You Alone
You may have noticed over the last few years, how we identity has become a popular term. For example, how one identifies with regards to gender. One can be a man but identify as a female, or on can be a woman but identify as a male. There is also gender neutral people who reject being labeled as he or she but prefer to be referred to as it.
I may have told you recently I was walking the boardwalk in Sausalito and there was an adorable toddler. I can’t walk by an adorable toddler without trying to connect and I did. I looked at the mom and said, “She’s so cute, He? She?” And the Mom said, “Oh What does it really matter.”
The same is true with religion. In the past few weeks alone, people have said to me, “ I like certain elements of Buddhism but I don’t identify as Buddhist. Or I like the teachings of Jesus, but I don’t identify as Christian.
How we identify ourselves is fluid over the course of one’s life. As a child, I was a rebel. I had a button in 1975 that said “Question Authority.” By the time I was 15, I bought a book titled “Marxism for beginners.” By 17, I gave up my identity as revolutionary, and I settled on Actor. I settled on an identity that allowed me to reinvent my identity with every new role I played. Eventually, I traded that to be called Mommy. Which was the role that I longed for more than anything? I longed for a sense of security. I longed to give my children the sense of home I felt I missed out on.
Longing for an identity and longing for the home go hand in hand. That sense of self when fully realized can often feel like a homecoming. That sense of all is right in the world. Feeling complete in who we are meant to be, fully settled, fully at peace, at home.
And yet, it feels as though we lose that sense and find it again over the course of a lifetime, in a million different ways.
Think about the many ways you’ve identified over the course of your lifetime and the ways the perception of that identity has changed. When I was 35, I was a professional… You fill the blank-
But now, now young people look past me as though I’m invisible, ignoring the wealth of experience I had.
I once was head of household, a provider, but now with a walker, I can’t change a light bulb. I once was a wife, but now I’m also a caretaker, a nurse to my husband.
I’m a mother, but now they hardly pick up the phone. Or even more heartbreaking, their lives ended too soon, and this love I want to share feels lost in its expression.
We place our self-worth in the playing out of these roles. If I'm not that I don’t know who I am. If I’m not a spouse, not a nurse, not professional, not a parent, my sense of home, sense of belonging is threatened because this is how I’ve known myself the past 10, 20, 60 years.
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In the Jeremiah passage you heard, the Hebrew people have been sent into exile. They have lost the only home and identity they have ever known. Jeremiah sends them a message from God- build homes, lay down roots, have families. In the
The Luke passage takes this idea and illustrates it intimately, through Jesus Christ and the return of one; a leper, a Samaritan, a despised foreigner who comes back to praise Jesus in thanksgiving.
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Every once in a while I come across an article I wish I had written, and I want to share one with you now because I believe the writer, Debie Thomas, has captured the meaning of the scripture better then I can. She writes-
I’ll never forget the day, decades ago now when I went snooping in my father’s study. I was four years old and bored, and I soon found myself digging through a tall filing cabinet. In it was a manila folder with four navy blue booklets wrapped in tissue paper. One—I discovered to my delight—had a baby picture of me inside of it, followed by a lot of big words I couldn’t read, followed by several pleasingly blank pages. I couldn’t help myself; I was a doodler. Grabbing a pencil, I sat down at the desk and began to draw.
I don’t know how many minutes passed and how many pages I desecrated before my father walked into the study. “What are you doing?” he cried, snatching the booklet out of my hands and flipping frantically through its pages. It’s only when he set to work erasing my drawings with trembling hands that I realized he was not angry; he was frightened.
“What are those?” I asked him.
“Our passports,” he said, without looking up. “These are our American passports. They prove we belong here. Without them . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “Please don’t ever play with these again.”
I didn’t. Even now, years later, I treat my passport gingerly, like an icon or a relic, convinced it might disintegrate in my hands. My father’s old, immigrant fear—the fear of not belonging, of being cast out—lives on.
This week’s Gospel story is, of course, about thankfulness. Ten lepers experience healing; one experiences salvation. There is something about the practice of thankfulness that enlarges, blesses, and restores us. The leper’s act of gratitude points to the fact that we were created to recognize life as a gift and to find our salvation at the feet of the giver.
But this passage also speaks to questions of identity—questions of exclusion and inclusion, exile, and return. This is a story about the kingdom of God—about who is welcome, who belongs, and who stays. As a daughter of immigrants, I feel these questions in my bones. They’re not intellectual or abstract; they’re emotional and urgent. What does it mean to belong? Where is home, and what is my identity?
Three years after that day in the study, we took a family trip to India, my parents’ homeland. One morning, as my father was standing in line to buy tickets at a village train station, my little brother pointed to two figures sitting hunched in a corner. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.
By then we’d been in India for two weeks, and I was accustomed to seeing beggars. Exhausted women with too-thin babies on their hips. Men who were blind or lame. Pot-bellied children who stared at my Western clothes. New to witnessing such relentless need, I spent my days digging in my father’s wallet or my mother’s purse, handing out every bill or coin they’d spare.
But these two figures were different. Though I guessed they needed help, too, I didn’t want to approach them. Their faces were distorted, eaten. Their fingers were half-missing, and their feet were scary mottled stumps. “They’re sick,” my father answered after a quick, pitying glance in their direction. “They have leprosy.”
The train station was crowded that day, swarming with travelers, vendors, and beggars. But what struck me about those figures huddling in the shadows was how alone they were. It was otherworldly, profound and impenetrable in a way I could barely comprehend. It was as if some invisible barrier, solid as granite, separated them from the rest of humanity, rendering them wholly untouchable. Yes, their disease frightened me. But what frightened me much more was their isolation, their not-belonging.
The lepers in the Gospel story also live in the shadows—in a no-mans-land, “a region between.” They are required to live in seclusion, keep their distance from passersby, sport torn clothes and disheveled hair, and announce their own contagion with loud, humiliating cries: “Unclean!”
So when Jesus heals their leprosy he does not merely cure their bodies; he restores their identities. He enables their return to all that makes us fully human—family, community, society, intimacy. In healing their withered skin and numbed limbs, he releases them to feel again—to embrace and be embraced, to worship in community, to reclaim all the social and spiritual ties their disease stole from them. Jesus enters a no-man’s-land—a land of no belonging—and hands out ten unblemished passports. He invites ten exiles home.
Seen from this angle, the tenth leper’s response to Jesus resonates differently. Yes, it’s an expression of gratitude. But it’s also the expression of a deeper and truer belonging. The tenth leper is a Samaritan, a “double other” marginalized by both illness and foreignness. By the first century, the enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans was entrenched and old. The two groups disagreed about everything that mattered to them: how to honor God, how to interpret the scriptures, where to worship. They avoided social contact when possible. It’s quite possible that the Samaritan’s social ostracism continues even after the local priests declare him clean.
So what does he do? What does his otherness enable him to see that his nine companions do not? He sees that his identity—his truest place of belonging—lies at Jesus’ feet. He sees that Jesus’ arms are wide enough to embrace all of who he is—leper, foreigner, exile.
Ten lepers dutifully stand at a distance and call Jesus “Master.” One draws close, dares intimacy, and finds his lasting home, clinging to Jesus for a better and more permanent citizenship. The tenth leper moves past obedience and finds friendship. He discovers what happens when duty gives way to love.
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The love we give- the love we receive, the love we learn through Jesus Christ, is our lasting home and our ultimate identity. The love we receive from Christ brings to us an identity far greater than any affirmed in the world. This is our universal truth that plays out so very personally in each of our longings to be whole, to be safe, to belong, to be at home. When we open ourselves up to Christ who stands before us, above us, below us and next to us; When we move past obedience, and into friendship with Christ, we open ourselves to expressions of thanksgiving and celebration; our homecoming. Our identities may change, but we find ourselves at home when we find our ultimate identity in Christ. Love is our first, middle, and last name. Amen.