Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai. To those here in the chapel and those joining us online: we are so glad you’re here!
This morning, we will sing songs of worship, pray together, hear from scripture and one another, as we move toward the pinnacle of our service: the table of our Lord, where we will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus. The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so I invite you to participate as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
If you missed a Sunday and want to catch up on the worship series, you can listen to our church’s podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
September 11 is Azle’s Sting Fling, and we’ve got a booth! If you’d like to volunteer to help pass out water bottles and fans, please email Andrea at secretary@azlechristianchurch.org.
September 18 is our Cabinet Retreat—on Zoom and in-person.
On September 26, the last Sunday of our worship series, we will have Dedication Sunday for our building.
September 29 is our first Gospels and Groceries even. We’ll host an outdoors hymn sing and collect food for our Little Free pantry.
Thank you to all who helped with the move-in to the main building this week! We’re excited to be back in there for worship as soon as possible. Be watching your eblast and FB for information regarding our official move and safety protocols.
We continue our new series this morning: Homecoming: Stories of Return. Today, we explore what it means to return not to a place, but to a person.
Let’s pray to turn our hearts toward God for this hour.
Spirit of truth, open to us the scriptures, speaking your holy word through song, through the bread and cup, and through offering ourselves, and meet us here today in the living Christ. Amen.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
We hold in prayer this morning all who are in the path of Hurricane Ida. And we continue to mourn with those who have been lost to violence in Afghanistan, including service members, U.S. personnel, and the Afghan people.
Join me in prayer.
(From Calling on God prayer book)
Creator of the universe, holy nurturing River of life,
We come to think again about what it means
To claim our place as one small body of your people.
We come with deep gratitude
For all the blessings that you have brought to those we love
And those we do not even know.
O loving Lord of life,
So often we would stand with the apostles,
And call to you, “Increase our faith!”
As though by simply asking
The answer will come down like lightning,
In a flash of faith that lays bare the truth
And brings the world to harmony,
Shalom, some kind of heaven here and now.
We hunger for the satisfaction
Of being part of your good news.
We want the lame to walk, the sick to heal, the blind to see.
We want the prisoners freed and to take their rightful place in community.
We want to be a part of your loving and creating body,
Part of your good news for the world.
We hunger for your call on us
As individuals and as a family of faith.
And though we want the easy answer,
We understand that truth comes slowly,
Rising like the sun,
Chasing imperceptibly the dark of doubt away.
Because we care, we carry with us
Burdens of the needs of others
And the weigh of our own needs.
O holy Sunrise of new beginnings,
Hear us as we lift our prayers
For those who need your healing, loving presence in their lives.
Be present with us as we listen deeply for your guidance.
Enfold us in your healing embrace as we listen for your call.
Hear now our prayers for those in need
As we share them in this sacred space
And lift them in the silence of our hearts.
And we entrust ourselves to our brother and redeemer Jesus, who taught us to pray…
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
Sermon
Luke 17:11-19
11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13 they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” 14 When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16 He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18 Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
For the past few weeks, we’ve been thinking about returning. As we have contemplated our own return to our building, we have read about the Prodigal Son returning home to his family, Jesus returning to Nazareth and his home place of worship, Lydia bringing all of her river gang back to her house for dinner, and last week, we read about the Israelites returning to Jerusalem after exile. In each of these stories, we’ve been thinking about coming home. Whether home is a welcoming place or a hostile place, a new place or an old, old place—the thing each of these stories have in common is the sense that the place of return is home.
But in today’s story, the place of return is more complicated.
For starters, the author of Luke seems to be bad at geography. For example, he gives us the setting of the story: the region between Galilee and Samaria. But that region does not exist. Galilee and Samaria border each other. That would be like saying we were traveling in the region between Texas and Oklahoma.
And then Luke tells us that Jesus in on his way to Jerusalem and is taking this imaginary route between Galilee and Samaria. But that would be like saying we were traveling to Abilene by way of Houston. It doesn’t make sense.
So is Luke simply bad with maps? Maybe. But perhaps, he’s using geography not so much for the sake of accuracy, but rather for theological reasons.
One of my seminary professors said to always read the Bible with a map of the ancient lands in your hand because the geography itself will tell you stories. In the same way that before HGTV, Waco used to only be known for a cult stand-off in the 90s, places like Samaria and Jerusalem should set off alarm bells in our head and trigger other stories.
So let’s start with Galilee. Jesus is a man from Galilee, Nazareth to be exact. If you remember, some people when they heard about this man from Nazareth performing miracles asked, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” It’s not an impressive place. But it is a Jewish place. Remember a few weeks back when we read of Jesus returning home to Nazareth—everything Jesus does is in the bosom of Judaism. He was born Jewish and he died Jewish.
And Samaria is a very strange place. We don’t spend a lot of time in Samaria in scripture, but we do encounter a few noteworthy Samaritans.
The gospel writers looked skeptically upon Samaritans. They never say it out right, but we can assume they were wondering, “Can anything good come from Samaria?”
Samaritans and Judeans have a lot of hostility over worship—it stems from experiences in exile that we won’t dive into, but trust me when I say, they worshiped God in a very different way. If you remember the Samaritan woman at the well, her story told in the gospel of John, you’ll remember that she has lots of theological questions for Jesus. She asks him about one of these points of contention between the Samaritans and Judeans—the site of temple worship. Israelites say it’s Jerusalem, but Samaritans say it’s Mt. Gerizim. Which one is it, she asks?
Meanwhile, all the disciples are scandalized by Jesus talking to this woman—the text literally says, “They were surprised to find Jesus talking to a woman,” which I would love to have a shirt that says that. The disciples are scandalized, but Jesus is unphased.
He is engaging with her. He asks for a drink of water—a big cultural boundary crossing. He inquires about her painful past—her life dependent on the carousel of men she must marry in order to avoid destitution because she is a woman. And he listens to her theological inquiries. After her encounter with Jesus, she becomes the missionary to her people. This Samaritan surprises us all.
And then we have the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. A Jewish man is on his way to Jericho and is beaten badly and left in a ditch to die. Three people pass by, but only one helps the man. And the person who helps the man is not the professional lawyer—an emblem of the legal system. And it’s not the priest—an emblem of the religious system. It’s the Samaritan. The one we’d least suspect. The one that perhaps the Jewish man in the ditch would have avoided had they met in different circumstances. The Samaritan risks his own safety and dignity and gives of his own resources to help this stranger.
And we learn from these two stories that of all the people we might expect to be the one who understands what Jesus is about—it’s the one we’d never expect. It’s the one we’d actually expect to ruin everything that ends up surprising us all with salvation.
And it’s with these stories fresh on our minds that we come to our story story today. Jesus is metaphorically walking in that in-between space—the imaginary place between the borders of Galilee and Samaria. The sureness of home and the suspicion of Samaria.
And he’s on his way to Jerusalem, the text tells us. Well, we’ve already covered that Jerusalem by way of this border is not plausible, but if we’re thinking about geography theologically, then we know Jerusalem is supposed to set off alarm bells, too. I know all of you Bible scholars know that if Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, he is on his way to the cross. Everything that happens “on his way to Jerusalem” is colored by what will happen in Jerusalem.
So it is with all of this geographical and historical context that we read that Jesus comes upon a village. And as he gets to the edge of it, he encounters a group of ten people with leprosy. They call out to Jesus for mercy, careful to keep the proscribed distanced as detailed by religious law that helped mitigate spread of disease. Sound familiar? And Jesus, full of mercy, sends them on their way to the priest to be okay’ed for return to normal life. But before they even make it to the priest, they are healed.
And one turns back. And we find out he’s a Samaritan.
This man thanks Jesus profusely for healing, and Jesus expresses surprise that it’s the Samaritan who returns. Jesus asks seemingly dumb questions such as where are the other nine? Well, Jesus, they’re on the way to the priest like you told them to do.
Is it only the Samaritan who has returned? Well, Jesus, it looks that way. Because as we noted before, the others are doing what you told them to do.
But something tells me that Jesus wasn’t interested in the answers to the questions so much as asking the question out loud. There were 10. And only one came back. And it’s the Samaritan. Is that clear to everyone here, he seems to be asking. It’s like when a parent would ask you questions they knew the answer to as a way to make you tremble in your boots. Is it 2 AM? Are you just getting home? Did you call? They knew those answers, and they said so much with those questions.
On the surface, this story of the one leper returning seems to be a simple lesson of gratitude. Be grateful for the work of God in your life. Always say thank you.
But if we remember the context and history from a few minutes ago, we realize that this story is about much more than gratitude. It’s about radical inclusion. It’s about the reign of God breaking down all of our carefully constructed boundaries and walls and ways of understanding the world. It’s about mountains and valleys becoming prairie lands. It’s about lions and lambs becoming friends. It’s about the last being made first, and the first being made last. It’s about a topsy turvy kingdom, a world turned upside down to be made right side up.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s scoot back for a second.
We know from other Samaritan stories, from the fact that Jesus himself calls this man a foreigner, that Samaritans are other-ed in scripture. They are often demonized. They’re seen as a threat to the religious establishment, to the respectability of what we’re trying to do here. As heretics, as at the very least weirdos. I mean, Mt. Gerizim? Come on.
But in this story where Jesus asks a series of questions, a question is posed back to us: Who gets what Jesus is about? Do you see it, Jesus is asking us. Do you see who is the one who turns back?
The answer seems to be: the other. The one we’d least suspect. The one that the very religious people have made other. We don’t run into a whole lot of Samaritans here in Azle, but I think we could conjure up some pretty good equivalents if we thought about it.
And it’s helpful to remember in this encounter where Jesus is headed. To Jerusalem. To the cross. Jesus ends up being the ultimate Other, being made so by the very religious people and state authorities. It’s almost as if he’s saying along the way, “This is my kin. These are my people. I am one of them.”
And it’s not that the healing is just for the Samaritan—all ten of the people with leprosy were healed. They were welcomed back into their families and their neighborhoods after seeing the priest, thanks be to God.
But this one who turned back, who returned to Jesus, his faith has made him whole. He returns, perhaps, because he has found in Jesus in this place of in-between as Luke proposes with his geographical mishaps, a home. A belonging. A wholeness and integration that he could not have dreamed. There’s more at stake than physical healing, then.
The song Nicole sang just a few minutes ago, “River,” is a secular song, but for those of us who are Christians, we hear it with memories of baptism. It’s a call to return to a place of not just healing, of not just washing our sins away, but also to a place of belonging, a place of wholeness and integration that we dare not even hope for.
For us, baptism is an initiation into a wide, wide community that transcends time and space, that connects us with the communion of saints, that stretches across the ethers of existence to wrap us all into a big bear hug.
It’s the means of grace, the baptismal moment when the grace of God washes over us, encompassing every part of us, drenching us in new life. All the lines we drew are gone. All the walls we’ve built cannot withstand the torrential flood of God’s grace in the end.
Baptism is a place of in-between for us. It’s happening here and now. It’s water that eventually dries off. But it’s also something we’re always returning to. Baptism is something we are caught up in over and over again because like this Samaritan, we are somehow caught in the gravitational pull of Jesus. Even when it wrecks our religious sensibilities, even when it delays our return to the normal life we’ve been longing for, we are somehow pulled into his vortex of grace.
I’m reminded of that spiritual “As I Went Down to the River to Pray.” It asks the question over and over again, “Who shall wear the starry crown? Good Lord, show me the way.” We might be surprised by God’s answers to who understands that the kingdom of God is changing everything.
May our return to Jesus be a reminder of our baptism, of our place in God’s family, that we are so very special and also so is everyone else, yes, that person and those people. And when we are like those who might be scandalized by who Jesus is talking to, may God’s grace turn our hearts once again to the scandal of Jesus, the way of the cross, the habit of walking through in-between spaces. May the grace of God wash over us again and again. Good Lord, show us the way.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church. Volunteering at things like Food Hub or Sting Fling or golf mailings. Filling our Little Free Pantry. And the sharing of your financial resources. There are many ways to do this: Venmo, giving online, giving box, offering plate.
I’m going to pass these plates during our final song, starting at the front row and they just to need make their way to the back where a deacon will collect them.
Invitation
If you’d like to become a member of this faith community, or if you’d like to become a disciple of Jesus, please talk to me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the final song, and the Doxology.
Receive this benediction from 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17:
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father,
who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope,
comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.