The One Who Saw

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Year C, Proper 23)
October 14, 2007

The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector

Misery loves company. Some unhappy people are happy knowing that others are unhappy, too. This isn’t always true. Unhappy people who also are compassionate don’t want others to be unhappy.

However, it does seem true, almost universally, that misery creates community. Suffering, being no respecter of anyone, can bring everyone together, breaking down the dividing walls of social distinctions, even cultural prejudices.

Jesus walked through the region between Samaria and Galilee,^[1] the boundary land dividing Samaritans and Jews – peoples who shared an historic hatred.

In that geographic shadow land dwelled ten lepers. Nine were Jews. One, a Samaritan. Together, they formed a colony of the marginalized, literally a community in the margins. Their disease and the fear of contagion made necessary their isolation. Their disease – having become the overwhelming commonality, the defining mark of their identities – made unnecessary even useless their continuing observance of any ethnic hostility.

Then, Jesus cured them.

The nine, following Jesus’ instruction, went to the priests who declared them ritually clean and restored them to their community. Thrilled at being cured, they did not thank Jesus.

So, it seems that grace can’t guarantee gratitude. Many are the gifts bestowed on the ungrateful and entitled that evoke no word of thanks.

The one, the Samaritan, once cured, sadly encountered the resurrection of the old divisions, for he was not entitled to go to the priests. Yet, it was this one, yet another Good Samaritan, who saw the grace of his cure as gift and was thankful.

Grace can’t guarantee gratitude. But recognizing grace as gift – something not wrought by one’s own hands – can.

We have begun our annual financial Canvass. Cutting to the chase, I ask each of us to pledge a portion of what we can’t take with us when we die, but while we’re living, we better not leave home without – our money to sustain St. Mark’s life and labor in 2008.

Let me share with you why I ask.

I have been your rector for 9½ years. Today, I know more about myself – who I am and why I exist – than I had learned in my 45½ years before my arrival. It could be that I’m a slow learner or a late bloomer or, simply, that I was ready to learn. But I can’t ignore the communal, relational context of that learning – you, St. Mark’s. Some of the lessons have been excruciatingly painful, some exceedingly joyful. All have been gifts of grace – things not wrought by my own hands. And I am grateful.

One of the tangible ways of expressing that gratitude is Pontheolla’s and my pledge of our money to sustain St. Mark’s. We pledge because we believe in the life and labor of the church, generally, and of this church, specifically. Even more, we pledge because we believe that the rector and his wife are to set an example of giving. Still more, we pledge not because of what we get out of St. Mark’s, but because of what we can do through St. Mark’s. We, St. Mark’s, can do more in this world than we, Pontheolla and I, can do. So, we pledge. But the bottom line is that we give because we are grateful.

Our pledge for 2007 is $5,500. Two weeks ago, when we made our pledge for next year, we cut it to $4,000. Since my Aunt Evelyn’s death this past March, we are covering more of my mother’s expenses that she and my aunt had shared. However, cutting our pledge didn’t feel right. Why? Generally, because we’re grateful. Specifically, because we’ve been eternally transformed by our sabbatical encounters with our South African sisters and brothers who so live to give that out of the emptiness of their poverty freely offered us a depth of hospitality that has redefined, radicalized our notions of generosity.

So, we’ve decided to restore the $1,500 and add $500, raising our 2008 pledge to $6,000. We’ve also made a pledge to each other that every day of 2008 we’ll figure out how to make it work. It won’t be easy or always pleasant. If you’ve never seen or heard me when I’ve worried about money, trust me, it ain’t pretty! But, again, our bottom line is this: We give because we’re grateful.

Through the lens of our Canvass theme – Giving humbly from our abundance to a world in waiting – I see a vision of our open and outreached hands. Over the past decade, we, St. Mark’s, have moved from our fabled insularity in which whatever we did was primarily about us toward a greater engagement in the world. We’ve moved from principally focusing on the development of our individual identities (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) toward a greater recognition of who we are as a community in the larger world.

Reflecting again on the gospel passage, nine were cured and went back to the lives they had left to be who they had been. One, the Samaritan, returned and gave thanks to Jesus, a Jew. In this act of gratitude, he “proved” that he was not only cured, but also, healed, made whole, for he reached across a barrier to be at-one with “the other.” He was the one who saw that God’s grace is not a gift only for the individual, but something to be shared. He was the one who saw that he had not been healed to be what he had been, but to become something other – one for others; one for the world.

Our Offertory Anthem^[2] – a prayer for a universal humankind that honors no barrier and cares for those in need – has these words:

Lord of taking and of giving,
give us back our dignity;
in our universal living,
break down all inequity…

See the silent ones who wait,
when the blessing seems too late.

The tenth leper, this other good Samaritan, he is the one who models for us the theme of our Canvass and of this choral anthem. May we, like him, be those who see.

[1] The gospel text appointed for the day is Luke 17.11-19.

[2] The silent ones who wait, words by Herbert F. Brokering and music by Cary Ratcliff.