In one of our recent Bible study classes at the church we talked about all the many words we have to express being on a trip, a journey. How many ways to be a traveler: Sojourner, migrant, immigrant, vagabond, refugee, pilgrim, fugitive, exile. So many, and all meaning something different.
Aren’t we all, somehow, travelers on a journey to or from somewhere, anywhere, or nowhere?
In our travels we encounter borders, lines which, when crossed, tell us we are no longer in one place but now in another. Some people, with a spirit of adventure, want to cross borders while others do not.
Some want the border lines to be erased while others want them fortified with impregnable walls or fences. There are others, still, who prefer neither of those things. They like the borders and they like to be able to wander back and forth across them. Perhaps even stand right at the threshold. To have a foot in two different worlds at the same time.
Christians throughout the ages have had different ways of regarding Jesus as a traveler. In a way we think of him as just passing through while he was here on earth. We imagine that he was out of his comfort zone, maybe longing to be reunited with the Father in heaven. Some depictions of Jesus show him as a man who was never really fully inhabiting his skin. These skin and bones were just borrowed clothes for a rather brief sojourn among mortals.
Yet, I have some trouble with that notion of Jesus, because I see him as the model of mindfulness, a man who was always present wherever he was. He was attentive, compassionate, generous with whoever he was with. He gave of himself fully, in a way that only someone who is fully present, fully experiencing, fully committed can do. Jesus was not just lightly touching down like an angel or a spirit – he was fully immersed.
During the years of his ministry he traveled seemingly nonstop. The gospels portray a man who was always on the move – on foot or in boats – going from one place to another and back again in roundabout ways.
Jesus’ movement makes me think of a labyrinth, those large designs that you sometimes find on the floors of cathedrals or other spiritual places. They look like mazes, but differ in that there is only one way through. Labyrinths are not puzzles; you simply follow the path – there is only one.
The interesting thing about labyrinths is that the journey they take you on is anything but direct. You enter a labyrinth and the path seems to take you toward the center, rapidly at first, but then you discover that, no, you will have to visit other nooks and crannies of the labyrinth – actually all the nooks and crannies – before you can enter the heart of it. It is inefficient, if the goal is to get to the center. It is inefficient, as was Jesus’ life. Inefficient, if the goal was to get from Point A to Point B. But if there was a different goal…
There might have been a different goal.
His journeys sent him across borders, over and over again. It was almost as if he saw his ministry as being not just for Israel but for the whole world. One day he was in the region between Samaria and Galilee. That is, he was at the border. Samaria, the land of a foreign people, a separate people who wanted to be included. But Israel did not see them as deserving of inclusion. The Samaritans were outsiders.
Galilee, the land where Jesus spent his childhood, we think of as a Jewish land. But Galilee was not quite Jerusalem. Ask any resident of Jerusalem. They would tell you. Galilee was a backwater, the land of the hicks. The Galileans, when they visited Jerusalem stuck out like sore thumbs. Think Jed Clampett in Beverly Hills. They had a right to be there, but did they really belong there?
So when Jesus was in the border region, between Samaria or Galilee, he was in an awkward space. Then, making things even more awkward, he saw ten lepers. They seemed to be in a group, and as a group they moved toward him – but they kept their distance.
The lepers had to keep their distance. It was required by law. They had to stay away from others, they had to announce their presence when they were anywhere near non-leprous persons by crying out as they went, “unclean, unclean, unclean.”
Lepers live across a border that may be invisible, but it is a strong border, nonetheless. No one wants to be near them, to risk being touched by them, for fear of contagion. Lepers are, in a certain way, strangers wherever they are. Unwelcome strangers.
But Jesus recognizes them, acknowledges them. He does not turn or move away from them. Instead he speaks to them, saying, “Go and show yourselves to the priest.” As they went they were made clean.
Jesus healed them of their leprosy. In doing that, he erased the border that separated them from everyone else. This is no small thing. When Jesus removed their leprosy he invited them in.
But one of these men, these lepers, was different from the others. One was a Samaritan.
Would the Samaritan man have been welcomed by the priest? He would not. Would he have been welcomed in the places the other nine were going? He would not. Maybe that is why he turned back, peeled off from the group of newly healed, newly clean men.
That would be understandable. Before, the Samaritan’s difference was irrelevant, but now it matters. It would be understandable for him to return. But to praise God? To return to Jesus, prostrate himself, and give thanks? That is unexpected.
It is unexpected because he, of all these ten men, is still an outsider. He has been cleansed of his leprosy, but he has not been cleansed of his Samaritanism. How does the one who has every right to feel bitter about his exclusion from God’s house give thanks and praise to God? It is unexpected that he should do that.
It is unexpected because the other nine should have known, as well as this Samaritan, that it is right to give our thanks and praise. These words we say every time we share Holy Communion, in our great prayer of thanksgiving. It is right to give our thanks and praise – It is indeed right and salutary that we should at all times and all places give thanks to the God who has given us our lives and everything in our lives.
It is unexpected that the nine Jews failed in this way.
Why is it that those of us who have the most to be thankful for are often the least likely to give thanks?
The nine Jewish men who were healed of their leprosy made their way to the temple in Jerusalem, presumably, and were accepted. If they were Galilean Jews and had that terrible Galilean accent that made the priest roll his eyes whenever they spoke, at least they were clean. They now had their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. They were in.
Would they remember what it was like to be an outsider? Would they remember what it had been like for them to huddle with Samaritans in the hinterlands, because their shared exile made their differences seem irrelevant?
Would they remember that in some very significant ways they are still outsiders, still in exile?
In those days, the Jews held an uneasy truce with the Roman Empire. They were allowed minimal control over their religious places and rituals, but they were never allowed to forget that they were not in control. That their God was not in control, because the emperor was in control. In a certain way, they were living in exile.
Just as we are living, in some important ways, as exiles.
As Christians, we live in what is often called the between times. We are between Christ’s first and second coming. The church teaches that he came 2000 years ago to usher in the reign of God, but a reign that will not be fully realized until he comes again. Whenever that is. Thus we are, my friends, living in that in-between time, waiting for that beautiful day the book of Revelation speaks of, when there is a new heaven and a new earth and God shall make God’s home among mortals.
When Israel was ruled by kings, thousands of years ago, they might have thought they were living in the reign of God. But it wasn’t so. The Assyrian army conquered and vanquished the northern tribes, then the Babylonian army came for the southern tribes. They captured and destroyed the holy city of Jerusalem, and they took the people into exile. We have the record of their songs of lament – their sorrow, their fury, at being thrown out as they were. The Psalms are full of these laments.
They certainly had a right to their sadness and their anger. But the prophet Jeremiah has another suggestion for them.
Jeremiah, the prophet who had been warning Israel for years about this, would have been justified, perhaps, in saying now, “I told you so.” But when they were herded away on their journey to a strange land, Jeremiah instead offered them this:
When you get to Babylon, build houses. Plant gardens. Marry your children, procreate. When you get to Babylon, the place of your exile, live your lives. and seek the welfare of this city where I am sending you, for in their welfare you will find your welfare.
Surprising as that is. Although Babylon is your enemy, they are now going to be your hosts, so do your best for the land in which you now live. You do not own the land, you do not own the culture, but it is where you are, so live the best life there you can live.
And so it is that we also are exiles in our time and place. There may have been a time in America when Christians felt as if we owned this land, owned the culture; the fact is we never really did. The fact is we are always in a foreign land. We are always traveling…between places.
The goal is not to get from here to there but to live all along the way. To understand that wherever you are you are in between.
So do your best for the place to which God has led you. Cultivate righteousness in your little corner of the world. Keep one foot in the kingdom of God and one foot in this place. Never forget you are a resident of both.
