Oct 9, 2016 • Solidarity Sunday • By Leora Weitzman
2 Kings 5:1-15c, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19
I’ve always liked Naaman. He’s so human. When Elisha sends word to him to wash in the Jordan, he reacts just as I react to advice to stretch or go for a walk. Surely I wouldn’t feel so miserable if that’s all I need! Surely I need someone to cure me, or at least I need to undertake some great and glamorous quest. But no. When I actually follow the advice, presto—I feel much better. And so it is, writ large, with Naaman.
The suffering people in today’s Gospel are also given instructions. In Matthew 3 and Luke 5, Jesus gladly heals leprosy with his touch. So why does he send these ten away for their healing? A clue is his answer to the grateful tenth: “Your faith has made you well.” It takes faith for the ten to go and show themselves to the priests, because the priests’ job is to declare them clean or unclean. What if they show up unhealed?
Perhaps Jesus senses that for these ten, something more than physical healing is needed. To that end, he may want precisely to coax them into this leap of faith, so that not only are their bodies restored, but so is their relationship with God.
I can imagine their skepticism: If God hasn’t healed me yet, why should I expect anything different now? Yet Jesus has created a situation in which taking a chance on God is actually the less risky alternative compared to going on as before. When the ten take the bait, and the plunge, setting out to show themselves to the priests, not only do they find themselves miraculously healed—they realize God has not abandoned them after all.
The one who comes back and is told, “Your faith has made you well,” receives an additional realization: it was the leap of faith itself that invoked divine assistance. And what has worked once could work again. Another offered leap might beget another return gift. An ancient dance with God has been revived. Now there is a healing even better than being cured of leprosy.
These stories, then, tell of more than healing. They tell of reciprocity, humility, empowerment, and relationship. They also tell of not setting conditions.
Naaman is healed when he stops setting conditions on what his healing should look like. Jesus in offering healing sets no conditions about having to be a Jew. In fact, he gives the Samaritan credit for showing gratitude across cultural barriers. Naaman, too, reaches across cultural barriers when he listens, first to his wife’s Israeli servant, and then to Elisha, “the prophet who is in Samaria.” It seems we have a God who rejoices when we see past our differences to our shared humanity.
And yet, like Timothy’s community, we wrangle and divide ourselves. It may boil over in election years, but it’s been simmering all along, and not all of us have the luxury of ignoring it when it’s not in the news. Like Paul, some “suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal” …being called names, given funny looks, fired without cause, denied access to hospitalized loved ones, refused commercial and legal services, even tortured to death either physically or by a million small exclusions that culminate in teenage suicide. And this is brought on simply by being oneself, by having a single aspect of one’s full, unique, divinely created self branded a cultural scapegoat.
Today is Solidarity Sunday, the day we as a community of faith stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise out of sync with cultural gender expectations. I’m not sure it’s respectful to celebrate this day with readings about leprosy, as if these brothers and sisters have an intrinsic condition that calls for healing, as some churches have taught. To each person in this room, I say, you are beautiful and whole as you are! I’d rather focus on the relational healing to which our readings also point.
When we sort the glorious variety of human beings into invented categories, based on which we pass judgment or give preferential treatment, we implicitly tell ourselves that we accept both ourselves and others only insofar as we do not fall into a category we’ve bought into rejecting. We thus set conditions for our own worth and dignity as well as that of others. Many live in a low-grade constant fear of being found to belong, directly or by association, to an unacceptable category.
There are many such categories, for condition-setting and categorizing has a tendency to spread. We have categories based on nationality and socioeconomic status. Beyond that, historical threads running back at least to ancient Greece intertwine attitudes toward cultural sexual and gender categories, racial categories, the human body, animals, nature, the very earth, and matter as such.
Hardly conscious of doing so, we may locate ourselves on one side of these divides and reject aspects of ourselves and others that fall across the lines. The mere fact of having a body, with all that that entails, can feel like a source of shame. Some internalize their feelings of shame or fear; some turn them outward in attempts to dominate others or nature. And so the fabrics of our communities, of our shared terrestrial home, and of our inner selves are torn apart.
Without some sorting into categories, systematic, scientific study would be impossible. With sorting, we become partly able to predict and control our experience, and this is understandably reassuring and intoxicating. Yet it carries the dangers symbolized by the tree of knowledge. We start thinking we know more than we do. We jump to conclusions, and we forget to listen to God, who created us in glorious variety that defies rigid categorization.
Today’s readings call us to stop setting conditions, to return to humility and wonder so that we may heal our relationships with ourselves, each other, all creation, and our God.
Let us turn to God in prayer.
That nations, faith traditions, political parties, and social groups may grow in the willingness to reach out to each other in humility and wonder, we pray …
That individuals overwhelmed by the scale of our divisions may, like Naaman, come to trust in the healing power of seemingly small actions, we pray…
In gratitude for the courage and healing power of all acts of coming out and of mutual acceptance and affirmation, we pray…