DELIBERATELY DIVERSE | The Rev. Terry Pierce
Deliberately Diverse represents the individual opinions of a group of Taylor friends who never completely agree about anything but enjoy diverse discussions.
In Luke 17, we hear the story of a community of lepers healed by Jesus. We are told that only one of those lepers, a foreigner, returned to say thank you and praise God for his healing.
Jesus said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”
The 10 lepers are celebrated at the Church of St. George in the Palestinian West Bank town of Burqin, near Jenin. The cave where the miracle took place likely was a Roman cistern with an opening at
the top. Despite the addition of an altar and other decorations by the Greek Orthodox community that cares for the cave, the smell and feel are of dirt and musty air.
They were a community of outsiders who lived together and ate together because they were not welcome in civil society — they weren’t welcome in church or in school or at the grocery store because they were “unclean.”
This community of lepers included Hebrew people and Samaritan people. The separations of society that kept Hebrews and Samaritans apart were no longer in effect because they were all excluded together.
Hebrew and Samaritan — members of communities that did not associate with one another. Like today’s Republicans and Democrats, perhaps.
In Greek, the word “leper” appears before the word for man — they are leper men.
Their disease is the first we know of them rather than their humanity. How often do we identify people by what we perceive as their disease or their life condition or their affiliations rather than their humanity?
A recent study showed liberals tend to describe conservatives as extremists, ideologues and nutjobs. Conservatives tend to identify liberals as hacks, idiots and trolls. We tend to separate people we consider enemies from their humanity, which leaves little chance of finding common ground. Perhaps this story teaches us that part of healing is the restoration of the primacy of our human identity. It is to name us as neighbors before we name us by our political or religious affiliation or by our skin color or gender or sexual identity.
It is to name each of us “child of God” before any other appellation.
It reminds us, too, that racial, ethnic and social divisions existed long before social media. The word translated as foreigner in this passage means “other genes” or “other genesis.” So today we know that humans share 99.9% of the same genes, but the point is that Jesus cares for those who have a different “genesis” than we do.
Perhaps if we begin to listen to those who have a different genesis, different beginnings, we will find evidence of our common humanity in the midst of our uncommon diversity.
Pierce is the vicar of St. James’ Episcopal Church in Taylor. She can be reached by email at ministry@ stjamestaylor.org.
