Homily | 🏡 Already Home

18th Sunday After Pentecost

Readings of the Day: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c | Psalm 111 | 2 Timothy 2:8-15 | Luke 17:11-19

You know that moment right before the service starts? You’re sitting in the pew. Maybe it’s silent or maybe a prelude is playing... Light is coming through the windows just right. And you’re here. You showed up. But there’s this question floating around in your head that you might not say out loud: Does any of this actually matter? Does any of this make a difference?

You’re not asking this in a cynical way (or maybe you are—and that’s okay!). It’s just... you see what’s happening out there.

The cruelty.
The chaos.
The way people treat each other.
The stranger being treated like a threat instead of a neighbor.

And if you have kids or grandkids, you see them being ushered into this accelerated world that is losing its grounding in reality. Everything’s a performance. Everything’s about achieving, competing, curating an image that’s acceptable.

If you’re a younger person, you wonder why your assigned older people can’t understand your world. And why the older people in charge of things seem to be so unhinged.

And you come here on Sunday and it’s beautiful—it really is—but sometimes it feels like a museum. Like we’re preserving something that doesn’t seem as effective as ordering something on Amazon and getting a tracking number two minutes later.

We’ve stopped expecting restoration. We’ll take maintenance, sure...

But real change? The kind where the good people win, where God actually shows up and makes things better?

We’ve learned to not even hope for that.

It’s not that we’re resigned. We still show up. We still go through the motions here—and I don’t mean that dismissively. The motions are beautiful. The liturgy, the Eucharist, the prayers. Ritual itself is great.

But man, is it hard to believe God can actually do anything with this mess.

I’m thinking right now of those ten lepers in today’s gospel... After Jesus miraculously heals them, they’re walking toward the priests... This is what you would do. After being healed, you’d go to the priests to get your stamp of approval so your community could welcome you back. It’s called a purity rite. It’s maintenance.

But one of them, this Samaritan guy (and in the Bible, ‘Samaritan’ is code for “outsider”), he stops mid-journey and turns around. He realizes something the other nine are missing.

Jesus didn’t just fix his skin. Jesus made him whole. Ontologically. At the core of his being.

Here’s what’s really going on under the hood for us:

At the base of human existence is a feeling of loneliness. Being cut off. Untethered from the good. Like God is way far away and we’re just... stuck here... left to do the work ourselves...

This internal posture is what we call Sin (curved in on self)—it’s not just the naughty things we do, but the fundamental lie we believe. The lie that we’re separated from God. That we’re on our own. That God might be out there somewhere, but not really here. Not in this mess. Not in this exhaustion.

But Christ reveals to us that the separation... isn’t even real.

It’s impossible, actually. God never left. Where else can God go besides... God?

But we believe it anyway. We’re like the toddler in the next room who doesn’t see you and calls your name with terror. MOM! DAD! But you’re right there. Playing candy crush or crossword puzzles and trying to get a moment of peace:)

Naaman, the Syrian commander in our Hebrew Scripture reading—he shows up in Israel expecting the full spa treatment—soft robes, healing waters from some pristine mountain spring, maybe some cucumber slices for his eyes while the prophet puts him on stage and works his magic.

Instead, he gets a lackey. A messenger who pulls up in his 1998 Honda Civic and tells him to go dunk himself in the Jordan River seven times.

Now... I’ve never been to the Jordan river. But from what I’m told, it’s a glorified irrigation ditch.

And Naaman’s furious... “It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this... ordinary!”

But that’s exactly the point.

Because here’s what Naaman discovers in that muddy Jordan. And here’s what the Samaritan leper discovers when he turns back:

God doesn’t show up the way we would if we were God.

God doesn’t show up through spectacle and worldly glory. Through lightning bolts, victory parades, the perfect political regime, the flawless prayer, or whatever it means to get our act together once and for all.

God descends.

God comes into the mess. Into the flesh. Into the muddy water. Into the leprosy. Into our exhaustion and despair.

Jesus doesn’t just heal skin conditions. He doesn’t just fix symptoms.

He restores people at their core. He makes them whole. He brings them Home. Right in the midst of the muddiest of waters.

God never left. Christ’s death and resurrection didn’t create a bridge back to a distant God. Jesus revealed that we never even needed a bridge—God is here, closer than our own flesh. Always has been.

But we forget. Our view is distorted by Sin.

The Bible has this number—seven. Seven days of creation. And seven times Naaman dunks in the Jordan. Seven is the number of completion, of resurrection, of God making all things new.

Naaman goes under that muddy water seven times. The first dunk was probably the hardest. But by the fourth, fifth, and sixth dunk, I imagine him laughing. Maybe he has a soggy toilet paper roll stuck to his head now, but his laughing rolls into tears and when he comes up, he doesn’t just have clean skin.

He knows who God is.

That’s what the Samaritan leper figured out. This outsider who doesn’t even know the rules of this silly purification rite that his friends are on their way to—he stops... Turns around. Comes back to Jesus, falls at his feet, and says thank you.

He realizes: he’s already been made whole. He doesn’t need a silly certificate of purity. He isn’t “on his way to being healed.” Not “almost there.” But: Already.

See, the Eucharist—this meal we’re about to share—isn’t a ritual to get God to show up (like Naaman expecting high-dollar hocus pocus).

The Eucharist is thanksgiving because God has already shown up.

In Christ, God has already descended into our mess, crossed into our exhaustion, and made us realize... We’re home. The separation is over. Not someday. Already.

We are—all of us Gentiles, all of us outsiders grafted into this ancient story—we are already beloved. You are already held. Already made whole.

The Spirit’s job is just to wake us up to what’s already true.

So we keep doing the pageantry. We’re human. It helps.

We process in. We light the candles. We say the ancient words. We take the bread and the wine.

Not to get something from God. But to celebrate what we already have.

Remember that question from the beginning—sitting in the pew wondering if any of this matters? Maybe we’ve lost hope because God doesn’t work the way we think God should. We think God should work with dominant-handed power—straighten up the world, let no one die or go through discomfort (except those who deserve it), wield lightning bolts against the bad guys, make everything come out right.

But God shows us something totally different in Jesus. It’s right here in the pattern of this Eucharist: We rehearse the last supper of a God who put on flesh and died to his mightiness. This is the opposite of earthly victory. It’s the last supper of a God who died to control. And in this meal, God enters us and moves us in this cruciform way.

Not to win over our enemies, but to die to the ways we think winning even looks like.

No wonder people would rather go to brunch than come here. How absurd? But wow, when it hits you, it’s the best thing ever.

Look at your own life. The small ways you love. The old versions of yourself you’ve been disavowed of. The ways you’ve emptied yourself into the things and people you love. And how others have given themselves to you.

All the times you thought it was over. And yet somehow, it’s THOSE times that God was most near. It’s those times that have shaped you and softened you the most. This is how God moves.

Again, it doesn’t look like the winning touchdown or the epic commencement speech or TED talk. It looks like coming up out of the irrigation ditch of your life... covered in mud... with pure joy... to say, thank you. Thank you, God. For you have made me whole.

The liturgy works this truth into our bones—through sight and smell and taste and touch and tears and silence—that we are Home. It makes us go through this pattern of death to remember we are made whole — made alive again in our belovedness. That we are being made MORE HUMAN through this strange, upside down, self-emptying love of the bizarre, ridiculous God we see revealed in Jesus.

And so, we stop collapsing into despair. Not because the world gets less busted, but because we know the ending.

When this hits us, we can welcome the stranger and the outcast because we know what it’s like to be outsiders brought Home. We can relax around our young people because we know we are not their god and we can trust the one, true God in the cracks and imperfections of their lives. And you young people can relax around your older people because you know that God is making all things new.

We can face the cruelty and the chaos without losing our minds, because we’re grounded in love. And that love has a body. Bread and wine. God’s own flesh and blood. For you.

And so it is... Amen.