A Stranger in These Parts

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.13.13

Scripture Lesson: Luke 17:11-19, Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

One of the more fascinating things about my bi-weekly visits to Poolesville has been encountering a community that has a sense of history.  That goes beyond having ancient bottles of Guinness stuffed into the walls of church buildings.  It’s a personal thing.  It’s a community thing.  There are families that have been here for generations, and that’s something rather different than I’m used to.  

That is in large part because I’m “from” a place that no-one’s actually from.  When you live inside the Beltway, in that suburban moonscape that sprawls as far as the eye can see, you’re in a place where pretty much everyone comes from somewhere else.  My home town of Annandale, for example, is a place without history.  

Folks can’t go back that far there, because the there that is there wasn’t there a hundred years ago.   It was a few farms, a few estates, and a whole bunch of woodland.  There was a little Methodist church a crossroads, one that had the misfortune to be burned to the ground during the Civil War.  Annandale was more of a place than a town.

There was nothing, and then there was something.  It stayed that way until a great tide of ramblers and asphalt swept across the land in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and suddenly there were people there.  Whatever sense of history existed in Annandale now rests under a strata of asphalt, tract homes, and stubbornly struggling Korean businesses.  Here and there, you’ll find a sign or a historical marker, sitting rusting on a patch of pavement by the place they’re building the Walgreens.  

There used to be something here, that sign will say.  But it isn’t here any more.

I think that’s the Annandale community motto.

You can’t really be rooted in a place that has no living roots.  You’re just another transient, drifting through for a year or two before your next assignment or your next posting or when another job calls you on to another place.  Everyone is a stranger, and just about when they stop being a stranger, they move.  We’ve been ensconced in our little slice of suburban paradise for just over 13 years.  Our neighbors to the right?  Different.  Our neighbor to the left?  Different.  The guy across the street?  Different.  We’re starting to be among the old timers, and we’ve been there only a quarter of a generation.  

Annandale’s most famous resident is sort of a poster boy for our transience. Who is that?  It’s Mark Hamill.  Yes, Luke Skywalker himself lived in Annandale, and went to Annandale High School, but for Mark, his time in Annandale was as fleeting as Luke’s time on Tatooine.  He lived there for a few years, but his dad was a military officer, and Mark Hamill found himself having to move around a whole bunch.  Having to constantly move because of your father’s job was yet another reason he was selected for that role, I think.

Annandale is increasingly the face of America.  It’s what everyone’s lives are like, everywhere in the United States.  Almost no-one is “from here.”  

Transience is a basic part of our culture.  We’re forever churning and cycling, chasing off after one thing or another.  Our society roils relentlessly, like ripples on the surface of a bathtub, bouncing from coast to coast now that we’ve filled up our allotted portion of the North American continent.

Both today's passage from the Prophet Jeremiah and the reading from Luke you just heard speak to how we are To live when we find ourselves strangers in a strange land.  Hundreds of years separate them,  just as they aree departed from us by millennia, but the basic nature of the human condition has not changed.

When you're in a place you don't belong, it influences how you think and act.  It can drive you to isolation.  It can draw you to fold in on yourself, or to resent those around you.

That was particularly true for the folks who heard Jeremiah's counsel.   Jeremiah was speaking specifically to a people who had been uprooted, and uprooted in a way that was a tiny bit more wrenching than having to go to a new school midway through your junior year 'cause your Dad has a new posting on the Death Star.

The people of Judah had relocated to a strange land because they'd been forced to.  As part of the Babylonian Empire's strategy to shatter and subvert the nations it had subjugated, official policy was to force leaders from those nations to come and serve Babylon in exile.  This was the beginning of what was called the diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world.

This diaspora was not exactly a move they'd desired.  Powerless, oppressed, and torn from their land, it would have been easy to succumb to resentment.

Almost as easy as it would have been for that one member of a band of lepers to be resentful.  In the ancient world, contracting Hansen's disease wasn't just something that would ruin you physically.  Because it could not be treated and was highly contagious, it also consigned you to a life as a social outcast.

By law, lepers were required to stay away from the rest of humanity.  If afflicted, you could beg...from a distance.  But the joys and celebrations of life,  the friendships and family, the rituals of meaning and belonging, those were forbidden to you.

You were a person without a place or a people.  Which is perhaps why, among a group of ten lepers who cried out to Jesus for help, there was a single Samaritan.  He wasn't among his own people, but really, he had no people.

For such an isolated soul, it would have been easy to succumb to bitterness or fear or resentment.

And yet in both of these instances, in these two utterly different tales from different times, we hear of a very different response.

From Jeremiah, we get exactly the opposite of what we  might expect.  Here we have the isolated prophet whose name gives us Jeremiad, which means to to shout and rant and rage like you're hoping for a career in talk radio...and what we get is not a prophecy of fury.  Instead, an incongruous word of grace and forbearance.  live your lives.  And while youre at it, pray for those who've oppressed you.

From Luke's Gospel, the only one of the four Gospels to remember this story for us, we hear that the one who was doubly isolated, the one who even when healed didn't belong, that one was the only one who thought to return to Jesus and give thanks for being released from that prison of illness.

It's a striking reversal, one that Jesus found worth calling to the attention of everyone around him.   All a y'all are Jews, and this guy, this foreigner, is the only one who thinks maybe a word of gratitude is in order?

And in each of these stories, a word to those of us who dwell as stranger in a land of endless diaspora.  Yes, even some of y'all in Poolesville, because of the nearly six thousand souls who live here in the year of our Lord two thousand and thirteen, most aren't related to the five hundred souls who were here in 1960.  It's a prolific town, but not THAT prolific.  The crunchy exurban shell that has formed around Poolesville's caramel small town center is filled with souls who live lives of wandering.

First, there's the call to be a blessing to whatever community you find yourself in.  That call, expressed by Jeremiah, establishes a positive and gracious attitude towards neighbors as the fundamental call of anyone who finds themselves a stranger.  Do all of those things that define you as a healthy and joyful person, and then hope that health for all those around you.

Allowing isolation to form, or casting up walls of distrust, hatred, and otherness?  That’s not the message that comes from Jeremiah, which is both practical and prophetic.

Second, and related to the first, there’s the call to connect with those who show kindness to us when we find ourselves as strangers.  If we have an attitude of blessing towards those around us, we will be more connected.  The Samaritan leper shows that attitude twice.  We know very little about this soul, but we do know some things.  Though this nameless man was a hated stranger in Judea, he is not alone.  He sought the fellowship of others who share his struggle, even those who aren’t quite like him.  And when he encounters someone who is willing to show him an impossible grace, he is willing to show gratitude.

The third is the flip side of the second.  For those times when we find ourselves on the other side of that coin, when we’re the ones with deeper roots, we are given the example of Jesus himself when presented with those who are outside the boundaries of the familiar and the acceptable.  The Jesus we hear in Luke’s Gospel is powerfully interested in the care for the stranger, the outcast, and the oppressed.

The foreigner is not someone to be feared or hated, or used as a scapegoat for our own failings.  The foreigner is our neighbor, a human being worthy of our care, and worthy of healing.  Two thousand years later, there are still a surprisingly large number of human beings who’ve missed this fundamental Christian truth.

When you are a stranger in a strange land, have a heart of blessing to those around you.  From that heart, find connection and community.  And when you are connected in community, remember that the stranger is your sister or brother.