Wholeness and Borderlands

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost

text: Luke 17:11-19

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To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.

(from Borderlands by Gloria Anzadua)

I have noticed, perhaps because I am getting older or maybe because technology is making it so, I have noticed that the world is growing smaller and smaller. And as the world grows smaller it seems to me that more borders and more borderlands appear. They aren’t all as obvious as the fence some would like to build to the south of us, or the stark lines between rich and poor neighborhoods in our cities. Some borders are sneaky. We do not discover them until we cross over and suddenly realize that, like Dorothy in Oz, we are not in Kansas anymore. It is not a comfortable experience, border crossing. Most folks, those who get to make a choice about it anyway, prefer to stay inside the borders. We know the rules in here, we get the cues. After all the laws were made by and for us, the ones who live inside the safety zone, well away from the ambiguity and confusion of the borderland.

But not everyone has the option of living inside a well defined border, of fitting like a puzzle piece into this or that part of the universe. Like the author of the poem I just quoted, Gloria Anzadua,who lives in two cultures, there are those for whom there is no essential place of belonging. For some of us, for more and more of us, every day is a border crossing and there is something of the borderland everywhere we know to go.

You may have already made the connection – today’s gospel from Luke takes place in a borderland, a village that is neither of Galilee – Jesus’s homeland – or of its neighbor Samaria, but somewhere in between. This is a place where Jesus likes to hang out, in this gospel, a dangerous place and an uncomfortable one. Here Jesus encounters a group of lepers, ten individuals marginalized by much more than their physical location in this border. Afflicted with a horribly visible disease there is no place inside the border of societal safety and community, these men cry out to Jesus for mercy. They are the borderland squared – marginalized twice over and reduced to begging for scraps on the edges of no man’s land. When they cry out Jesus doesn’t touch them or go closer to them. Rather he sends them back to customs, so to speak, promising that this time they’ll pass. They are sent to show themselves to a priest – the person charged with guarding the borders of the community against spiritual danger. Physical illness was interpreted by the cultures of that time as a strong sign of spiritual danger or worse, spiritual failure. So, for those of Jewish faith a priest was the only person who could re-instate the citizenship of those who had been outcast, and declare them clean. They all go – understandably desperate enough to try anything – and on their way they discover that they are healed. Of these ten, nine go on to complete the task set before them by Jesus – to have a priest mark them as clean and return to their villages and families as full citizens once more. It’s completely understandable. This is probably what I would do. They are healed and we can safely assume they take up their lives inside the borders once again.

But one man returns without going to the priest. He comes back to Jesus’ feet to praise God. This leper is a Samaritan, a foreigner to Jesus and perhaps the last person we should expect to return to the feet of a teacher from Galilee. “Get up and go on your way” Jesus tells the man “your faith has made you well.”

So we learn that being healed or made “clean” is not the same as being made “well.” One is about physical experiences of the body – a tangible blessing which is also a passport back to the safety and security of belonging to one’s own spot in the world. The other, being made well, is about transformation of the whole person, parts seen and unseen, and rejecting the idea of a passport altogether. This Leper, the one whose faith propels him toward wellness, toward wholeness, is one whose desire to live within the safety of borders is steamrolled aside by his experience of God in Jesus. Wholeness, perhaps, is about seeking the borderland on purpose.

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras – without borders. be a crossroads.

In our gospel this morning, one leper comes back. Ten lepers are healed – ten of them are seen by God and blessed by God and included by God. But only one sees Jesus in return. Only one turns back to the borderland, delays his return to the place where he once belonged. And this one is not only healed, made clean, but he is also transformed. Perhaps he didn’t have as much to go home to as the others. Maybe, as a Samaritan, he was used to borders and borderlands. But one thing is for sure – this man discovers his whole self, not back within the safe borders of town and family and society and home, but at the feet of Jesus, in no man’s land.

This text prompts me to think of all the ways in which Jesus is a borderland, and a crossroads. Jesus, who in this text is on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus who stands between life and death, outcast and insider, creation and God. Jesus who makes of himself a crossroads, a place where all of the borders we build to keep us safe are torn down. And it is from this place of belonging to everyone and no one that Jesus heals and transforms. It is in this borderland between Jews and Samaritans, this moment on his way to Jerusalem and death that Jesus makes people well. Healing is a gift Jesus gives to anyone who needs it, in our gospels. But wellness – wholeness? That seems to be another thing entirely – something that is born not just of healing but also of faith. And faith, at least for this one leper, means moving into a life without borders, a life where being with Jesus matters more than a life within the safety, comfort, or belonging behind a border.

I believe that everyone here, myself included, knows something about navigating, and perhaps even inhabiting the borderlands. Some of us know this deeply, as people who move between cultural and ethnic borders, or economic borders, or live in worlds of political borders. And, I would suggest that most of us here, including me, are also border makers – that in ways intentional and unintentional we are part of the creation, enforcement, and guarding of harmful borders in this world – borders that help us feel safe, but that marginalize and shut out other people, people who for whatever reason are not comfortable, or similar to us – people who we feel don’t belong. The faith of the leper suggests to me, and perhaps also to you, that if we have to cross some of those borders to be made whole, and to find Jesus. The faith of the leper suggests that transformation, wholeness, the actual way to the place where we really belong to God and each other is to seek the feet of Christ – to seek first to belong to the God who lives in the borderlands and whose love obliterates borders.

And so I wonder:

I wonder where your borders are? The ones you make, keep, enforce, guard, and obey. I wonder where you might be called to cross over, to turn around, to leave a border behind in order to find Jesus at the crossroad?

And I wonder where you already are an inhabitant of a borderland? I wonder what lonely, alienated, hurting or lawless part of your own life or self is calling to you, inviting you to thanksgiving or greater wholeness?

The promise of our gospel today is not that Jesus makes the borderland safe, or tame, or comfortable. The promise is that we can take our blessings to the borders, we can cross over to meet Jesus in the places and people who don’t belong to or with us, who push us and challenge us and even frighten us. The good news is that if we can go to these borderlands, we will find Jesus and our faith can make us whole.