My Fellow Aliens!

Tonight we hear the familiar story of Jesus encountering ten lepers while on his way to Jerusalem. They ask for mercy, and Jesus tells them to go show themselves to the priests.

He did this because by Jewish law only priests could certify whether a leper was no longer afflicted by the "uncleanliness" of leprosy. In the story, one of the lepers notices that he has been made clean and turns back to Jesus where he falls at the feet of Jesus and thanks him.

My first impulse upon re-reading this story was to talk with you tonight about gratefulness, a vastly overlooked virtue that I think deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Gratefulness, in the deepest sense, is a pathway to deep spirituality.

But I kept noticing that there's something else in this story that the gospel writer Luke seems to be trying to point out to us. Luke makes a point of saying this man who turned back to thank Jesus was a Samaritan. And Luke has Jesus referring to him as a foreigner. Now, if lepers were the consummate "outsiders" of the time, so were Samaritans as far as other Judeans were concerned. So, this man was a double outsider - a Samaritan leper.

I want to take a minute here to talk about a word Luke uses in this passage because his choice of words here is very significant. The most common word that Luke uses when he means "foreigner" is the Greek word ethnos. He uses this word seven times in his gospel and four more times in the Acts of the Apostles which he also wrote. And this word is commonly used in the Greek version of the Old Testament. Also in Acts, Luke uses the word paroikos one time and this word means roughly the same thing that ethnos means - foreigner or stranger.

But in tonight's gospel passage Luke seems to have gotten out his thesaurus because he has Jesus use the word allogenes. This is an interesting choice because it is the only place in the entire Bible where this word shows up. It is translated as "foreigner" in the version of the Bible we read from tonight and in the King James Bible as "stranger." But it is the nuanced meaning that is so interesting, for this word not only means foreigner and stranger, it comes from the Greek root words meaning "other" and "race," so it also has the stronger connotation of "alien" and one dictionary says it means "sprung from another race." So Luke is telling us this man was about as far from the norm as you could get - a dirty alien leper - sprung from a another race. And yet this is the one who thanked Jesus and whom Jesus blessed and praised as being a man of faith.

I wonder how many of us have ever felt that we are aliens and sprung from a another race? I've spent most of my life feeling that way and I know many of you feel that way right now.

You might feel like an alien in a freshman seminar as you look around the room and wonder to yourself if the admissions office has made a mistake in letting you into Princeton.

You might feel like an alien when you're talking with your friends about interviewing with investment banking companies in New York when you'd rather work for a non-profit child advocacy organization in Washington.

You might feel like an alien when you're an officer in a prestigious campus club or organization and you realize one day that you can't remember why you ever wanted to join the organization in the first place.

If you are gay you might feel like an alien on Gay Jeans Day when you see posters on campus advertising Heterosexual Pants Day.

You might feel like an alien in your ROTC unit when you find yourself reading 19th century French poetry under a tree during breaks at summer training camp.

You might feel like an alien if your skin is brown and you are constantly surrounded by people whose skin is not brown.

You might feel like an alien when your parents or friends ask you why you would ever waste your Princeton education by being a teacher in Trenton, or joining the Army, or working for a small town newspaper.

You might feel like an alien on a Thursday night when everyone else you know seems to be headed for Prospect Street and you want to be somewhere else, or maybe you are somewhere else and wish you were on the Street.

Many people on this campus feel tossed around by the winds of parental pressure, peer pressure, and the pressures of a materialistic society and make choices about what major to pursue or what graduate school or job to pursue that are completely at odds with what they know deep down will make them feel happy and fulfilled.

Others stick to what they know will make them happy and are criticized as being a little soft in the head or "out of it," and though they persevere they pay the price of feeling alienated, of feeling like they were sprung from a another race.

In the story that we heard in the first reading tonight, Ruth was an alien too, in her case by choice. She was a Moabite who had married a Judean living in Moab. When Ruth's husband died Naomi, her mother-in-law, decided to return to Judea. Ruth by this time had formed an attachment to Naomi and over Naomi's strong objections returned to Judea with her. Ruth thus became an alien by choice because of her friendship with, and her faithfulness to, Naomi. Ruth was, in fact, sprung from a different race from Naomi's, yet she remained faithful to her even when it was not required of her. She showed love and loyalty over an above what was normally expected of her even when that meant moving to Judea where Moabites had been despised for generations.

The truth, my friends, is that we are all aliens - every one of us. This world we live in is our penultimate home, but not our ultimate home. We are all aliens in a strange land.

It seems to me that being an alien is a way of life for all of us and what is required of us is to live our lives with integrity being true to our innermost selves and to God's call to us. But integrity requires courage and perseverance. And courage and perseverance are difficult if not impossible to sustain for very long without some kind of support from others. That is the role the church can - or should - play in our lives when the church is at its best. The church helps us to remember what our ultimate goal is, and where our ultimate home is, and helps us to be true to what God is calling us to be and do. And the church, of course, is not a building or an institution, but is instead the assembly of all God's people gathered together not only to love and worship God, but also to love and support and sustain one another during our journey toward our ultimate home.

The support of the church, and the message of the gospels, and our weekly sharing of bread and wine at Christ's table help us to focus on how God calls us to live our lives with integrity being true to our innermost sense of who we are, and in keeping with God's command that we love God and love all other people just as God loves us.

In Luke's gospel that we heard tonight Jesus makes it clear what it is that has made the Samaritan leper clean. Jesus says, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you clean."

And to us who are aliens in this world the words of the second letter to Timothy (2:15) seem as though they were written in a letter to each one of us:

And these words from Ephesians (2:19-22) are similarly written for us:

Amen.