Jesus and the healing of the ten lepers. This may be a short story, but it is not shallow. There are so many messages in this brief narrative, so many things I could preach about, and have preached about over the years. There is the very evident theme of gratitude. Or I could talk about goodness from unexpected places. Or perhaps I could focus on wellness versus healing. I could speak about connecting to and reaching out to those the world pushes to the edges. All of these themes would make very good sermons, but they aren’t what primarily caught my attention this time around. What primarily caught my attention was the focus in this passage on liminality—liminality of place and time. Let me explain.
Liminality comes from the Latin word “limen” which means threshold. A liminal time is a time in which we are betwixt and between. We have left one room but not yet entered the next room. It is the time when we are moving between one stage of our lives to another. It is a time when everything has changed but we haven’t yet emerged into a new way of being. It can be chaotic, disruptive, and scary. Sometimes we enter liminal times and spaces by choice: marriage, childbirth, a new job, a new home, a spiritual retreat. But, more often than not, liminal times are thrust upon us, and we are usually none too happy to be there. Death, illness, divorce, aging, loss of a job, pandemics, climate change, racism are just a few life occurrences that can thrust us unwelcomingly into a liminal space. Once there we are uncomfortable, unhappy, disoriented, and destabilized, and willing to do anything we can to get out of those liminal times and to return to what once was before we entered the liminal space. And if we can’t get out, we can become angry and bitter.
But life is a funny thing. It seems that we need liminal times if we are to grow, learn, transform, and mature into the people God is calling us to be. It seems that we need the loss of control and comfort that liminal times bring to us in order to learn, in order to develop. We need the humility that liminal times bring to recognize that we need to learn.
If you read the Bible regularly, the whole Bible both Old and New Testaments, you will come to see that much of the work of God throughout time and place has been to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough to learn something essential and genuinely new. I’ll give you two examples.
Remember the story of Esau and Jacob, those twins who fought with each other as only twins can do? The sibling rivalry was fierce between these two men, so fierce that Jacob stole Esau’s birthright and then fled to a distant land for many years to escape Esau’s wrath. Finally, Jacob decides it is time to return to Esau and his home, but he is afraid. Will Esau kill him and his family? He recognizes how he has wronged his brother and that his brother might legitimately hate him. He is in a liminal space. And in that space, he wrestles with God. And he emerges changed. When he meets his brother the two men are reconciled to one another.
Or we could look at the story of Moses. Remember he was the Israelite baby boy who should have been killed by the Egyptians like all of the other Israelite boys. But he was saved when his mother floated him down the Nile in a basket to the daughter of the Pharoah who scooped him out of the water and raised him as her own. Moses was raised as an Egyptian prince and as an Israelite, as the Egyptian princess hired Moses mother to be his nanny. Moses was, in his very upbringing, a liminal person. He was both Egyptian prince and Israelite slave. He lived all the time in a liminal place. One day this liminal existence became too much for him, and when he saw an Egyptian slave master ruthlessly beating an Israelite slave, he snapped and killed the Egyptian slave master. Moses fled into the desert and took his liminal self into a liminal place. And it is in the desert that God encountered him in the burning bush and changed his life forever. It was in that place that Moses was to embrace his destiny, his calling—to be the one who led the Israelite people out of slavery in Egypt and to the land that God had promised to them.
And then there is our Gospel reading for this morning, the healing of the ten lepers. Jesus himself is a liminal person. He is both God and human. He intentionally lived on the margins of his society, aligning himself with those at the bottom of the heap. And in our reading for today he has entered a liminal time in his ministry. He had been wandering around Galilee with his disciples preaching, teaching, and healing, and now he has turned for Jerusalem, the place he knew would bring about his arrest, crucifixion, and death. He brought his closest friends and followers with him into this liminal time and place. He was trying to help them understand what was coming next and what God was doing in the world through him and eventually them.
But this is not the only liminality in this passage. Jesus and his disciples were going through an area between Samaria and Galilee. Let me explain why this is liminal. Galilee is to the north. Samaria is in the middle and the rest of the Jewish province of Palestine, including Jerusalem, is to the south. Originally all of this land was a part of the nation of Israel, but around the 10th century BCE, the northern Israelite tribes separated from the larger nation in order to establish a rival monarchy. Two hundred years later these northern tribes were conquered by the Assyrian empire, which transported distant Mesopotamian peoples into the region, resulting in centuries of inter-marriage and a transformation of the religion being practiced there. Over time the Samaritans developed their own religious traditions, emphasizing devotion to the first five books of the Bible and affiliation with the Temple on Mt. Gerizim, not Jerusalem.
For the Israelites of the south, known as the Judeans, the Samaritans were some kind of horrible ethnic hybrid that practiced some parts of Judaism, but not in its true form. The Samaritans felt the same way about the Judeans. They were enemies. In the second century BCE much of the region of Galilee converted to the Judaism of the Judeans, leaving a middle section, known as Samaria, isolated between two-Jerusalem affiliated populations. In Jesus’ day, hostility toward Samaritans was strong enough that Galilean pilgrims often bypassed Samaria when travelling to Jerusalem, even though it added considerable time and risk to the journey.
So, Jesus, was not in Galilee. He was not in the Jewish region of Palestine south of Samaria. He was in a liminal place that was neither one nor the other. And there he encountered a group of lepers, another group of liminal people. Lepers of Jesus’ day suffered from a number of different skin conditions, not the leprosy that we know today. But whatever it was that they suffered from, they had been cast out from the communities because of their condition. They lived a life that was in-between. They weren’t dead, but neither were they fully alive, as they could no longer be with their families or friends, work to earn a living, or simply even be with other people who were not labelled lepers. Notice that when they saw Jesus, they called out to him, but they kept their distance. And Jesus met them in their liminal lives and place and healed them. But only one of the ten lepers was changed by his liminal experience. Only one of them has been not only healed but also made well. Only one of them returns to Jesus to say thank you and praise God. And the one who returns is from that liminal place in-between place, Samaria.
And that is the thing about liminal times and places. We generally don’t want to be in them, even if we need to be in them. We generally want to get out of them and go on our merry way, much like the 9 lepers did, and return to the way life used to be. But you see, we can’t. We can’t go backward. Whether we like it or not, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. And if we try, we are likely to simply end up in a place of suffering, for ourselves, and anyone else around us. We certainly won’t be in the place of new life and new beginnings that might be possible if we embraced and allowed the liminal time to do its work on us.
I recently read an article about the lifecycle of butterflies that illustrates my point well. A caterpillar has within in it all the cells it needs to become a butterfly, these cells just haven’t been activated yet. When the time is right a caterpillar will weave itself into a cocoon. Inside that cocoon the caterpillar dissolves into a primordial ooze. In the ooze are caterpillar cells and butterfly cells. The butterfly cells realize their time has come and they rise up and multiply. But the caterpillar cells don’t just melt away without a fight. The caterpillar cells try to fight the butterfly cells off. They think they are being invaded. Inside the cocoon a great drama is taking place. Fortunately, most of the time, the butterfly cells win, and a butterfly emerges from the cocoon transformed. Occasionally though, the caterpillar cells win, and no butterfly emerges—and no caterpillar emerges either. The caterpillar cells win and then die.
When we enter a liminal time, we face a similar struggle. Parts of us will be scared and seek to do anything to keep from becoming something new. I think this is a big part of what we are experiencing as a country right now. We are collectively living in a liminal time. All sorts of things have pushed us into this place, but I think there are four that are particularly important and prominent: the global pandemic, climate change, growing economic inequity, and a growing awareness of our nation’s white supremacy/systemic racism. All three things have rocked our world. All three are changing our lives beyond what we can grasp or imagine. All three are scary, and big, and overwhelming.
Some are reacting to this liminal time by fighting with all their might against even an acknowledgment that these things are real. Some want to drag us all back to a time before these things changed our lives so dramatically. But see, you can never go back, and would we really want to? The 1950’s and 1960’s were a great time for heterosexual, gender-typical, Christian, white men in this country, but not so much for anybody who lived their lives outside of any or all of these categories. But the fact is that even if we wanted to, you can’t go back.
What we can do is to allow the painful and challenging time that this liminal time is to transform and guide us. We can relinquish our illusion of control. We can sit with the pain, with the unknowing, with the turmoil and discomfort, and see what it has to teach us. We can rest in the knowledge that God is always present in the liminal times seeking to not only heal us but also to make us well.
We are living in a liminal time. We don’t have control. We are vulnerable. It is scary. But we do have choices. We can fight and seek to go back to where we were before this liminal time began, and probably end up completely miserable and possibly dead, like the caterpillar cells that win their fight. Or we can stop fighting. Accept our loss of control. Embrace our vulnerability. We can allow the liminal time to teach us what we need to learn. We can see that we are not alone in this time. God is with us. We are with each other. If we do the latter, we will emerge from this time transformed just as the butterfly emerges from its cocoon transformed. We may even find, as many of the spiritually great people throughout time have discovered, that the liminal space is a good place to be after all, for without it we would never learn how to fly. Amen.
