October 12, 2025 "The Gift of the Foreigner"

18th Sunday after Pentecost

2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c

Psalm 111

2 Timothy 2:8-15

Luke 17:11-19

Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ,

 grace and peace to you

 from the one who stitches us together in love. Amen

“Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?”

Jesus proclaims over the head of the healed Samaritan

still prostrated at his feet.

 Who is he speaking to?

His disciples?

The crowds?

Anyone who has ever designated someone else a foreigner,

 with the implication that foreign is not as good as familiar?

Us?

Possibly all of the above, 

It’s a question that echoes Jesus’ conclusion

to his parable that we know as “The Good Samaritan”

 when asked by the legal expert to define “neighbor”

 instead Jesus tells a story

that shows what it means to act as a neighbor

 where a priest and a Levite act according to the law

 and pass by a man in need

 while a Samaritan stops and helps him

and when Jesus concludes his teaching

by asking the legal expert

which of the three men in the story

 was a neighbor to the one who fell into the hands of robbers?

 the legal expert can’t bear to say it was the Samaritan,

 but answers instead, ‘the one who showed mercy”

 and Jesus sends him off to do the same.

And here we have another story with Jews and a Samaritan

 where in the end it is the Samaritan

who is commended for their faith,

even as the Jews were doing what they were supposed to,

what Jesus instructed even.

What is it with Jesus and Samaritans?

 Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem,

he is headed to the cross,

and we are told that he is going through the region

 between Samaria and Galilee,

he’s intentionally traveling along the border

 between two peoples who historically don’t get along-

but as we find when we actually go to border lands

the people living there

tend to interact more than those living elsewhere would expect,

living next to one another

 they find that they have more in common than not,

and this seems to be the case

with the group of men with a skin disease

that approach Jesus.

 because of their condition

they are not welcome in their communities,

they abide by this as they keep their distance

 as they call out to Jesus for mercy,

 and Jesus has mercy on them,

 he tells them to go and show themselves to the priests

- this was how one who had been excluded from the community

 could return to communal life-

 to go show the priests that they’d healed

 and the priests would certify that they were no longer unclean-

 and the men follow Jesus’ instructions,

 believing in Jesus’ power they go and as they go

 they are healed, made clean.

 “Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice…and he was a Samaritan.”

 and Jesus points this out

 then turns to the man at his feet and tells him

“Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

 another translation of the word “well” is “saved.”

 The nine that continued on their way to the priests were healed,

 the one that turned back was saved.

 What was the difference

(besides nationality?)

 It was giving thanks.

And Jesus makes sure to highlight to the disciples,

 the crowds, to all of us,

 that it was a foreigner who returned to give glory to God.

The other nine men clearly believed in Jesus’ power to heal them

and they obey his command,

 but it’s the one Samaritan

who disobeys Jesus’ command

 to return to give praise to God

and he in his thankful disobedience is the one Jesus commends.

 Jesus’ emphasis on foreigners

 follows a long tradition

of God in working through the foreigner, the outsider

 to reveal the glory of God,

 we heard the story of Naaman as out first reading,

but there are many others

Rahab, Ruth, Cyrus of Persia just to name a few,

let alone the many commands in scripture

to welcome and care for the stranger

 and worship practices that remind the Israelites

that they too were strangers in a strange land

 lest they forget their own time as foreigners.

So Jesus’ emphasis on foreigners

 is really in character for Jesus, the Son of God,

who in this instance perhaps is reminding the disciples, the crowds, us,

of the gift of those among us who are different from the majority.

As one commentator remarked “The foreigner can approach the grace of God in a particularly insightful way, a path of insight that may now be lost to many of us…The foreigner is a vital presence among us. The foreigner is a reminder of the pain of displacement many of us have felt. The foreigner is a reminder that God’s promises know no boundaries or borders, that God’s grace will not abide by the arbitrary lines we draw between ourselves and others, that God consistently finds the most unlikely proclaimers of the good news as the best choice of all to announce God’s will.” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-28-3/commentary-on-luke-1711-19-6 

Those with an outside perspective are a gift

because we get used to the way we do things,

we even think our ways are the best ways

 (See Naaman asking why he had to go into the Jordan river when the rivers of his homeland were clearly superior)

 We need people who see with a fresh perspective

to show us what gifts we may be taking for granted,

where our care may lack.

 The priest and the Levite passing by on the other side

 may have been doing what was socially acceptable at the time

but that way of doing things had lost sight of mercy,

 they needed a foreigner to come along and say

‘hey wait a minute, what about mercy?’

 It’s been my experience

that the communities that struggle with welcome the most

 are communities where the majority

 have never had the experience of being a stranger in a strange land,

of being on the receiving end of welcome.

We need a variety of perspectives,

the foreigners in our midst,

to fully be who God created us to be,

 God who created the astounding variety of creation

 that all fits beautifully together,

 much like the many different pieces of fabric in these quilts

 that are stitched together to become a beautiful whole,

and in fact it is the variety of pieces

that gives beauty to a quilt

 that makes it a quilt.

God has created us wildly and beautifully different

Not that any one thing is best

But that together we create an even more magnificent whole

And God gifted us with Christ

Who stitches us together in love

friends and strangers,

one in the body of Christ,

and so we give thanks

 God’s way lived out in the world. Amen