Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
September 1st,
Year of Our + Lord 2024
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, South Dakota
Cleansed Lepers Walking by the Spirit of Christ
Luke 17:11 – 19 and Galatians 5:16 - 24
Audio of the Sermon available HERE
Shall we talk about leprosy? Do you know what leprosy is? In modern times, leprosy is used to refer to a particular bacterial skin disease, also called Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian physician who isolated the guilty bacteria. Biblically, leprosy refers to what are likely a number of different skin diseases, characterized by lesions on the skin, dry patches, sores, thickening skin, and numbness.
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Today, antibiotics and other modern
medicines can cure leprosy, and many other skin diseases. But in the ancient world, there was no
reliable cure for these various contagious plagues, which caused great
suffering to their victims, and often shortened their lifespans. So, to safeguard the healthy, the laws of
various societies said that lepers must be separated, forced to live apart from
others. This has been a common public
health solution since at least the Exodus, and has continued through the centuries. This practice has ended, for the most part,
but only in recent decades.
Living with leprosy was terrible: a
combination of physical discomfort and pain, unsightly sores and discolored
patches, and numbness in the extremities that left the victim susceptible to
further injuries. And these problems
were made much worse by the exclusion they created. Lepers were subject to being cut off from
family, friends, and community. The
disease was so all-encompassing that if you caught it, you weren’t called a
person with leprosy. Rather, you were
simply called a ‘leper.’ Your disease
defined you.
The ten lepers in our Gospel reading today
stand at a distance, calling out to Jesus, because that
was the rule. Lepers were
not allowed in close proximity to healthy people. A harsh measure, bitter for the suffering
leper, to be sure. But the good of the
community outweighed the plight of any one individual.
Leprosy is greatly reduced in the world today. Thanks be to God for modern medicine, which has improved all our lives, so much. But there is a trade off. These remarkable improvements in modern medicine can make it harder for us to understand what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Modern blessings and the comfortable, well-fed, climate-controlled lives we live make comprehending the Word of God a harder challenge. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be truly hungry, let alone threatened with starvation. We have rarely had to endure extreme heat or cold for long. And thankfully there hasn’t been a shooting war on U.S. soil since the Civil War, which ended 159 years ago.
Thanks be to God for the safe, comfortable, blessed reality we mostly live in. But this means we moderns need to work harder to understand the Bible, which is full of stories of leprosy, and suffering under blazing sun and freezing nights, of warfare, dangerous waters and hateful enemies. I pray none of us ever face such horrible things. But even more, I pray we truly grasp the Truth that the Spirit is seeking to teach us, even through such evils.
Many of the worst horrors of life are used by God to teach us about ourselves, and our plight as fallen sinners. The Spirit also uses them to reveal the Father’s heart to us, to help us see and believe in the Savior, who entered into our broken world to rescue us. That the Lord uses pain and suffering to teach, correct and save sinners is offensive to many people. We might prefer to think that God is always “nice.” But God isn’t worried about our sensibilities; He is worried about our eternity. So, we should not be surprised that along with other sufferings, He used leprosy. Jesus used leprosy to teach us about sin, and to display His power, to reveal His identity. Jesus used leprosy, to save sinners.
Throughout the Bible, leprosy has served as a visible metaphor for human sin. Sometimes, a particular sinner was punished with leprosy. Think of Miriam, Moses’ sister, who rejected God’s choice of her little brother as leader of Israel, and so spent a week as a leper. God did this, so that all Israel understood Moses was God’s man. But transferring the case of Miriam to every person with skin lesions is unfair. The Bible doesn’t say that leprosy in general is a punishment for particular sins. We humans are the ones who naturally supply this idea. Leprosy caused true suffering, and left you cut off from family and community. So, we assume, if you are a leper, God must be particularly mad at you. You must be a particularly bad sinner.
This generalization is not true, but God uses our misperceptions anyway. God used leprosy, to teach, and to save. Leprosy became a visible symbol of the sin that plagues all of us. As leprosy separated people from earthly community, the spiritual leprosy of sin, that infects every descendent of Adam, separates people from God and His heavenly congregation. Spiritual leprosy isn’t as visible as physical leprosy. Although Paul helpfully tells us what walking the way of the sinful flesh will eventually look like: sexual immorality, impurity, … idolatry, … strife, jealousy, etc. The main point to understand is that, while we can, more or less successfully, hide the spiritual lesions on our hearts, sin will cut us off from the community of God, forever, unless we receive the cure.
Every human being ever born, except Jesus, has suffered from the leprosy of sin. So, God used leprosy to drive dying sinners to Jesus. Naaman the Syrian general in 2nd Kings chapter 5 is perhaps the best example in the Hebrew Bible. In the New Testament, Christ Jesus heals lepers many times, to show Himself to be the Savior, God in the flesh, with healing and blessing for everyone, no matter how ugly their disease.
Indeed, recognizing Jesus as the only Source of true cleansing and healing is the heart of walking in the Spirit. Ten lepers called out to Jesus for healing. It seems they were narrowly focused on their physical problems, and not so much on their spiritual need. Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests, that is, to follow the law, the rules, that Moses had set up to deal with leprosy. If a leper in ancient Israel was healed of his disease, Moses taught he should be examined by a priest. If the priest verified He was clean, then the leper was allowed back into the community, back into his family.
The ten lepers in our Gospel needed healing. So, having heard that Jesus’ was a miracle worker, they cried out, hoping against hope to receive healing from Him. Jesus instructs them to go show themselves to the priests. With nothing left to lose, they accept Jesus’ Word, and head off on their way, toward the Temple.
But while they were walking this way, they were healed. Their disease doesn’t seem to have gradually get better, they were healed, in an instant. Sores gone. Pain gone. Skin smooth and clean. Imagine their surprise, their joy! Something greater than Moses and the Law and the Temple was present! God in human form had spoken, and healed them. The Spirit revealed this wonderful truth to the one Samaritan among the 10, and so he stopped following the Law of Moses, and ran in the Spirit back to thank the Lord, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He fell on His face before Him, worshiping God, and Jesus accepts His worship. Your faith has saved you; rise and go your Way.
The Way on which Jesus sends the Samaritan leper is the Way of the Spirit in which Paul exhorts us to walk. The way of the nine other lepers, healed by God in the flesh, but still schlumping off to the Temple to get certified by human priests, this ends up to be the Way of the flesh.
Now, perhaps you got a different idea from Paul, who describes the Way of the flesh as producing all kinds of manifest evils: sexual immorality, debauchery, spite, etc. These are works of the flesh, which Paul contrasts with the fruit of the Spirit, which includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, etc. So, how can I suggest that the nine lepers, healed but still piously heading to the Temple to keep the Law, are walking in the flesh? What are they doing that’s so terrible?
Well, it is true, Paul makes a radical distinction between the saving Way of the Spirit, and the destructive way of the flesh. But Paul is describing aftereffects, the things that naturally occur when one is walking in the flesh, or, conversely, walking in the Spirit. Those who walk in the flesh naturally produce all kinds of evil effects, even though they might be truly seeking to keep the Law. They are sinners; they cannot help themselves. If like the nine lepers we seek to keep the Law without the Gospel, without knowing the promise fo the Spirit we will end up in bad places.
On the other hand, those who have been sealed by the Spirit and walk in His grace naturally bear all kinds of wonderful fruit. We need to understand, recognize and pursue this good and right Way. But, in today’s Epistle, the Apostle isn’t talking about how one gets rescued from the Way of the flesh, and placed on the Way of the Spirit. This rescue is described earlier in Galatians, for example, in chapter 2 Paul writes: “For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. 21 I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.” (Galatians 2:19 – 21)
The only One who can rescue you and me from our flesh, from the leprosy of our sin, is God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth. Moses’ rules for recognizing the physical healing of leprosy were fine, but they didn’t heal anyone. None of Moses’ rules, none of the Ten Commandments, none of the Temple worship ordinances, none of these things could save. Not because they weren’t true and right, but because the leprosy of human sin makes us incapable of fulfilling them.
Following Moses’ Law, or any other set of rules, can curb our worst excesses and keep us from killing one another, for the most part. But they cannot return us to the community of God, because they cannot cure our spiritual leprosy. They cannot cleanse us of our sin.
But the rules and laws of Moses do point us to our true cleansing. The Way of the Law, which is reduced to an ineffective Way of the flesh because of our sinfulness, still helps us. The Law helps us by revealing our sin, and by pointing us to the New Way, the New Testament, to the Messiah, the Christ, the one and only Savior, Jesus, Mary’s Son. For He, and He alone, has fulfilled the Way of the Law, and He did it, in our place.
God in His grace chose to dwell with His people, for a time, in the Jerusalem Temple. Now, God dwells with His people, forever and ever, in the flesh of Christ Jesus. The blood of beasts, sacrificed on Jewish altars, did not, in and of itself, have the power to forgive trespasses and cleanse sinful human flesh. But the blood of God, sacrificed on the Altar of the Cross, has infinite power to forgive and cleanse and rescue. The Levitical priests, appointed to carry out the functions of the Law in the Temple, did not have the authority to save sinners, once and for all. But Jesus is our Great High Priest, of the eternal order of Melchizedek, the Priest who made Himself also the Perfect Sacrifice. He is the One Savior with all Authority in heaven and on earth, who has opened the Way to God for sinners. This Way is through His own sinless flesh, given into death, for you, and for me, and for all people. In the resurrected Christ Jesus, we are healed and cleansed, in an instant. What a surprise! What joy!
It may be hard to accept that God used leprosy to teach and save sinners. Until we are reminded that our God used crucifixion, an inconceivably horrible form of execution, to win salvation for all of humanity. We in our comfortable lives may dislike the seriousness and harshness of much of the Biblical witness. That is, until great suffering, evil and death come into our lives. And they will come. In those dark times, God’s habit of bringing the greatest good out of terrible evils suddenly becomes very sweet comfort.
So today, let us baptized believers strive to walk in the Spirit. Let us seek to see His good fruit produced in
our lives. And above all, we pray for
the wisdom of the Spirit, the wisdom to run to the feet of Jesus, to receive
His cleansing forgiveness, and rejoice in thanksgiving before Him, today by faith,
and, one day soon, face to face in heaven, forever and ever, Amen.
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