Pentecost 18 Year C

Luke 17:11-19 (Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7)

Many of you know that I am chaplain at Edinburgh Airport. One of the things I like to do there is to sit in a cafe just before the security gates. It’s a good place to bump into staff because it’s a through route, it’s a place for informal meetings and it’s a place to get a good hot drink. It’s also a fantastic place to people watch, which is one of my favourite past times. That little bit of corridor is a threshold place. The security gates create a transition between being “landside” and “airside”, a transition between being an ordinary person to being a “passenger”, for staff a transition into parts of the workspace that are highly protected by security protocols. That bit of corridor is a threshold into that, a place where people have a moment to prepare themselves to step over into being something else. I enjoy watching how people deal with that, some are anxious, some are ultra-prepared, some waver and put it off, some take it all in their stride, some literally run towards it.

And then there are those people who come as part of a group, some of whom aren’t going to go through security and become a passenger. Some of whom are there to say goodbye to people who are going off to experience something they are not. There’s a moment where the group breaks up and some of them walk closer to security and then eventually go through the gates ready to snake around to the scanners. Sometimes I can see a look of relief on the faces of the people left behind as they turn and head back to the carpark. Most though say a fond farewell, some with tears, most with lots of hugs. A few weeks ago, I watched two parents say goodbye to their daughter who had a massive backpack. Hugs all round and then she walked towards the security gates and went through. The parents watched her until the very last minute and, as they turned around, the mum caught my eye and said, with a smile and a shake of the head that was part pride, part sadness, “she didn’t look back”.

I wonder if, as a culture we are equally a bit mixed up about looking back. We are a group of nations that take parts of our history very seriously but struggle to face into other parts. Our culture has been heavily influenced by philosophers who prioritised growth and development, that things could only get better and better. We value therapeutic spaces which give us the opportunity to look back at our individual lives and understand them more, but we also look negatively on people who are, as it were, stuck in the past. We are all for the present and the future, who we are now and what we might become.

In our gospel reading today we meet a man who did turn around and look back. In fact, more than that, he travelled back and said thank you. Luke has set this story up so that it well and truly also takes place in a transitional space. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and going through a place that’s between two other places – Samaria and Galilee. It’s a dangerous place, it’s border land. And in this space Jesus meets ten, two short of the perfect twelve, people who have some sort of skin disease that means they have been cast out of ordinary society and live on its margins because they are thought to be contagious. The borderlands are where they are trying to make a home. And they create another borderland between themselves and Jesus by keeping their distance from Him. They meet, but with a sense of remoteness.

In this thin, transitional, borderland space they instantaneously recognise Jesus for who He is and call Him Jesus, master. In Luke’s gospel it’s a bit of a theme that it is the outcasts, often when they are most desperate that call Jesus by name – the blind beggar, the man considered to have lots of demons, the thief on the cross. They ask Him to heal them, and Jesus sends them back into the ordinary world, right into the heart of society, to see the priests. And, as they went, they were made clean, then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back.

Luke has also set up this story so that it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the person who turns back is a Samaritan, a foreigner, an outsider. He has been building up to this moment. In chapter nine Luke tells a story of Jesus rebuking His disciples for wanting to get revenge on a Samaritan village that didn’t want them around. In chapter ten of his gospel, he has Jesus tell the parable of the good Samaritan. Within the story it doesn’t seem, perhaps to surprise Jesus, He is focussed on the nine who haven’t turned back to say thank you.

There is, I would suggest, much to learn from the experiences of being in transitional spaces, places where we are not intending to stop, of being in places where we don’t quite fit, places which feel foreign and without the safety and security of home. And these aren’t just geographical, physical spaces but also spaces in life where we move socially or psychologically, between jobs, or relationships, between a status or a station in life.
There’s much to learn alongside and from people who are in those spaces, even when we are not.

These are times and spaces when we are vulnerable, when there is great potential for us to misunderstand our context and those around us, when we simply don’t know and don’t understand. These are times when we are often experience a stripping back, a shedding of possessions, of relationships, of habits and knowledge, times when we begin to understand what we really need around us and what’s really important to us. These are times when we feel the pain of displacement, of being moved on from our place in the world. Perhaps the pain of misplacement, of being in a place we don’t really want to be. Perhaps the pain of being unplaced, of being rootless and drifting. And one of the hardest experiences in life is that of longing to go back to something or someone you once called home, but knowing deep down that home no longer exists, it has been destroyed beyond repair or life has moved on. Perhaps nostalgia is one of the greatest unacknowledged sorrows, temptations, and forces of modern life.

These are not easy places and times in life. I think there is a challenge and an encouragement throughout the Biblical text for us to lean into the experience of being foreigners, of being in transitional spaces, to engage with and embrace the experience. We heard a strain of it this morning in Jeremiah; seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. There is a challenge and an encouragement to find peace with being vulnerable, find freedom with being unburdened, find safety in ever journeying. There is also, absolutely, a challenge and an encouragement for us to care deeply for others who are experiencing this. And in the current atmosphere surrounding people who are immigrants, non-nationals, I suggest the church needs to find ways to say this with more depth and frequency.

These transitional spaces are also, most profoundly moments and places where God is close by. Where Jesus is at hand. Where the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred is thin. Where what we learn from the experience can be absolutely shot through and shinning with the love of God that will not let us go, with healing that reconciles us to ourselves and to those around us. Where we feel safe and secure enough in who we are and who God is to step away from the people we are travelling with, to step away from being on our way to being accepted by others and at the heart of the action. Where we sense that a significant good change for us is in the air. Where it becomes the most natural thing in the world to look back, to turn back, and to say, even if it’s a whisper, thank you for what has made us well.