Boniface Tuesday (Proper 4 Year 1)
Today’s Assigned Readings:
Deuteronomy 12:1-12, 2 Corinthians 6:3-7:1, Luke 17:11-19
He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?
Luke 17:16-18
Generally, I’m learning to be of the opinion that the Gospels can teach us more about the Early Church than about Jesus. Over and over again this spring, reading St Luke, I’m amazed at how open the Lukan church was to outsiders, to Gentiles, to people who were not otherwise acceptable in Jewish society. At the same time, Luke seems to spend a lot of time showing up the “Acceptable People.” To put this is modern terms, we might go to Ana, my friend and former coworker at the Episcopal bookstore in NYC. She used to say, “Sometimes the Pagans are better Christians than the Christians.”
She was referring - usually - to acts of charity, hospitality or care for the environment and always in the modern rather than ancient world or political actions. And she was referring - usually - to the way what we might call The Christian Right is unChristian, but also the way the Christian Left is, generally, ineffective, even when they want to do something.
My own experience parallels hers because I know mostly of places where “love one another” gets turned into “love one another if they are exactly like you in theology, liturgical practice and politics.” This was not just a problem with Orthodoxy: Anglicans - especially Anglo-Catholics - can have this problem too, as can very-progressive sorts of Christians. It’s really very human.
Having been raise in an evangelical sort of world, where those born again will go to heaven and the rest won’t, it might be natural to find myself fearing them. When I was a member of a very liberal sort of parish in San Francisco, the thought of travelling back east to visit my family and the conservative Methodist parish in which I was raised was terrifying. As my maternal Grandfather aged, however, Mom began to press for frequent visites. One Sunday we found ourselves there, sitting in the pews at the Acworth United Methodist Church on Youth Sunday - a Sunday on which I had coincidentally preached in 1979 - and it was time for communion. I’d already had the experience of not going forward for communion with my parents - not very pleasant at all - so I had decided earlier in the visit to just go forward.
And I was surprised to meet Jesus over the bread and the wine, just as he promised.
How could the same Jesus I prayed to at a my liberal, Anglican congregation in California show up at an Evangelical, Methodist parish in Newt Gingrich’s Cobb County, the Buckle of the Bible Belt? I had a strong sense of “no one is outside any more.”
None of them returned and gave praise to God except this foreigner.
Depending on your point of view either I might be seen as the outsider or else I was in Samaria. But there was God, just the same as he was when we gathered around the table in San Francisco. Just the same as he was when we stood before the Holy Doors. Depending on your point of view regarding the Orthodox Church, either I am thus the outsider or else I’ve been worshipping in Samaria.
And I think both of those points of view are always true… until you come to the sense that no one is outside any more. As we noted yestreday, God was in Christ reconciling all things to himself - to God. The only outsiders any more are those who freely place themselves outside (like the 9).