Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Pentecost 20
October 14, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 17:11-19
On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 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?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
In Eugene O’Neil’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night, Edmund Tyrone, the younger of two sons, a character many believe to be O’Neil himself, says this about an experience he had while at sea:
“I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of (the sea), and for a moment I lost myself…I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and (the) high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life….to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.”
I share Edmund Tyrone’s words with you this morning because, some say, they express where living a grateful life comes from: a profound sense of belonging to others, to the world, to life itself and to the holy one who is the source of all.
How does our gospel for this morning speak to this?
Jesus, we hear, is traveling in a borderland. On one side of the borderland is Galilee, Jesus’ home: the place of belonging, belonging to family, to friends, to years of traditions and daily rituals woven through every moment of life. And on the other side of the borderland is the home of the Samaritans, a people the Jews did not believe belonged either with them or with God.
Jesus is traveling through this borderland on his way to Jerusalem when he encounters ten lepers, people who more than just about anyone else, belonged nowhere. Ejected by their families and their communities for fear of contagion, these miserable people were forced to wander from place to place as beggars.
The lepers see Jesus, call him by name and, while keeping their distance, beg him to have mercy upon them (which may have amounted to no more than their asking him for money). He does not immediately heal them but instead tells them to go and show themselves to the priest, the person whose job it was to certify anyone’s disease-free condition. On the way to do this, the ten find that they have been cured of their leprosy.
Nine of ten, we are told, just keep on going—and who could blame them? After so much suffering and so much isolation, who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t find that darn priest, get your clean bill of health and then make a beeline to your village and to your family, both of whom had probably given you up for dead years before?
But upon seeing his flesh return to normal, the Samaritan leper, we are told, has a different response. “Oh God, look at this!” we can he imagine him saying. And, with this, we can imagine something shifting within him, something that sends him running back to the one who met him in the borderlands, to the one who gave him back the power to belong to his family and to his village again, to the one he felt he had come to belong to.
This, Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of the book Gratitude, the Heart of Prayer, says, is what grateful living (with a capital G) is founded in—the sudden sense that can come upon us that we belong in the world, belong to life and to God, not because we’ve earned it or because we’ve worked so hard to create a place for ourselves. Rather this sense of belonging comes out of a sense of having stumbled onto it, fallen into it, found ourselves surrounded by it, received it as gift.
This kind of deep sense of belonging that wells up within us or falls down upon us as gift, is the source of gratefulness for the big things and the small things in our lives. It’s also a source of our own and, Steindl-Rast would say, society’s well-being. And so in our gospel, while ten lepers are healed of their disease, only one leper, the grateful Samaritan, Jesus declares, is filled with well-being, has wellness at a deeper level than the others.
And so it is with us. We can be disease-free but not well. Most of us have also known those who have been diseased but in and through their disease have awakened to a new sense of belonging and gratitude that has enriched and deepened their lives. These people can become channels of deep belonging to the rest of us.
I will never forget a woman by the name of “Snooks” Haley. She served on some kind of diocesan committee in South Carolina where I lived at one time. I was on retreat with this committee and heard saw and heard her across the room. She must’ve been in her late 70’s then, with a husky voice that quavered and a deep Southern drawl. I would come to learn that she had had significant health issues in the last year. One afternoon as some of us sat around talking, we noticed that Snooks was over on the side of the room sprawled out on her back on the rug. It was clear that she was in the middle of some deep and blissful reflection. And so, of course, I went over to find out what that was about. I forget the exact exchange, but at one point she sat cross-legged in front of me and said : “Melissa, what I’m finding as I get older, even with all my physical problems, I feel more bliss, more connection to my life, to my people, to this church of ours, and to God. I’m so grateful.”
I came away from that retreat saying to myself, “I want what she’s having. I want to be like Snooks.”
The Talmud says: “We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” This, of course, is what I’m talking about. The question is, then, how can we move toward a way of seeing that notices our belonging to the world, to life itself and to God, a way of seeing that is grateful? How can we do this under all conditions? How can we do this now?
First, slow down and do one thing at a time and give it both your attention and appreciation. The simple practice of staying with one small activity—making a cup of tea and savoring it, walking the dog and being in that moment, reading your child a story, all of these are windows onto our sense of belonging in the universe and our sense of the giftedness of everyday life.
Second, journal about the people, things, circumstances you are grateful for: So I’ve actually begun doing this. Each morning I wake up and I write about a few happenings (and the key is a few happenings) the previous day for which I’m grateful. To my earlier point, most of them have to do with experiences of unexpected belonging and joy: an unexpected kind gesture from someone, the way the tree looks in the front yard with all its now red foliage, reminding me of falls from my past, getting to spend some time with one of the children in the parish. It sounds so simple, but it helps to shift what I notice, what I take into myself, and this is what gratefulness is all about: shifting what we see and notice.
And finally, look for the sweetness that (eventually) can come from bitter experiences. By this I do not mean pretending that bitter experiences are not bitter. They are. Rather, wait on them and with them, wait and watch for the gift hidden in them, the new work you are being allowed to do through them, the unbidden companions that can materialize there, the new dimension of yourself that the bitter experience can lay bare or evoke, the face of God glimpsed there. This, of course, takes time. Give it time. Give the sweetness time. I believe you will see it there.
I want to end where we started: with Eugene O’Neil and Long Day’s Journey into Night. O’Neil dedicated the play to his wife Carlotta on their twelfth wedding anniversary. What he says to her in the dedication and what he says about the effect of writing a play in which he finally explores the bitterness of his own family life tells us something about the transforming nature of our belonging to one another, our gratitude for this and the power that it has to bring us well being, to draw the sweetness out of our bitter experiences. The play is about “a fateful, heart-rending day (from around 8:30 in the morning to 12:00 midnight) in August of 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the autobiographical representations of O’Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents.”
For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: “I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dread at last and write this play--write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light--into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
Gene
Works Cited or Consulted
Bryan Stoffregen’s Comments on the gospel in his website entitled Crossmarks
Wikipedia’s entry about Long Day’s Journey into Night and Eugene O’Neil
David Stendl-Rast’s website Gratefulness.org
