Healing the Sick in a Borderland Village

A sermon preached on October 13, 2019 at St. James Episcopal Church in Arlington, Vermont. 

It was reported on Friday that since January of this year, “the U.S. government has ordered 16,000 migrants under 18, including nearly 500 infants, to wait with their families in Mexico for U.S. immigration court hearings” under a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocol. These people – these children – are asylum-seekers, mostly from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. And they are stuck, living in makeshift villages in a borderland.

“The risk of violence and illness runs high and is of particular concern for families with young children or those with chronic health conditions,” Reuters reports. Doctors and nurses told reporters that “they have seen cases of chicken pox, scabies, respiratory infections, skin rashes, eye infections and gastrointestinal issues among children and adults.”

27-year-old mother Blanca Aguilar, a migrant from Guatemala, told reporters about the children in the borderland village she is living in. “When one gets sick, they all do,” she says. “Her two-year-old son Adrian has had a recurrent cough with wheezing, as well as bouts of diarrhea, since they arrived in August. ‘He’s been sick a lot,’ she says, adding that she suspects he may be developing asthma.”

It is here – in a village at the borderland – that we find Jesus this morning.

And it is here, among adults and children in a dangerous place –  that ten people suffering from a painful infectious disease cry out, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

And it is here that Jesus heals them.

He tells them to go present themselves to the priest, and on the way there they are made clean. They didn’t even have to make it to their destination. The noticing love of Jesus and their faith in him made them well. 

And one of those healed decides to turn around – to come back to that village and to thank Jesus. “He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him.” And Jesus replies, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?”

One could interpret this as Jesus finger-wagging about the other nine not coming back to say their proper “thank-yous.” But Jesus isn’t speaking to those nine people. Jesus has healed those nine people. They are well. And they are out in the world, living. And I have a feeling they are grateful. And I have a feeling they make this gratitude known to God.  

No, Jesus is talking to the people in front of him – to the one who returned, to the disciples accompanying him, and to the crowd gathered in this borderland village. Jesus, as he so often does, is seizing on a “teachable moment.” 

Because the one who returned to him is a Samaritan. The one who returned is an outsider in the world of Jesus’s disciples. A foreigner. Some of Jesus’ disciples may well have looked at a Samaritan man and thought him “dirty” even once cleansed of infection. And Jesus – God with us – points to this man as the one who returned, the one who shows his faith and devotion with loud and confident clarity, the one who directly shares his gratitude for God’s healing power … and the one who is “the foreigner.” “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner" he says. Jesus is not shaming the nine for not properly showing their faith. I don’t think that’s what he’s up to.

Jesus is preaching tolerance at the border.  

We disciples of Jesus are not asked to solve all these enormous problems in our world on our own. We are in fact told we can’t do that. As Christians, we believe in the ultimate coming reality of the Kingdom of God in which all is made new and all borders that have ever been are dissolved. And that work is the work of God.  

And, we are not off the hook when it comes to trying to make the world safer or better or more comfortable whenever and however we can. Just as Jesus tells the Samaritan “get up and go” following his healing, we too are asked to go out into the world, to see God in all people. To heal. To show mercy. To love.

If you are interested in learning more about ways to help present-day borderland villages, please check out the work of Episcopal Migration Ministries. Because now, as then, God is present in borderland villages. As God was there with the unnamed Samaritan at the Samaria-Galilee border, God is there with Blanca Aguilar at the Mexico-US border. God is there amidst the violence at the Syria-Turkey border. God is there in all borderland spaces where tolerance for difference is put to the test.

On fall Vermont days like these – with the trees bursting into daytime fireworks displays – it feels somewhat easier for me to remember to regularly and enthusiastically give God thanks for the wonder and joy this life brings. But this life, these days of ours on this earthly plane, can also be so hard. Can be so sad. Can be so confusing. For all of us. Anywhere. So today, I want you to hear that this noticing, healing love and mercy of Jesus – it is for you, too. No matter who you are. Because there will be no foreigners, no outsiders, no borders with God.