Sermon Tone Analysis

/Now on His way to Jerusalem, Jesus travelled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

As He was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him.

They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”/

/When He saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.”

And as they went, they were cleansed./

/One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice.

He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked Him—and he was a Samaritan./

/Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed?

Where are the other nine?

Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

Then He said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”/

Speaking with the pastor of one of the largest churches in North America, I was challenged to tell the story of a revival I had witnessed.

As I told of the men and women of the congregation in the Outer Mission District of San Francisco, I related their story.

George, whose mind was permanently fried from drug abuse…  Armando who paid an extreme price for his faith in Christ when he was fired from the only job he could perform, which was driving cab…  I told how Patty Hearse was captured only a matter of feet from the vestibule of the church.

I told of the prostitutes and pimps, the thieves and muggers, the common people and the street people — all united by their love for Christ who had redeemed them.

I continued by telling how respectable churches were horrified by the odd assembly of believers.

I concluded by saying that they would not likely be welcomed in his own congregation.

It seemed as if there weren’t a normal one in the crowd; but, oh, how they did love one another.

Crippled and broken, the Body of Christ is a fraternity — a fraternity of lepers.

We have been redeemed from our abject slavery to sin and our utter isolation from Holy God; our brokenness has been restored by the grace of God who is life.

Our story is akin to one which is related by Doctor Luke.

My prayer is that our particular story is not that of the majority, but that we are part of the minority.

Perhaps I should clarify that statement by exploring the incident.

Jesus, together with His disciples, was travelling to Jerusalem.

They were walking along the border between Samaria and Galilee where they entered a border village.

The text reports that ten lepers met Him.

We may speculate that these lepers had heard of his presence and were deliberate in arranging to intercept His journey.

On the other hand, perhaps it was serendipity … a chance occurrence.

Seizing upon this chance encounter, they stood apart from Him as required by the Law and cried out for mercy.

The command Jesus issued is simple, predicated upon their faith in His power.

/Go, show yourselves to the priests/.

Doctor Luke is quite precise about what happened next.

/As they went, they were cleansed/.

Even as they began the journey to Jerusalem to show themselves to the priests, they were cleansed.

We will never quite grasp the importance of this cleansing until we understand the stigma attached to leprosy in that ancient day.

We likely cannot fully grasp the sense of isolation, the feeling of ostracism and rejection, until we explore the social view of the various skin diseases from that ancient era.

United in Misery — Let’s try to understand what it meant to be a leper in ancient Palestine.

Leprosy, the horrifying disease which lends its name to the biblical skin ailment, is still with us to this day.

The disease is caused by the rickettsia Mycobacterium lepræ, and is still a dreaded diagnosis.

This disease is part of the family of germs which cause Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Tuberculosis, each of which is difficult to cure and each of which presents a serious challenge to modern physicians.

The horror of leprosy in our day is that it causes nerve paralysis.

When the patient cannot feel pain, they tend to injure themselves, and the burns and wounds are easily infected with concomitant mutilation.

Fingers, toes, ears, nose and even lips seem to literally rot away since the pain which would normally serve to warn of injury or infection is not present.

Lepers, especially without aggressive treatment, are consigned to an awful, lingering, horrifying death.

The disease is not highly contagious; physicians and religious workers have for years provided help within leprosoriums without themselves contracting the disease.

Nevertheless, the uneducated are frightened at the sight of a leper and the irrational fear that they also may be contaminated.

No doubt there is a sense of ancient fear instilled in our minds by memories conjured up by unverified stories which contributes to our horror.

When you read the account of diagnosis of leprosy in the Pentateuch, it becomes apparent that a range of skin conditions was possibly included in the diagnosis of leprosy.

This is not to say that lepers were not leprous; it is but to caution that other skin conditions could isolate an individual from society.

That is the important point for our consideration in this message.

The diagnosis of leprosy was a sentence to utter isolation.

The leper could not live among the people.

He or she was removed from his or her family home and forced to live outside the town.

Lepers were compelled to wear old, torn clothing, leave their hair unkempt and uncovered, cover their lower face, and cry out at the approach of any person, /Unclean!

Unclean!/

[Cf.

*Leviticus 13:45*].

A leper was a social pariah.

They could not work, since that which their hands touched would be deemed to be unclean.

They could not socialise with others, since they were unclean.

Where they sat was unclean and others could not sit there.

Where they lived was unclean and others were not permitted to enter there.

Their breath, should they approach too close, was considered unclean, and those upon whom they breathed were contaminated.

To be a leper was to be consigned to a living death.

There is still a deep, abiding fear of leprosy in this day.

The last leprosorium in the United States, located in Louisiana, is not the closed facility it once was.

In the not so distant past, patients diagnosed with leprosy were sent, even against their will, to that isolated facility, or to another in Hawaii.

In Canada, patients diagnosed with leprosy were sent to a facility in the Maritimes, where they would live out their years isolated from family and friends and all social intercourse save for the artificial society of the dying lepers.

We no longer have many such conditions with the social stigma of leprosy … with the possible exception of AIDS.

Perhaps those infected with HIV are the new social pariahs.

Whether through promiscuous sex (usually homosexual), through intravenous drug use, or through governmental mismanagement of blood supplies, those contaminated with the HIV virus will almost assuredly die a lonely, lingering, frightful death.

Deserted by those they thought to be friends, at the last these modern social outcastes will succumb to strange diseases in abject loneliness and in deepest agony.

/And the Band Played On/, an investigative study of the politics and the people affected by AIDS was written by Randy Shilts over a decade ago.

Shilts, himself a homosexual, eventually succumbed to the disease.

The graphic descriptions of the final days of those men infected with the disease cannot help but affect the sensitive soul.

One great overriding thought as I read the book was that the gay culture is anything but gay.

Populated with lonely individuals, the sodomite subculture of contemporary life is sad and lonely, isolated by right-thinking individuals.

Tragically, instead of being appalled by the rebellion, too many are angered by the individuals.

I remember a former pastor of mine who until recently served the First Baptist Church of San Francisco, telling of a young man in his final days of a losing struggle against AIDS.

He told how the young man, the son of an evangelical preacher, had rebelled and lived his own life.

Now, at last, he was dying … the consequence of his rebellion.

Alone, isolated from family, even his friends had forsaken him.

Dr.

Higgs told how the aide who delivered the food tray would literally throw the food across the floor so she would not need to enter the room.

The dying man was isolated even by the very staff hired to minister to his needs.

Horrible though the treatment of those afflicted with AIDS may be, even more horrifying are those infected with such new and deadly diseases as Ebola.

Such people die quickly … and alone.

Blood pours from every orifice of the body and the lungs fill so quickly that the patient literally drowns in his or her own secretions within a matter of hours.

Being viral in origin, the disease passes readily through the unbroken skin.

Consequently, save for a few religious workers, few people have been willing to tend to the dying in those villages infected with Ebola.

The village is isolated and in some extreme incidents anyone attempting to leave the village was shot and their body burned.

There is no question but that some diseases present a horrible possibility for death, and there is no question but that those infected are too readily isolated from society.

The Bible does not pretend to be a textbook of medical science, and the proscriptions against those infected with leprosy were not solely for hygienic reasons.

Leprosy was a type of sin.

The leper was marked, and the visible blemish was a vivid reminder of the sinful condition of mankind.

You would think that the purification rituals prescribed in *Leviticus 14* would serve to encourage the leper to pray for deliverance, creating in that one a heart dependent upon the mercies of God.

The evidence from our text would cause us to question such a situation.

You see, the lepers formed a sort of society within society.

They really were outcastes.

Just so, those contaminated by the leprosy of sin are utter outcastes from all divine intercourse.