A Reflection and Poem for XVIII Pentecost St. Thomas Episcopal, Ahoskie, NC
October 9, 2022 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Presider
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 Psalm 66:1-11 2 Timothy 2:8-15 Luke 17:11-19
Σέσωκέν: Soul Made Whole
Last week in the Lesser Feasts and Fasts, we remembered William Tyndale, who in 1526 translated much of the Bible into English. Throughout the centuries in England parts of the Bible had been translated into Old and Middle English, but the church grew leery of lay people reading scripture and forming their own opinions. It reached a crisis point when John Wycliffe issued a translation which was banned and a couple years after his death in 1384, his body was dug up and burned as a heretic because he said that scripture should be trusted rather that the Popes. The fear of the church leaders was that if people read the Bible they might use it to make changes in the established order of church and state. In 1401 under the reign of Henry IV, heresy was re-defined not only as a theological offense handled by the church but a crime enforced and punished as treason by the state.
Tyndale wanted to translate the Bible so that an English plowboy could understand the words of scripture. Tyndale was declared an outlaw and heretic for his push for translation and had to hide in Europe away from the wrath of Henry VIII. In Germany he came into contact with Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German and Tyndale turned his exile as an opportunity to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale finished his Greek New Testament translation and some of the Hebrew Testament, and Henry VIII banned its publication in England in1530. In 1536, Tyndale was betrayed, tried and put to death by the Roman Catholic authorities in Europe for heresy for translating the Bible.
Henry VIII, in the meantime, had picked a fight with the Roman Catholic church and was excommunicated in 1538. In 1539 Henry declared himself the Head of the Church in England, and had an English Bible, called the Great Bible, to be read in English churches. The New Testament of the Great Bible was basically Tyndale's. In 1549 the First Book of Common Prayer was written and used standardized spellings versions of Tyndale's Early Modern translations. These standardized versions were brought forward in the 1611, King James Version of Scripture.
I want to use one verse from Luke's Gospel for today: 17:19 when Jesus says to the 10th Leper, the Samaritan leper: “And he sayde vnto him: aryse and goo thy waye thy faith hath made the whoale.” Tyndale was translating the Greek word, “Σέσωκέν”- “sesoken” as “made whole”. In this last Century, modern English Biblical translators, wanting translations to be easily understood by today's readers translated “ sesoken” as “made well”. Not a bad translation; but I want to argue that while doctors make us well: the goal of God is not just make us well, but to make us whole, body and soul complete. Whenever I pray for someone to be healed. I envision, yes, a relief from symptoms, but beyond that to an opening into a new life. In this Gospel story for today, all ten of the Lepers were “made well” but only one was recorded as being “made whole”,
Lets take a look at what life was like for a Leper in the time of Jesus, and in most of human history. People who were lepers were seen as “impure” people who must be isolated from the community. Leprosy, which modern science sees as a bacterial infection, the Hebrew testament of Leviticus saw as a sign of God's displeasure, a spiritual disease, if you will. If you had the disease you were to be cut off from your family and any way of making a living; a social death from the community for the rest of your life. Many lived with a raging anger against God and God's representatives and the idea of a just God was seen as a sick delusion. Living away from the protection of the law; there was no protection from stronger human predators. Longing for some sort of human companionship, many lepers connected with fellow sufferers, like the group of 10 in the Gospel story for today. Food was made available by the variable acts of charity, or by family compassion, thrown at you from a distance. If you had no one to provide charity to you, you soon died; cut off from your past, in a miserable present and no hope for a future. The one advantage is that you knew that there was no reason for hope. Knowing the boundaries of no hope, helped you to try to make yourself as comfortable as possible.Your only way out would be if you appeared before a Priest, the very class of person who pronounced judgements of banishment from normal human society. If the Priest examined you and pronounced you “clean” from God's punishment then you were able to live into a new present. However, you carried the past wherever you went. Even if you returned to your old community; many of the former neighbors and family would regard you with suspicion that God's displeasure might return and so the present and future were always contaminated by the past. It was hard to believe in a loving God
The closest modern situation to being a Leper would be as an inmate serving a life sentence without parole in a prison. It is a time when your past is painfully irrelevant, the present is full of threat and any future is never in sight. With a fear of stronger predators, there are gangs in the prisons, exploitation is a daily occurrence and casual cruelty is the norm. It is hard to believe in a loving God. Almost every prisoner says upon release that they would never go back in as an inmate. However, according to the North Carolina Justice Center, North Carolina’s three-year recidivism rate is 40% and nationwide there is five year recidivism rate of 70 %. People do not plan to go back in, but they have learned on a daily basis that fellow human being are cruel and God is indifferent. They do not want to go back but at least prison is something that you can used to, a kind of home. When the state will tell you that you have paid your debt you leave, but you are far from being “made whole”.
Being made whole is to examine one's life, past and present; it is a journey, one step at a time. Writer, Brendan Gill. said, "If the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined past is not worth possessing; it bears fruit only by being held continuously up to the light, and is as changeable and as full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, as the future."
I think of people who I have worked with over the years who have addictions, bad enough to go into treatment programs. According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, about 40 to 60 percent of people who receive substance use disorder treatment relapse at some point afterward. Relapse is part of the understanding of the disease; you can get a certificate of completion but recovery is a life long, daily work in progress. The 12 step program for addicts to move toward wholeness is:
Step 1 We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
Step 2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step 3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Step 4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step 5 Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Step 6 Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Step 7 Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Step 8 Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Step 9 Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Step 10 Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Step 11 Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
Step 12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
About 30 + years ago, I was working in a church in Virginia and I scolded my parish that they were not getting involved enough in the community; doing ministry outside the church walls.. I told them that I would take a tithe of my time as their Rector, paid for their tithe money, four hours, one afternoon a week, and volunteer in the community. Paul's, my older brother's, life fell apart due to addiction and not wanting to admit or work on the addiction. In shame as his life was falling apart, he committed suicide. One of my parishioners in the church was a counselor at the local treatment center and invited me with my earlier Master In Social Work degree to join him for four hours a week to co-lead treatment groups as a way of my own healing my grief, of working to be “made whole”.
A couple months ago, one of former parishioners in the parish from which I retired three years ago, whose wedding I had performed, asked me to help bring a deeper spiritual dimension in the treatment center they started. Each Monday morning, I visit that local addiction treatment facility and co-lead a group of residents on a relationship with a Power Greater than themselves. The problem is not about quitting the uses of their addictions but about beginning the journey to become whole. A couple weeks ago, with today's lesson in mind, I asked them if they could give thanks for the time when their lives finally fell apart for them, breaking apart any denial, telling them they needed to go into treatment. It is only when we realize that our lives are a mess that we can begin the journey to wholeness.
In the Gospel lesson for today, nine of the 10 Lepers go blithely away to go back to their old life, and they may or may not fit back in. They are cured of their physical illness but only one of them realized that he had a spiritual disease at the core of their physical malady.. Only one of them was made whole to become reconciled to God and fellow human beings. The journey to wholeness begins by learning how to give thanks and enter into a relationship to a power greater than oneself. The 10th Leper had a Spiritual awakening. The 10th Leper began the relationship by giving thanks. It was a journey of faith and Jesus told him that his faith had made him whole. Jesus made the others well but the 10th Leper found his faith had made him whole.
Faith is one of those words I want to change from a noun to a verb. In Wilson's world, “Faith” is not something you have as an object you own and keep locked up, but something you do each day of your life. If I ran the world we would say, “I faith”, “He or She faiths”, “We are faithing”. Faith is the lookin not at creeds, but at the examination of conscience of living in community where the space between each of is Holy Space. We are made whole by connecting to our neighbor, our deeper self, and the Power Greater than ourselves.
Σέσωκέν: Soul Made Whole
When in a somewhat comfortable trap,
at least knowing where boundaries are,
rules and norms, not needing to look far
into the future, past; or any reality crap.
Then, longed for, but unexpected, doors
are opening into a new time and space;
with a choice to feel sun on your face,
or longing to a return to same old chores.
Are we ready to live redeeming that past,
rejoicing in present and hoping in a future;
bound tight together with a spiritual suture,
working each new day in a recovery to last?
The hard truth is that we are only made whole,
not by relieving symptoms, but a healing of soul
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