This sermon was preached at All Saints' Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA on Wednesday, November 14. The texts for this sermon are: Titus 3:1-7, Psalm 91:9-16, and Luke 17:11-19.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended my Diocesan Convention back in Massachusetts. A group of high school students who make up the Diocesan Youth Council gave a heartfelt presentation about the twenty years of their organization and what it has meant for youth voices to be heard and taken seriously on the Convention floor. At the end of the presentation, three young adults in their twenties and thirties—Diocesan Youth Council graduates—got up. They presented results from a survey of their peers, other DYC alumni. Even though the young adults who responded to the survey overwhelming report that DYC had played a significant role in developing their sense of identity, their leadership qualities, made them who they were today--just a minority of these highly involved youth came back to regularly attend church in their early adulthood. In front of hundreds of clergy and lay leaders of their church, these three twenty-somethings attempted to speak to their experience of why it has been so hard for each of them to come back – lack of outreach to single people, loneliness, isolation.
Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”
So often I am asked to speak for my age cohort in the face of anxious questions from older folks in the church. Why haven’t our children come back?
In that question, I hear pain and frustration and resentment and grief. And yet asking me where are the others, well, it’s a bit like Jesus asking the Samaritan man who returned, where are the others? It’s kind of a rhetorical question.
After all, all I can say, and all the man who returned can know, are our own stories. I can only speak to my own small experience of what moved me toward relationship with Jesus, toward returning the table of Eucharist and thanksgiving, where my healing began. I can’t know, for sure, why the others haven’t. But I’m here. And I wonder if that’s enough.
Unlike other healing stories, the beginning of this one lacks the same kind of intimacy of the grasping of a hand or the spittle on the eyes we see in other parts of the Gospels. Jesus sees the people with leprosy when they cry out to him from afar, and he responds to their cry by sending them further off. And in their sending off, in their journey to the priests, on the way there, they are healed.
It is the outsider among outsiders, the foreigner in the group of the already excluded, who recognizes not only that this healing has happened, but knows the source. And he returns, closes that distance, gets right up to Jesus – at his feet – and thanks him.
And yet, those other nine were still healed. The blessing isn’t revoked. They are still out there, making their way in the world – in fact, doing exactly as Jesus commanded them. For their journey away from Jesus, the one he started them on, was a necessary, integral part of their healing.
Where are the other nine? Weren’t they cleansed, too?
Perhaps Jesus’s distance is to blame. Maybe it was not made clear enough that Jesus is the source of their healing. Perhaps it was simply just too easy to attribute their transformation to other external factors, or maybe the healed people were just plain ungrateful and lazy. We can speculate all we want – just as we love to speculate about the simplicity of children’s ministry programs or the lack of theological content in youth groups or the various generational defects attributed to millennials.
But that’s not my invitation for you today. Instead I want to wonder, what might it mean to release ourselves from this question entirely? What gift might it give us, and our ministries, to let go of answering why it is that some people who are raised in the church never come back? And what does this act of letting go require in us? Do we trust that God has healed and shaped and knows the ones who come into our churches and do not return? Can we hold fast to the faith that the blessing has not left them and the door to relationship with God has. not. slammed. shut. The journey beyond one aspect of their healing may simply be along different pathway, one that doesn’t involve the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement at all.
When we let go of worrying about the dismal rate of return on our investments, perhaps we are also released to pay attention to the one who is already back and among us, beside us. We are freed to welcome the one who comes to praise God, the one who seeks deeper relationship with Christ. Even if it’s not the one we wanted, or expected. Even if it may mean embracing the foreigner, the outsider.
One of the young adults that stood up to speak was twenty-nine years old. I’m single and I don’t have children, and I don’t expect that to change about me any time soon, she explained to the Convention. While her peers were finding entry-points into the church again through young family ministry, she struggled to find that same kind of welcome. Yet there she was, in the pew by herself, week after week. She challenged the church to look at itself and to see her—not the one they had been renovating the church school building for, or hiring a new children’s ed director for—but there just the same, at the feet of Jesus, returned and full of praise and gratitude, ready and willing.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended my Diocesan Convention back in Massachusetts. A group of high school students who make up the Diocesan Youth Council gave a heartfelt presentation about the twenty years of their organization and what it has meant for youth voices to be heard and taken seriously on the Convention floor. At the end of the presentation, three young adults in their twenties and thirties—Diocesan Youth Council graduates—got up. They presented results from a survey of their peers, other DYC alumni. Even though the young adults who responded to the survey overwhelming report that DYC had played a significant role in developing their sense of identity, their leadership qualities, made them who they were today--just a minority of these highly involved youth came back to regularly attend church in their early adulthood. In front of hundreds of clergy and lay leaders of their church, these three twenty-somethings attempted to speak to their experience of why it has been so hard for each of them to come back – lack of outreach to single people, loneliness, isolation.
Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?”
So often I am asked to speak for my age cohort in the face of anxious questions from older folks in the church. Why haven’t our children come back?
In that question, I hear pain and frustration and resentment and grief. And yet asking me where are the others, well, it’s a bit like Jesus asking the Samaritan man who returned, where are the others? It’s kind of a rhetorical question.
After all, all I can say, and all the man who returned can know, are our own stories. I can only speak to my own small experience of what moved me toward relationship with Jesus, toward returning the table of Eucharist and thanksgiving, where my healing began. I can’t know, for sure, why the others haven’t. But I’m here. And I wonder if that’s enough.
Unlike other healing stories, the beginning of this one lacks the same kind of intimacy of the grasping of a hand or the spittle on the eyes we see in other parts of the Gospels. Jesus sees the people with leprosy when they cry out to him from afar, and he responds to their cry by sending them further off. And in their sending off, in their journey to the priests, on the way there, they are healed.
It is the outsider among outsiders, the foreigner in the group of the already excluded, who recognizes not only that this healing has happened, but knows the source. And he returns, closes that distance, gets right up to Jesus – at his feet – and thanks him.
And yet, those other nine were still healed. The blessing isn’t revoked. They are still out there, making their way in the world – in fact, doing exactly as Jesus commanded them. For their journey away from Jesus, the one he started them on, was a necessary, integral part of their healing.
Where are the other nine? Weren’t they cleansed, too?
Perhaps Jesus’s distance is to blame. Maybe it was not made clear enough that Jesus is the source of their healing. Perhaps it was simply just too easy to attribute their transformation to other external factors, or maybe the healed people were just plain ungrateful and lazy. We can speculate all we want – just as we love to speculate about the simplicity of children’s ministry programs or the lack of theological content in youth groups or the various generational defects attributed to millennials.
But that’s not my invitation for you today. Instead I want to wonder, what might it mean to release ourselves from this question entirely? What gift might it give us, and our ministries, to let go of answering why it is that some people who are raised in the church never come back? And what does this act of letting go require in us? Do we trust that God has healed and shaped and knows the ones who come into our churches and do not return? Can we hold fast to the faith that the blessing has not left them and the door to relationship with God has. not. slammed. shut. The journey beyond one aspect of their healing may simply be along different pathway, one that doesn’t involve the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement at all.
When we let go of worrying about the dismal rate of return on our investments, perhaps we are also released to pay attention to the one who is already back and among us, beside us. We are freed to welcome the one who comes to praise God, the one who seeks deeper relationship with Christ. Even if it’s not the one we wanted, or expected. Even if it may mean embracing the foreigner, the outsider.
One of the young adults that stood up to speak was twenty-nine years old. I’m single and I don’t have children, and I don’t expect that to change about me any time soon, she explained to the Convention. While her peers were finding entry-points into the church again through young family ministry, she struggled to find that same kind of welcome. Yet there she was, in the pew by herself, week after week. She challenged the church to look at itself and to see her—not the one they had been renovating the church school building for, or hiring a new children’s ed director for—but there just the same, at the feet of Jesus, returned and full of praise and gratitude, ready and willing.
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