TWO EXCELLENT SERMONS FOR 10-10-10

The preachers both speak of punch lines from stories from Scripture, having to do with foreigners, stories which were shocking in their own time.

For no particular reason, starting with Caminante, who preaches from the story of the healing of the ten lepers. (Luke 17:11-19)

The gospel has saved up the punch-line for this moment. In one short sentence, it informs us, ‘And he was a Samaritan.’A Samaritan.

Not only once cast out of society by virtue of his leprosy, but twice cast out because of his nationality. A doubly impure, scorned man, someone whom the boundaries would have permanently kept out.

Yet Jesus ministers to this man with the same grace as he has to the other nine. Moreover, he tells the Samaritan something he does not tell the other nine: ‘Your faith has made you well.’ A stronger translation is, ‘Your faith has brought you salvation.'

And the sermon titled "Shame On You" by Tobias Haller at In a Godward Direction on his sermon blog. Tobias preaches from the story of Ruth and Naomi (Ruth 1:(1-7)8-19a) and from the story of the ten lepers. (Luke 17:11-19)

On Ruth, the Moabite, who follows her mother-in-law back to Judah after both have become widows.

Ruth does in the end discover a distant relative of her late husband; she finds Boaz, who because of Ruth’s loyalty to him and to Naomi marries her. She bears him a son — and that son, it turns out right at the end of the story, is none other than the grandfather of King David!

Imagine how that punch-line must have sounded in the ears of proud Judeans: David’s great-grandmother was an immigrant Moabite — a foreign-born member of one of Israel’s ancestral enemies. For Moabites had once long before treated the wandering Israelites themselves as lower than dirt and wouldn’t let them so much as set a foot in Moab on their roundabout way to the promised land; and in latter days the songs of Israel would declare, “Moab is my washbasin” — and yet here it turns out that our greatest hero, David the King, David the Deliverer, is part Moabite, and wouldn’t even have been born at all had it not been for the loyalty of a woman of Moab, Ruth, in not turning back from Naomi. And perhaps a feeling of shame might rise in the heart of any Israelite who had ever mistreated a foreigner.

Of course, I urge you to read both sermons in their entirety. The sermons serve us well as they point us toward an examination of our present attitudes and actions toward not just immigrants, but all those in our society who are viewed as different, other, not like us.