It was a hot day in September, as it always is in Dallas, only a year after I had arrived as pastor of Royal Lane. I was outside moving tables, setting up spaces for delicious Turkish food to be laid out for people of our city to purchase. Women in hijabs served some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. Men helped me move tables and set up the area for the influx of people. Children played tag and ate cookies by the plateful. How did a group of Turkish immigrants end up at Royal Lane Baptist Church on a Saturday?
Well, let me back up a year. When my family first moved here we didn’t really know anyone. I felt out of place as I didn’t know the city and couldn’t figure out where to begin to get to know people. Then, Wednesday night church regular, Pastor Woody Weilage, mentioned I should get to know Emrah Aktepe, the then director of the Dialogue Institute of Dallas. The Dialogue Institute is a Turkish-American non-profit that promotes scholarship and inter-faith dialogue. The organization is made up of folks who have been targeted by the government of their home country for their religious and philosophical beliefs.
I reached out to Emrah and he invited me over to the Turquoise Center, the Turkish community center in Richardson, and treated me to a delicious, traditional Turkish breakfast of pastries, nuts, dates, and cheeses. As we shared a meal, we talked about Dallas, about our faith, and about the things that bring us together. Emrah was one of my first friends in Dallas and helped me feel like I belonged here and he affirmed that we had work to do here. And I am fortunate to count him as one of my dearest Dallas friends even today.
Fast-forward a year and Houston had just been devastated by Hurricane Harvey. People lost their homes, their lives, everything. And when water sweeps through a city, when destruction and devastation happen, there isn’t us and them, Christians and Muslims, poor or rich. Everyone is affected and we are all one as we suffer the fate of hurt and loss. And so, in response, our church partnered with the Dialogue Institute Dallas and put on a bake sale on our front lawn so that we could send the proceeds to those who needed help in Houston after the hurricane.
As we combined our time, resources, and money – and really good baking and cooking skills – we raised over $2,500 in a couple of hours. We sent that money to an interfaith organization in Houston that helped refugees and the elderly from all religions to recover from the flooding. We, as Muslims and Christians, knew that we belonged to the same human family and that we needed to come together in solidarity and in goodwill to help our friends in Houston. We cultivated an identity of belonging in Dallas and we hope we helped to create one in Houston as well.
And that’s what we see in our gospel lesson for today. Jesus was on the edges of society. The text says that on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the brutality of his rejection and death, Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. The thing is, there wasn’t anything between Samaria and Galilee. It’s just a fancy way of saying Jesus was on the border. He was one the edges of society and on the outskirts of the territory. He was on the edges of life where no one wanted to be and no one wanted to go.
And while he was on the edges of life where no one wanted to be and no one wanted to go, he was met by a group of lepers, one of which was a Samaritan. We know from Jewish history that Samaritans were hated and unwelcome. Do you remember the story of the Good Samaritan? Samaritans were so despised that Jesus felt it necessary to put the word “good” in front of the word Samaritan in that parable. The story of the Good Samaritan showed that Samaritans were different than what the crowds had thought or were used to.
And we see that in this group of ten lepers there was at least one Samaritan. It seemed that the misfortune of these lepers had brought all types of people together. Their marginalization had broken down barriers of ethnicity, nationality, and religion. They belonged in a group together because they were all lepers, simply trying to survive – needing each other to endure. Scottish author and professor, William Barclay, said, “In the common tragedy of their leprosy they had forgotten they were Jews and Samaritans and remembered only they were men in need.” He goes on to relate it to life. He said, “If a flood surges over a piece of country and wild animals congregate for safety on some little bit of higher ground, you will find standing peacefully together animals that are natural enemies and at any other time would do their best to kill each other. Surely one of the things which should draw all people together is their common need of God.”
And these ten lepers did have a common need of God. They needed God to meet them on the edges of their lives. They needed God to step foot in that “in between” place, that liminal and thin place, that place where no one would risk to go. That is where God is. That is where Jesus went. That is where we ought to go. We ought to go into the hard and heavy places of people’s lives because that is where they are the most tired. We ought to go into the outside and out of the way places in people’s lives because that is where they are the most lost. We ought to go into the in between and innermost places of people’s lives because that is where they are the most stuck. It is in the liminal places of life, at the border crossings, where Jesus finds those of us who need him most.
And this was true for the ten lepers. Lepers were folks who lived on the margins and in the “in-between” places of loneliness and community, hope and fear, and life and death. Lepers might have had a range of skin conditions from simple psoriasis, to boils, to actual flesh destroying diseases. They lived in the shadows, in caves, in abandoned homes. They were forced to live in seclusion, keeping their distance from all passersby. They wrapped themselves in torn clothes to cover their wounds while disregarding their disheveled and disheartened appearances. And to bring attention to their hopeless existence, they had to announce their own impurity with loud, humiliating cries of “Unclean!”
And these lepers were indeed unclean. And because they were unclean they were kept at arm’s length, close enough for folks to say “thank you” that they were not like them but far enough so they didn’t have to see them, experience them, live with them. The only place for someone who didn’t fit in was on the border, the border between clean and unclean. And I’m sure they didn’t want to be on the unclean side anymore. They didn’t want to be separated from everything and everyone that they loved. They wanted to be healed.
And I’m sure the words “Unclean! Stay away!” were words that Jesus heard many times traveling in the “in between,” on the border of Samaria and Galilee. However, this time, as Jesus made his way to Jerusalem, made his way to his own in between moment of the pains of this world and joys of paradise, he heard shouts. Jesus didn’t hear the words, “unclean and stay away.” No, the shouts were different. The ten lepers, recognizing Jesus, didn’t shout for him to steer clear. They raised their voices and their pleas for him to draw close. They kept their distance in accordance with Levitical law, but it did not prevent them calling out, “Jesus, Master, we know who you are! Have mercy on us!” Maybe they called out because, as Pastor Dennis Sanders of First Christian Church of St. Paul, Minnesota says, “Maybe they know that Jesus is all about the liminal, that he likes being in the borderlands. Jesus seems to be all about crossing boundaries, both physical and theoretical. He is willing to cross another one to heal ten men.”
And Jesus, also keeping his distance for the moment, saw and experienced their need and ordered them to go to the priests for a confirmation of their healing. You see, priests, not physicians, pronounced the ability of the sick and diseased to return to their families and communities. The ten lepers heard Jesus’s order and knew that undertaking Jesus’s request would make them well. And sure enough, on the way to be seen by the priests, all ten lepers were indeed healed. Jesus not only healed their bodies, he restored their identities, making the lepers fully human again. They we no longer in the “in between” space. They were in a new space. They were restored and could now be readmitted to their communities.
However, one leper could not go home. The Samaritan leper was in a foreign land and although he had been restored to health, he still didn’t belong to the community. He didn’t have a home nearby, a religious sanctuary, or priests to pronounce him clean. He had nowhere to turn. So, he turned to Jesus. He turned to Jesus because maybe he knew what it felt like to be an outcast, to be on the outside. Maybe he knew that although he wasn’t plagued by leprosy anymore, he still was plagued with discrimination and prejudice and isolation. He had nowhere to go, no place to belong. And so, his place of belonging was at Jesus’s feet. And Jesus embraced him as he embraces us all – the leper, the immigrant, the exile, the afraid, the lonely, the broken. That embrace brought the tenth leper back to Jesus, back to say “thank you,” back to belovedness. With Jesus, this cured Samaritan leper had an identity of belonging.
Although Samaritans didn’t belong, weren’t part of the in-crowd, it was the Samaritan who came back to Jesus to thank him. Jesus drew attention to this man, drew attention to the fact that he was a foreigner, an outsider, an “other” in the eyes of the religious elite. Wars of religion and difference keep us hating and hurting one another. We see it in the news today, “My God is the right God. My God is stronger than your God.” Christians have waged many a war against our religious enemies. We see fringe groups in all religions that care more that someone doesn’t belong rather than loving and accepting all people.
What kind of Christians will we be? What kind of Jesus-followers will we be? Would Jesus call us to exclude people because of their religious beliefs or would Jesus welcome them and receive their friendship and gratitude? I see a Jesus welcoming all and drawing attention to those outside of the set religious structures of the day. I see a Jesus who cultivates an identity of belonging, all of us belonging to the good world of God.
On Monday, October 29, 2018, almost exactly a year ago, a gunman stormed the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where the Jewish congregation was worshipping; 11 people were killed, and many others wounded. This marked the worst act of anti-Semitic violence ever in America. Shortly after, it was a Muslim nonprofit group who initiated and raised one million dollars to support the recovering Jewish community, providing funds to pay funeral expenses for the deceased and medical expenses for the wounded. They announced that shared humanity was more important than religious difference, and that coming together in opposition to violence was vital to the progress and flourishing of all people. Belonging was more important than difference and isolation.
Rev. Debie Thomas, the Director of Children’s and Family Ministries at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, tells a story about the importance of belonging. “I’ll never forget the day,” she said, “decades ago now, when I went snooping in my father’s study. I was four years old and bored, and I soon found myself digging through a tall filing cabinet. In it was a manila folder with four navy blue booklets wrapped in tissue paper. One – I discovered to my delight – had a baby picture of me inside of it, followed by a lot of big words I couldn’t read, followed by several pleasingly blank pages. I couldn’t help myself; I was a doodler. Grabbing a pencil, I sat down at the desk and began to draw.
I don’t know how many minutes passed and how many pages I desecrated before my father walked into the study. ‘What are you doing?’ he cried, snatching the booklet out of my hands and flipping frantically through its pages. It’s only when he set to work erasing my drawings with trembling hands that I realized he was not angry; he was frightened. ‘What are those?’ I asked him. ‘Our passports,’ he said, without looking up. ‘These are our American passports. They prove we belong here. Without them…’ He didn’t finish the sentence. ‘Please don’t ever play with these again.’”
“And I didn’t,” she said. “Even now, years later, I treat my passport gingerly, like an icon or a relic, convinced it might disintegrate in my hands. My father’s old, immigrant fear – the fear of not belonging, of being cast out – lives on.”
So, today I want to ask us, what does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be home? What does it mean to have an identity of inclusion and love? Many things separate us in today’s world. We are separated by literal and figurative walls. The healthy on one side, the sick on the other. The abled on one side and those differently abled on the other. Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. Citizens on one side and immigrants on the other. The poor on one side and the rich on the other. Blacks on one side and whites on the other. Church, we don’t belong on one side of the wall or the other. We belong to one another. But most of all, we belong at the feet of Jesus where the wide arms of our savior welcome us all home. Our passports are stamped with the sacrifice of Jesus and the love of our Creator. So, let us go out this week knowing that we all, each and every one of us, have identities of belonging and that we must bring that identity of belonging to all people. And for that, we fall at Jesus’ feet and say, “Thank you.”
Amen.