“Aging calls us outside,” wrote John Updike in his memoirs. I wonder if he was onto something there. I used to spend a lot of time outside, days and nights, when I was young, but I hadn’t slept under the stars in a very long time. I was drawn to it, though, and so I packed the necessary things in my kayak and went on the river for a few days—and it was glorious. One morning, I paddled around a river bend and glided into what felt like a hug, like being embraced by wooded hills dressed in glowing late-summer colors under the bluest sky, as I floated in a dimension between the world and its perfect reflection in the mirror of water. I closed my eyes and I could feel the weight of the stunning silence—and for a moment my whole being was joy and gratitude. Updike wrote,
Like my late Unitarian father-in-law am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and the sky is a pageant of clouds. Aging calls us outdoors, after the adult indoors of work and love-life and keeping stylish, into the lowly simplicities that we thought we had outgrown as children. We come again to love the plain world, its stone and wood, its air and water. “What a glorious view!” my father-in-law would announce as we smirked in the back seat of the car he was inattentively driving. But in truth all views have something glorious about them. The act of seeing is itself glorious, and of hearing, and feeling, and tasting.[1]
Yes, the lowly simplicities of the plain world and the glories of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and tasting do indeed invite our awe and rejoicing. Walter Brueggemann wrote that
Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community; indeed of all creation. Yes, all life is aimed toward God and finally exists for the sake of God. Praise articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit, and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are. Praise is not only a human requirement and a human need, it is also a human delight. We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.[2]
We worship God because there’s something about life that calls us to respond to the miracle and gift that it is and to the wondrous reality of our being part of it. We worship God because we want to say thank you, sing thank you, and live thank you. John Burkhart reminds us that,
What matters … is not whether God can be God without our worship. What is crucial is whether humans can survive as humans without worshiping. To withhold acknowledgment, to avoid celebration, to stifle gratitude, may prove as unnatural as holding one’s breath.[3]
Martin Luther was once asked to describe the nature of true worship. His answer: the tenth leper turning back.
Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem when he was approached by ten men with leprosy. Luke writes Jesus was traveling between Samaria and Galilee, only there wasn’t any land between the two—there was, however, a line. There was no border, no wall, no checkpoints, but there was a line, a sharp line drawn between two groups of people who hadn’t been friendly with each other for generations, Jews and Samaritans. The enmity between them was entrenched and old. They disagreed about things that mattered most to them: how to honor God, where to worship, what set of scriptures to receive as sacred. The line between them wasn’t so much on the land as it was in their hearts and minds, their imaginations. They did what they could to avoid contact with each other.
Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, traveling between Samaria and Galilee, when he was approached by ten men with leprosy. Leprosy was dreadful. It was the name given to any skin blemishes that looked suspicious and triggered fear of contagion. Leprosy was a sentence to exile. These men who approached Jesus had been banished from their homes and villages. We don’t know how long it had been since they had felt the loving touch of spouses, children, parents, friends. It no longer mattered which side of the line they once claimed as home or which community they claimed as their own or who they used to be or dreamed of being—now they were lepers. Whoever saw them didn’t see them as persons, but as no-longer-persons, as untouchables pushed out and left to beg and wander in the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee. “They shall live alone,” the law of Moses declared; “their dwelling shall be outside the camp.”[4]
The ten who had been dwelling outside the camp for who knows how long approached Jesus, crying out for mercy, and Jesus saw them, heard them, and responded. “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” he said. The priests were the ones responsible for determining if a rash was leprous or not. The priests were the ones who would examine the skin and decide, after the blemish had faded, if a man or woman could return from their exile. “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus said to the ten, as though it was time for their return to life. And as they went, they were made clean.
Made clean meant they would belong again. Made clean meant they could touch and be touched, embrace and be embraced, hold the baby, kiss the children, hug their wives, do their work, hang out with their friends. The ten had encountered Jesus in the land of not-belonging and they were restored to life, restored to wholeness. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he thanked Jesus. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, saw something the others didn’t. Nine of the ten got their old lives back. One found new life. And he was a Samaritan.
Again it was a Samaritan who saw what others didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see. At the beginning of his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus told a story about a man who fell into the hands of robbers on the Jericho Road. You know the story. A priest happened to come down that road, and when he saw the victim, he passed by on the other side. Next a Levite came to the place and saw the man, and he passed by on the other side. And then a third man came near, and when he saw the man, he was moved with pity. And he was a Samaritan.
It was an outsider whose actions revealed what being a neighbor is about and it was an outsider who recognized Jesus as an agent of God’s mercy. It was outsiders who saw what others didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Ten cried out for mercy. Ten did what Jesus told them to do. Ten were made clean. Nine went home and lived happily ever after; nothing suggests that their healing was revoked for their lack of gratitude, nothing like that. God’s mercy is unconditional. One of the ten, though, turned back and gave praise to God at Jesus’ feet.
In Jesus, the kingdom of God has come into the region between where exiles dwell or rather wander, longing for redemption and crying out for mercy. Leprosy meant exclusion and isolation, and that makes it the perfect symbol for all the ways in which human beings experience being cut off from life. For some of us, complete isolation may be difficult to imagine, but to the degree that we are not at one with the world, not at one with each other and with ourselves, we all know what it means to wander the roads outside the camp, longing for life that is nothing but life.
It was the Samaritan, the outsider, newly liberated from the exile of leprosy, who recognized that with Jesus the reign of God had entered the world. He saw an embrace so wide and welcoming, it wouldn’t create yet another camp in this broken, divided world, but one redeemed humanity, made whole by God’s mercy.The Samaritan saw grace so deep, mercy so wide, his whole being became gratitude and praise.
“Get up and go on your way,” Jesus said to him; “your faith has made you well.” This wellness is about healing, but goes beyond it. This wellness is about redemption and restored community, but goes beyond it. This wellness is about our deliverance from any blindness, any fear, any self-centeredness, anything that inhibits grateful praise. Burkhart wondered whether humans can survive as humans without worshiping, without losing ourselves in wonder, love, and praise. I don’t think we can, and we need to stop trying.
Jesus was on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross. He traveled through the vast region between, his feet tracing the many lines that divide us from each other, from our fellow creatures, and even from ourselves, he traveled with his hands stretched out to either side in the most vulnerable gesture of welcome. He went all the way to the cross, erected outside the city gates, outside the camp—and there the deep divide between us and God was revealed, the violent pride of God’s human creatures presuming to be beholden to no one but themselves.
And there, in that ultimate act of human rebellion against God’s reign, God chose to remain faithful to the Beloved and to us. Such mercy. Such a passion for life. How can we not sing? How can we not praise the One whose we are?
[1] John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1989), 246-247.
[2] Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1988), 1. The first sentence is a quote from Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Praise of God in the Theological Reflection of the Church,” Interpretation 39 (1985), 39.
[3] John Burkhart, quoted in A Sourcebook about Liturgy, ed. by Gabe Huck (Chicago: LTP, 1994), 148.
[4] Leviticus 13:46