“United in Suffering”
Luke 17:11-19
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
10/16/16
It’s a proverb
as old as humankind itself: Nothing
brings people together like a common enemy. All a person has to do is to
tap into latent fear, to convince enough people that some one, or group, or
thing poses a threat, and that person can rise to power without any capacity
for exercising authority responsibly. And when greed, resentment, and vengeance
do ascend, the inevitable downfalls tend to be catastrophic. The need to remain
diligently aware of this reality has kept Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer on
required reading lists for some 400, 700, and 2300 years respectively.
There’s
another kind of enemy that draws people together. When caused not by malicious intent
or ignorance but by the inevitable hazards of living in an imperfect world, suffering can bring people together in
deep and long-lasting ways. A nuanced enemy, suffering can peel away pretense
and prejudice. It frequently heals wounds and divisions that have seemed
impervious to time, therapy, and even prayer. Cancer wards and ICU waiting
rooms come to mind. 12-Step groups gather people for the specific purpose of
sharing addiction-related suffering. It would be hard to find as broad a
cross-section of human community as one finds suffering together at an AA
meeting.
On his way
from Galilee to Jerusalem, “Jesus was going through the region between Samaria
and Galilee.” Luke takes us into the in-between place that separates Jews from
Samaritans. One of the things that unites each group is enmity with the other. First
century Jews know who they are by knowing, among other things, that they are not Samaritans. By most accounts, Samaritans
feel the same way. Having clear religious enemies helps to create what must
feel like unpolluted identities. They guard their distinctiveness with sacrosanct
boundaries.
As Jesus
traverses the liminal space between Jewish and Samaritan worlds, ten lepers
approach him. When we learn that “one” is a Samaritan, by implication we learn
that the other nine are, or at least include, Jews. Like some slapdash clot of
sticks, Styrofoam, and fetid yellow froth on the Nolichucky River, these ten
lepers have coalesced into an of eddy of human refuse. Isolated from their
communities of origin, they have created a new community of shared suffering.
Their union is much simpler and much more sublime than the rituals and dogmas
of Mt. Zion and Mt. Gerazim. The ten cling to each other because human beings
need, indeed we are created for, relationship.
Genesis
blesses and challenges us with two different creation stories. Neither is told
to explain how God creates the universe,
but to invite us to stand, together, in awe of the Creator and the Creation.
These stories invite us to affirm that God creates all things to live in
relationship with each other. The second version of creation makes this
explicit when God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The
point is: No human being can know or love
God without knowing and loving other human beings, other creatures. This
holds true because relationship lies at the very core of God’s own self.
Relationship is the source and the
goal of our own lives and of our life in God. This is the whole point of
talking about God as a dynamic Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is the energetic dance within and among all creation.
So, whether we’re Presbyterian or Methodist, Christian or Muslim, theist or
atheist, introvert or extrovert, straight or gay, hunter or gatherer, Bulldog or
Volunteer, human beings, to one degree or another, seek community because that
is who we are. It seems to me, then, that the truly ill are those who by some selfish
or fearful intent objectify others and push them away.
Remember Ebenezer
Scrooge. Old Scrooge, untainted by the scourge of compassion and kindness,
considers himself the sole non-leper in the world. Then, three ghosts remind
him of where he comes from, where he is, and where, if things remain unchanged,
his life will end – in utter loneliness, forgotten by everyone.
Finally acknowledging his resentment
and greed, Scrooge realizes that he
is the leper. And, with his business partner, Jacob Marley, gone, he has no one
with whom to suffer anymore. Living in a dark, cold world of exile, the rich,
old miser is in danger of experiencing complete and terminal isolation in the
world.
Remember, too,
his giddy, childlike, effervescent joy when he awakes. Restored to community,
Scrooge becomes awestruck by life. He’s grateful and generous in ways that he
had forgotten were possible for human beings. Healed of his spiritual leprosy, Scrooge
is the foreigner who returns to “give praise to God.”
It has been
well-documented that in the ancient Middle East, the term leprosy encompassed just about everything from diaper rash to
actual leprosy, the serious but now-treatable bacterial infection we know as Hansen’s
Disease. That broad umbrella allows us to expand the category outward to almost
anything that causes us to isolate one person or group from another.
It seems to me
that we live in a terribly leprous world right now. We tend to focus much more
energy on identifying enemies and uniting in opposition to them than we do on
sharing one another’s suffering. But shared suffering is the whole point of the
Incarnation. God deliberately enters the suffering of the beloved creation! God
traverses the tragic, beautiful liminal space between birth and death called
Life.
Carl Jung once said, “Life is a
luminous pause between two great mysteries, which are themselves one.”1
In this statement I hear Jung saying that God interrupts the uninterruptible.
God stakes out boundaries within eternity. Taking an unimaginable risk of
vulnerability, God creates space and time in which we are given the opportunity
to traverse, consciously, the liminal realm of physicality, with all of its
beauty and violence, with all of its joy and agony.
Human institutions tend to construct
things like denominations, political parties, country clubs, dress codes, and
other idols. Spiritual communities participate in the on-going self-revelation
of God called Creation. Spiritual communities make space for healing mercy.
They invite others into luminous experiences of reconciling Love. To live in
spiritual community is to live in breathless awe and grateful praise of the One
Who Creates, and in generous compassion toward all our fellow creatures.
If Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
is a truly spiritual community, we know who we are not by trying to demean and
disgrace some “enemy.” Nor is our faith
making us well by curing leprosy, heart disease, or cancer. We are who we
are, and we experience our hope for here, now, and tomorrow by determined
witness, in a grotesquely distorted world, to the reconciling power of justice,
kindness, humility, gratitude, and fearless dignity in our interactions with
one another.
The late Elie
Wiesel said that “Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone – and,
ultimately, hating himself or herself.”2
Uniting around enemies only breeds
enmity.
God is
different. Before joining with us in celebration and joy, God unites us with, and unites with us in, suffering. “Our tendency in the midst of
suffering,” says Rob Bell, “is to turn on God. To…shake our fist at the sky and
say, ‘God, you…have no idea what I'm going through.’
“[But the] cross is God’s way of…taking
on flesh and blood and saying, ‘Me too.’”3
1Carl Jung as quoted by Richard Rohr in Falling
Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, 2011. P.
88.
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