Physical Borders, Spiritual Thresholds

As some of you may recall, I recently preached a sermon on the value of doing good works without seeking recognition or reward. I made the rather bold claim that true hospitality is not dependent on reciprocation, including a thank you. You can imagine then, my eye-roll when I read the Gospel passage I’d be preaching on next - the grand biblical exhortation about saying thank you. I once told this Gospel story to a group of pre-schoolers during their morning chapel time, and their teachers were genuinely grateful afterwards. Isn’t it nice when Scripture matches up perfectly with our societal norms, so we can mold it into a teaching tool for our own purposes? But the thing is, I stand by my claims about Christian hospitality, and I do not believe that Jesus had one single regret about his life-saving ministry because someone didn’t say “thank you.” So what on earth is going on in today’s Gospel passage?

Well, if the message is not merely a reprimand of the 9 ungrateful lepers who forgot their manners, perhaps we should consider the leper that Jesus praises. The only thing we know about him, other than his thoughtfulness, is that he’s from Samaria. Aha! It’s time for my favorite sermon section: Biblical history with Hannah. As you may remember from the Old Testament. Israel was once one united kingdom under King David and King Solomon. But then, the northern Israelites broke away to create their own monarchy called Samaria.

Over time, Samaria lost its connection to Jerusalem and the God who resided there. Now the peoples of Samaria and Judah had geographical and religious differences, and so the animosity grew. After several centuries of static, hate-filled rivalry, the people to the north of Samaria, the Galileans, began to convert their allegiance to Jerusalem and it’s God. Now we have two Jerusalem-focused nations physically separated by one giant adversary. To get from Galilee to Judea, or vice versa, you either had to take the long way around Samaria, or venture through enemy territory. What we have here is not just an international controversy - it’s a border crisis.

Unfortunately, this is language we can relate to. We know that the close proximity of two forces on either side of a border heightens tension, and we know that the muddiness of the line between them challenges our convictions. We also know that Jesus loves to hang out at a border. This is particularly apparent in Luke’s Gospel. Theologian and professor Ira Brent Driggers noticed that Luke has a lot to say about Samaria in particular, both in his Gospel and the book of Acts. Driggers says that “when the risen Jesus commissions the apostles, he seems to envision Samaria as a kind of threshold between the Jewish homeland and worldwide ministry: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8)” This insight got me thinking. How are borders and thresholds connected? Are there other ways that physical borders serve as spiritual thresholds?

We don’t have to wander far, there’s a border issue in our Old Testament lesson today, as well. Jeremiah is prophesying at the beginning of the Exile. The Israelites are hoping that they’ll only be stuck in Babylon for a few short years, but Jeremiah knows this isn’t the case. He gives what I’ve always considered a powerful and moving sermon about living life to the fullest exactly where you are. But truth be told, that is most likely not what the people in exile in Babylon wanted to hear. In their minds, they were very clearly on the wrong side of the border, the side on which their God could not reach them.

We are no strangers to border crises in our own midst. Over the past several years, and especially in the past few months, our community has been embroiled in a battle over the public school system. And what I’ve noticed lately is that we’re experiencing an epidemic of border drawing in this struggle over education. People who live in this zone send their kids here. Schools with these test scores defer to authority over here. If I’m on the right side of the border, the policies and decisions will likely benefit me. But if I’m on the wrong side of the border, my access to education is limited.

On the news and on social media, we’ve seen several young people from so-called “low-performing” schools give testimony about their experience and make pleas for their right to learn. We are surprised to hear eloquence and substance from children we’ve deemed failures, just like we’re surprised that a Samaritan would bother to say thank you to Jesus for curing his leprosy, or that Jeremiah would ask us to invest in our community in exile.

But this is where we have it wrong. God has no time for the physical, political, and spiritual borders we create in this world. God’s love and grace crosses them all. God can reach us no matter which borders we cross, and God is also fully present with our enemies on the other side of the borders we build up for our own security. As Christians, we often ask ourselves, where is Christ in my struggle? The answer is that whenever we draw border lines of any kind in our lives, we can be sure that Jesus is squarely settled on the other side of them.

My friends, the stakes have been raised, because to fully encounter the risen Christ in the world, we have to cross those borders. We have to see them not just as physical dividing lines, but as spiritual thresholds, gateways into Kingdom of God. The Israelites in exile had to find God in Babylon. Jesus’ disciples had to learn to love Samaritans as Jesus did. What borders have we created, and who is on the other side of them waiting to show us the face of Christ?

I don’t have a solution for our public school crisis, but I think I know where to look for Jesus in the midst of it. And I’m certainly grateful for the borders in this world that keep me safe from harm, but I can’t ignore what the Gospel has to say about them. This Gospel passage isn’t asking us what we should say to the nice man who cures our leprosy. It’s asking, who are the Samaritans in our lives, the people who catch us off guard with their witness to the Kingdom? What walls have we spent time and effort building up, which we now need to breach in order to see God at work in the world? Where can we turn physical borders into spiritual thresholds? Amen.