? Are we glad just to be clean and
healed but on the outside?
Or
are we going to really be well, and on the inside of God’s Kingdom?
May God be with us in our
choosing. Amen.