So, that land between Samaria and Galilee is where we find Jesus today. And I can’t count the number of times I have preached the story of the healing of the lepers, and always I have gone to the experience of the lepers — wondering at the one who was given eyes of faith and understanding enough so that he returned to give thanks. And imagining what the other nine were doing?
Were they so excited that they simply forgot the manners their mama taught them and ran off to spread the Gospel, the good news of their healing experience?
But today I find myself thinking about where Jesus and his disciples are travelling — through that in-between land, that liminal space.
I used to think that Luke used that phrase, “the region between Samaria and Galilee,” as just a literary device to get Jesus from Point A to Point B.
But lately, I've been thinking that it's something more. It seems like, as likely as not, Jesus heads out to these places, these in-between places, and I wonder if we meet up with him in this particular place for a reason.
Because the land between Samaria and Galilee is neither one or the other. It doesn't belong to one place or the other. But this no-man's land makes it impossible to forget that the two places had once been one.
It's a place where travelers couldn't help but remember how things were before the experience of Exile left its mark on both kingdoms.
It's a place where you couldn't be too sure who belonged and who didn’t, where you might be freaked out, un-trusting, even a little fearful.
It's a place where the familiar rules don't apply — where you don't even know your place anymore.
But it's the place where Jesus goes today. It is a place where, if you think about it, we also find ourselves, as often as not, nowadays in this uncertain, rancorous, turbulent world.
At least this is what, as often as not, I have found to be true for me in the ten or so years. And I suppose it should come as no surprise that in some ways I’d rather it be less “often” and more “not.” But I think it happens to all of us.
Whether your daily lives take you to office buildings or hospitals, to nursing homes to social service centers, anywhere out in public or within your own person, you know what it is to walk that line between what you know and what you dread as you encounter this uncertain, often frightening in-between-ness in the lives of others — or in your own.
Last winter, I realized that I was finding myself more and more in that strange land where Jesus traveled so long ago.
I was up at a funeral home in Canastota doing a brief service for someone who had no church (the funeral home director had gotten my name from somewhere or other and asked if I'd come say a few words).
I had just left and was walking to the parking lot when I ended up having a conversation with two young men who, under other circumstances, I might just cross the street to avoid.
They were leaning against a car in the funeral home parking lot smoking a joint. I almost nodded and kept on going. Instead, for some reason, I said, “Hey, how's it going?” And dang if they didn't start telling me.
In the course of all they told me, they said that they were the friends who had been asked to speak at the funeral of their lifelong buddy later that day. Their friend, whose body lay inside the funeral home, had died of a heroin overdose earlier in the week. If you stopped long enough to look beyond their nonchalant stance and t-shirts and jeans, you could see their grief and fear.
What hit me then was that this was not a world I knew much at all except from meeting people who actually lived in it at times like this. I grew up safe and protected and in a world entirely foreign to the anger and despair that took the life of their young friend.
Much of my life I have believed that if you just did the right thing, you'd be rewarded — unlike the heartbroken mother of this young man who had done all that she knew to do and still was suffering an unspeakable loss.
And it dawned on me then and there. I don’t much like traveling in this land in between where words are hard to come by and healing seems so awfully far away. Where the rules I’ve come to count on don’t quite seem to apply.
Lately, I've been dealing with this sort of thing again today in a more removed way. Someone I know has mental health and suicidal issues, and all the things I think of saying and all the things I try doing seem to be the exactly wrong things.
And I have no clue what to do but vent my frustration and try to remember to pray. And frankly, I am more apt to remember the former rather that the latter. And that's a shame.
And yet this in-between place is where God keeps calling me of late — to this same place where Jesus traveled when those desperate, hopeful lepers cried out for mercy. Maybe you're called there, too, in your own way.
As I was trying to leave that funeral home, those two guys motioned to the inside of the car. The mother of their friend was sitting inside smoking a cigarette. She asked me to pray for her, and I did. She asked me to pray for her son, and I did. I can’t remember what else I said to her, but I do remember telling her the parking lot was filling up with a lot of people, so her son must have been loved.
And with tears flowing down her cheeks, she said that honestly, it was hard to believe that, but she was grateful for so many people coming, in spite of how her son acted while alive. She was grateful that they had not left her alone in this in-between place of grief and confusion, anger and despair.
Y'all, I do not have Jesus’ power to cleanse and make whole the way he did in this familiar story we heard today. But we, all of us, have the power to step into those in-between places in people’s lives where we can no longer deny that what once was whole is now broken and where the pain of their experience may be simply heartbreaking.
Those places where the lepers in today’s Gospel once lived — cut off from all they knew and loved and took for granted.
We can walk into those places and at least try to do what we think is right. It may be hard, and some hard truths may need to be said, and it may not even turn out the way we wanted – as often as not.
But we can still walk into those places with love and caring and, I hope, some of God's mercy. And maybe, just maybe, that is the beginning of cleansing, of healing, of restoration, for others and for ourselves. And somehow even just that alone sometimes brings about the kind of gratitude we witness in today's Gospel reading.
For some reason, I keep finding myself in that place more and more. I expect there was a time when fear alone would have kept me from choosing to walk into these in-between places: this land between Samaria and Galilee, where the rules don’t apply and the words are hard to find and healing is elusive.
I’m not entirely certain what has changed lately, except most days I seem to have no other choice. But after all the time between that time in the parking lot and now, I still find myself surprised to be in that place. But it's where Jesus traveled. So I reckon that’s exactly where God’s people are called to travel, too.
Amen.