Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

One of them...turned back, praising God with a loud voice.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

Nationalism is one of the more pernicious kinds of idolatry. If idolatry is worshiping something other than God, and if our idols are mostly pro-jections of ourselves, or some aspect of ourselves, the notion that my own ethnic group is superior or specially favored by God is idolatrous. God and my blood-relatives become indistinguishable. It causes war, on which the apostolic dictum that the wages of sin is death is an observable fact. Just about every ethnic group practices this kind of idolatry, including God's Chosen People, the Israelites. What makes them different is that they actually reject the idea.

The prophetic tradition of the Hebrew scriptures is one long objection to it and every kind of idolatry. To begin with, it emphasizes that Israel is not favored, but chosen. Chosen by God for a purpose. Then the prophets spend most of their time criticizing their nation for infidelity - chiefly expressed through social injustice. And finally the prophetic tradition culminates in the majestic vision of universal salvation, symbolized by the endless reign of perfect justice and peace for all peoples. If Israel is chosen, it is chosen for this end. Paul did not invent the idea of extending the Covenant to all nations, it was a prominent theme of late post-Exilic Judaism, expressed in the symbol of God's Anointed, a Descendant of King David, to reign in David's capital forever and ever.

Today's readings emphasize the irrelevance of nationality. In the tale of Ruth, we learn that King David wasn't even a pure-blooded Jew! His great-grandmother was a Moabite heathen. His bloodline was not important. In this late Jewish short story, only a little bit older than the New Testament itself, a universal religious consciousness is on display: "don't worry so much about bloodlines and nationality, it tells us, "That is meaningless. Concern yourself instead with faith, fidelity, faithfulness, like Ruth, the Moabitess":

Intreat me not to leave thee,

or to return from following after thee:

for whither thou goest, I will go;

and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:

thy people shall be my people,

and thy God my God.

Where thou diest, will I die,

and there will I be buried:

the LORD do so to me, and more also,

if ought but death part thee and me.

I think there is no more exquisite passage in all of holy writ. An expression of faith, uttered by a pagan: a pagan who had turned to God. Her fidelity is crucial to the history of salvation, because:

"Boaz took Ruth, and she was his wife: and when he went in unto her, the LORD gave her conception, and she bare a son.

And the women said unto Naomi, Blessed be the LORD, which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be famous in Israel.

And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age: for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him.

And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it.

And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, "There is a son born to Naomi; and they called his name Obed: he is the father of Jesse, the father of David."

The whole story is about women and women's contribution to the holy history. The Book of Ruth could be read as an early feminist tract, right up there with Lysistrata. Ruth is better to Naomi than seven sons! And on top of that, Ruth is not even a Jew!

But she is a mother of David. And then we hear how a Son of David heals Ten Lepers, somewhere "in the region between Galilee and Samaria", and the only one who returns to give thanks was also not a Jew, but a Samaritan. Now being a Samaritan was somewhat worse than just not being a Jew. Because Samaritans were, in fact, not foreigners, but close relatives of the Jews, descendants of tribes other than Judah, who had never accepted King David's centralization of worship in Jerusalem. Jews hated them and they hated Jews, as only kinsmen can hate one another. Jesus was a Jew, and even though His own Jewish credentials were a little inferior, since He was from Galilee ~ also known as Galilee of the Gentiles, because there were so many goyim up there living cheek -by-jowl with the Jewish residents ~ He was a Jew on His way to Jerusalem to fulfill His religious obligations. All of this underscores the importance of the Samaritan leper, the main character in this story. The other nine lepers ran off to get their cleansing certified by a priest, as Jesus commanded. Only the detestable Samaritan came back to fall at Jesus feet and thank Him.

[I have a feeling that there may be a whole mystical subtext to this story. I hope so. "Jesus, Master, Have mercy on us," cry the Ten Lepers. They address Jesus in the form of the ancient Christian mantra known as the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me." Their prayer is answered. Could it be that they represent all who seek God? Are we not all lepers, in a sense, cleansed by the remembrance of God? This is the matter of another sermon.]

We may read this story as an endorsement of late-Jewish universalism, as typified by Ruth. Jesus's path, it seems, is practically littered with Samaritans. There is the Samaritan woman at the well in Shechem, there are the Samaritans who take in the disciples and those who don't, Samaritans are mentioned as hanging out in the crowds that listened to Jesus, and there is the Good Samaritan of the parable. For all we know, the other nine lepers were also Samaritans. (We do not have to infer that they were Jews, and read this story as one more expression of growing anti-Judaism in the early Church.) I think the Samaritan leper is there to make the point that neither blood nor correct doctrine is of much interest to God. God accepts all who turn to Him, like this leper. That turning is faith, the generous forgetting of self exemplified by Ruth. Your faith has saved you. It is that turning back to give thanks that saves. Anyone who is genuinely grateful is saved.

Are we saved because we give thanks? Or do we give thanks because we are saved? Perhaps, as the Buddha might say, this is an unprofitable question. Maybe it's a false distinction; maybe giving thanks and being saved are one and the same. In any case, it has nothing to do with ethnic identity. In fact the salvation (healing) of thanksgiving is precisely the opposite of self-identification, because it is ecstatic self-forgetfulness. The Samaritan leper, like Ruth, forgot his identity. Also like Ruth ~ and like the enraptured hesychast or dervish, lost in the praises of the Beloved ~ his heart was full to overflowing with the goodness of God, and he turned back, praising God with a loud voice.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!