The LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a leprous disease on the skin of his body, he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. The priest shall examine the disease on the skin of his body, and if the hair in the diseased area has turned white and the disease appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous disease; after the priest has examined him he shall pronounce him ceremonially unclean. But if the spot is white in the skin of his body, and appears no deeper than the skin, and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall confine the diseased person for seven days. The priest shall examine him on the seventh day…and if the disease has abated…the priest shall pronounce him clean….

In short, the temple priests of Jesus' day acted as medicine men, so to speak. And this is no surprise, since in many cultures priests have also been the dispensers of curatives. In the religious life of Israel, ritual purity was especially important, and so those who were "unclean" had to be separated from the community of the faithful.

In Luke chapter seventeen, we meet ten such people, a roving leper colony. They are careful to observe the Law, keeping a distance from Jesus, and calling to him: "Jesus, Master have mercy on us!" Jesus' response is likewise in keeping with the Law, for he instructs them to "Go and show yourselves to the priests," just as the passage from Leviticus commands.

This is a pretty ordinary scene in that time and place, actually: an unclean person appeals to a teacher, a rabbi, and the rabbi sends the unclean person to the proper authorities, in this case the temple priests. What makes this scene extraordinary to me, though, is that this isn't Jesus' usual M.O. Jesus isn't usually concerned about keeping within the confines of the Law when it comes to ritual purity: time and again in Luke and in the other gospels, we see him break down those religious boundaries by actually touching the unclean. The idea of touching someone unclean in order to heal that person is really a radical idea in Jesus' culture. We are used to doctors prodding and poking us, but not in Jesus' day. Even the priests-the "medicine men"-are not to touch the lepers; they are only to look at them. For to touch an unclean person is to make yourself unclean, which no sane religious Jew would ever intentionally do.

Except Jesus, who routinely does just that. Only here, Jesus seems to be playing along with the lepers. He doesn't push the religious limits; he simply instructs them to do what lepers have been doing for thousands of years in that culture: show themselves to the priests.

Of course, a really extraordinary thing happens next. On their way to the priests, the ten lepers are "made clean." And then one of them, seeing that he was healed, turns back to thank Jesus and praise God.

Only then are we told the most extraordinary thing of all: this healed leper is a Samaritan. Samaritans were regarded by Jews as half-breeds. They were an ethnic group that arose in the period of the Babylonian captivity, when a few Jewish peasants were left behind while the Jewish nobles were carted off to Babylon. These peasants intermarried with the surrounding Canaanite populations, a thing expressly forbidden in the Law, making them automatically unclean. To add to that, the Samaritans adopted Canaanite religious practices. When the Jewish bluebloods finally were allowed to return from Babylon, the Samaritans built a rival temple to the one that the bluebloods built in Jerusalem, which is where Jesus is headed. So Samaritans were half-breeds, unclean, and heretics. They were abominations. In fact, the worst insult the Jews could hurl at Jesus in John's gospel is to call him a demon-possessed Samaritan.

So here's this anomaly. Somehow, a Samaritan leper had fallen in with some Jewish lepers. But this makes sense, since we are told that "Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee," the latter place being Jesus' Jewish-dominated northern home province, which bordered on Samaria. I would suppose that if you were a Jewish leper, a Samaritan leper would be tolerable, since you were both outcasts. Of course, a Jewish leper had only one problem, a problem that could be solved by being healed, while a Samaritan leper even after being healed would still be unclean.

This is why Luke changes words in the middle of his story. For he writes, "And as they went, [all ten] were made clean" (of the leprosy, that is). "Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed [of the leprosy], turned back, praising God with a loud voice." When speaking of the Samaritan on his own, Luke couldn't say that the Samaritan was "made clean" like the other nine, because as a Samaritan he was unclean by birth. The only thing that would cleanse him would be an "ethnic cleansing." That is: to the Jews, the only Good Samaritan was a Dead Samaritan (which is why Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan was so shocking to them, I might add).

In this story, then, we meet a Samaritan whose physical healing cannot negate the fact that in the eyes of the Jewish authorities, he is still an "unclean" person. And yet, the way he responds to his physical healing leads to something deeper and more meaningful than whether he is "in" or "out" in the eyes of those authorities. For at the end of this lesson, Jesus says, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well." The word Jesus uses for "made well" is rendered elsewhere as "saved." So that last sentence could be translated, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has saved you." And I think it's in this latter sense that Jesus really means it.

Of course, this all begs the question: from what has the Samaritan's faith saved him? I don't think Jesus is talking about life after death here, since Jesus hasn't died and been raised from the dead yet. Instead, he's talking about living life fully right here, right now. What Jesus praises in the Samaritan is the fact that he has returned to "give praise to God." And it is this faith, this attitude of thanksgiving to God for the gift of wholeness and new life, that Jesus points to when he asks, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?"

Jesus knows full well where those other nine are. He himself told them where to go: to show themselves to the priests. Jesus isn't giving us a lesson in etiquette, that it's rude of them not to thank him and praise God before going to the temple. He's pointing to something much more important: that living a life of thanksgiving to God leads to a wholeness, a holiness, which is much more valuable than ritual purity.

But that's not the set of assumptions out of which the Jewish lepers operate. They believe that holiness and ritual purity are the same thing, that being on the right side of the in group is what puts them in right relationship to God and to each other. The Jewish lepers have bought into the logic of what I like to call "us-them religion." In this version of "us-them religion," the priestly gatekeepers determine who is "us" and who is "them." When the lepers were unclean, they followed the rules; and once they were made clean, they expected to be allowed back in the club. This system works quite well when your main concern is to know for certain that God is on your side and not on anyone else's. It's reassuring to know that the world can be divided into "clean" and "unclean," "pure" and "unpure."

Of course, that's not what the holiness code in Leviticus was intended to do. All it was really intended to do was to safeguard a vulnerable nomadic population from contagious disease. The priests were to quarantine people so that an epidemic wouldn't break out and kill everybody. But that's not what the holiness code developed into, and that's not where we are today with it. The Church still struggles with issues of who's "in" and who's "out," who's "pure" and who's "unclean," only we use different words.

And that's what makes these eight verses from Luke so terribly important. Two thousand years have passed, yet we've hardly even begun to understand what Jesus was getting at by the way he interacted with people like this Samaritan leper.

What we can take away from these eight verses is that our holiness is not dependent upon how "pure" we are, and our righteousness is not dependent upon how "right" we are. This doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what we believe or think, but it does mean that our opinions only matter insofar as they affect the way we live in relationship to God and with one another in community.

So when Jesus asks, "Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?", his own use of that word is ironic. He's being rather arch here, and it becomes clear to us that in his eyes, this one "foreigner" is more a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven than nine native-born Sons of Israel.

Of course, if all Jesus is doing is turning the tables so that those who were "out" are now "in" and vice-versa, we still don't have anything new. That's not gospel. Rather, the good news in this is that when all of us are living a life of thanksgiving to God, in all times and in all places and under all circumstances, then we have no need for these categories. It's not that they disappear altogether, but that they are put into new perspective by the One whose light puts all things in their proper perspective in the first place.

Let me conclude by giving you two brief examples of this principle at work here and now, one global and one local.

On the global level, we are eight days away from the release of the Lambeth Commission Report, which will make recommendations about how we can better live in communion with each other in the face of serious disagreements and divisions. This report will be the culmination of a year of reflection on the worldwide impact that the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire last year has had on the Anglican Communion. When the report is released, we can either start sorting people into "us" and "them," or we can treat everyone as beloved, if often errant, children of God, and try to figure out how we can all live together in the midst of conflict so that God is the one who leads us, rather than us setting agendas we expect God to follow. In other words, we will have an opportunity to listen to God more deeply, but only if we stop the din that comes from dividing the Church between "us" and "them" and focus instead on what it means to give thanks to God in all times and in all places and under all circumstances.

On the local level, it has been ten days since the Vestry issued its call to Charlie to be our new rector. While this is a source of great joy for many, there may be some in our community who would have preferred to see a new leader come in from the outside. And so we have a choice. We can sort ourselves into the "in" crowd who support Charlie and the "out" crowd who, openly or not, don't. Or we can make the same choice the Samaritan leper made, to return thanks to God for what God is doing in our midst. So instead of buying into the old "us-them religion" that drives so many of our religious communities today, let us prostrate ourselves at Jesus' feet and give thanks to God that God has held us together throughout this process, and that whoever is at the helm, we can be sure that if we give thanks to God in all times and in all places, we can forget about the old "us-them religion" and begin to practice the new "us-God" one instead.