Your Life Hidden in Christ

Sunday – 17 after Trinity – Proper 23

2 Kings 5: 1-3, 7-15. In this encounter Naaman is too high and mighty to enact a simple remedy, expecting due deference and complicated rituals instead, so it is comforting to note that human nature hasn’t changed much since then. Apparently, leprosy was unknown in these days so although that is how the ailment is translated in our Bibles it is more likely to be eczema of some sort. There are hints of inter-religious dialogue and connection as well as hints relating to the cleansing nature of Baptism.

2 Timothy 2: 8-15. A reminder of the core of the gospel which is “Christ raised from the dead” is the start of our lection today. The template “dying with Christ in order to live with him”, is obviously metaphorical, and entails a dying to self, which entails ego and self-interest, and self-centredness, in order to live for God – that is a God-centred life.

Luke 17: 11-19. Like Naaman in the opening tract from 2 Kings, the object of interest is another foreigner – a Samaritan. This is an exercise in early Christian universalism, reaching out beyond Israel, to the schismatic neighbouring Samaritans. He was the only man healed that returned to give thanks to Jesus (God). People with skin diseases were excluded from religious festivals so their healing brought them back from social and religious exclusion, which may have been the original thrust of Luke’s story, although he is perhaps a bit unrealistic as no Samaritan would surely report to the Jerusalem priesthood to record their healing.

Christ is risen. This is the absolute core of the gospel.

And the fact that Christ is risen is of universal importance and application. Christ being raised is of equal surpassing eternal importance to an Amazonian forest dweller, a Ukrainian tractor driver, a Bombay slum dweller, a millionaire New Yorker, a Slovenian super model, a Chinese factory worker, a Nigerian street pastor or a Budleigh retiree.

It doesn’t matter, who you are or your station in life, or your culture, ethnicity, or stated religion or lack of any religion, because if we believe as we do that the resurrection of Christ is an objective fact, it follows that when Jesus said “I am the truth” that was a truth with universal human application.

Of course, it has a cosmic significance as well, incorporating all created matter, but the human application is where we start.

We get glimpses from the Old Testament, like God saving Nineveh, a pagan city to the astonishment and dismay of Jonah;

We heard this morning of God working to heal another pagan, Naaman through the prophet Elisha.

In Jesus’ own ministry on earth, he often lauded the faith of schismatic Samaritans as we heard this morning, when he indiscriminatory healed some people and only one came back to give thanks – and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus was born in Galilee, known as Galilee of the gentiles and worked in gentile areas, like the Decapolis, which were mixed Greek cities and mixed with the poor, the outcasts, prostitutes, the diseased, the tax collectors.

His message of “Life in all its fulness” was for all people at all times and in all places.

So when the risen Christ gave the great commission, to make disciples of all nations, this is the natural impetus behind all missionary evangelizing.

There are consequences to accepting these truths of course. Accepting Christ is one thing, living as he commands us to live is a much harder task. Being a Christian can hurt, physically, as Paul suffers, or more likely nowadays socially mentally and psychologically, and spiritually.

To love the unlovely is hard. To love your enemies is even harder. And to die to self is possibly the hardest thing of all. We are asked to supplant our will with the will of God in order to act as he would act – as Jesus acted

All other religions have their own way of emphasising this loss of ego and self-interest.   In Islam you submit to the will of Allah – in fact the word Islam means submission. You replace your will with the will of God. In Buddhism, the control of self-serving ego is central to their philosophy but in Christianity it is slightly different.

We don’t stop loving ourselves. We are called to love others as we love ourselves. We have a new dignity and status as “children of God”. We are called to love and serve as God loves. We are called to be imitators of Jesus Christ in our attitudes, our will and our actions. As Christians we are called to become more fully ourselves – the person that God always wanted us to be.

We all have unique personalities and God honours that individuality. He entered this world as an individual human being. He doesn’t want to create a homogeneous, faceless mass of people indistinguishable from each other.

God doesn’t and won’t overwhelm you. Everything is with consent and done with love and your best interests at heart. That is what we learn from the life of Jesus. That is how He acted.

As Christians, we will share a family likeness because we all on the same path at different stages, but we cannot and will not all be the same. I, though I say so myself am pretty spiritually sensitive to mood and atmosphere and I am sure that the Spirit is flowing more freely through the churches in the R.M.C. than He has done before.

That Spirit is of a risen saviour, who wills that we flourish and become the best versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. Praise be to God.