lepers

Be Like This Dirty Foreigner: Sermon Preached on 12th October 2025 (Seventeenth Sunday After Trinity)

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A painting featuring a group of figures dressed in elaborate, tattered white robes with raised hands, holding staffs adorned with bells and vines. They appear to be in motion, reaching out toward a single figure on the right, also in white robes, standing with arms outstretched against a grayish background. The scene has a mystical and dynamic feel.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

2 Timothy 2. 8-15; Luke 17. 11-19

“He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.”

Whom do you hate?

A painting depicting a group of people in colorful, tattered clothing kneeling and reaching out with raised hands on a grassy hill. In the background, a figure in a white robe stands alone, with a soft, glowing sky above. A few shadowy figures are visible further back on the hill. The scene conveys a sense of reverence and awe.
Gebhard Fugel, Ten Lepers Call Out to Jesus (1920), hangs in the Diocesan Museum of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, in Freising.

Do you hate Muslims?

Do you hate… Tories?

Do you hate Black people? Do you hate posh people? Do you hate Nigel Farage? Do you, well, want to make clear you’re not anti-Semitic, of course, but actually you hate the Israelis? Or do you hate sanctimonious lefty-liberals who have self-righteousness like other people have bad breath?

We all have a little bit of hatred for somebody or other tucked away in us somewhere. None of us is all-kind and all-loving all the time. We all form in-groups and out-groups—that’s just part of human nature. We can’t possibly know everything we need to know to make a judgement as to whether to trust somebody we’ve just met, so we all look for shortcuts to help us form a view of them. Although our higher aspirations rightly make us try to suppress these instincts, it’s not always easy to navigate the world without them, and they aren’t easy to control.

For the Jews of Jesus’ time and place, the people they hated were the Samaritans. Their religion was very similar to that of the Jews, but that just made the ways in which it was slightly different even more upsetting. Unlike the Jews, the Samaritans hadn’t been sent into exile by the Babylonians, but had always lived in the Holy Land— so as far as the Samaritans were concerned, they were the true descendants of Moses and David, while the Jews were the people whose religion had been corrupted by funny foreign ideas.

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Are You A Leper?: Sermon Preached in St Mary’s, Potterne, Sunday 9th October 2022 (Seventeenth  Sunday after Trinity)

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Readings — 2 Timothy 2: 8–15; Luke 17: 11–19

“As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dividing ourselves into insiders and outsiders is one of our most basic human instincts. It would be nice to think that, as we are all equally loved by God our heavenly Father, we could see all eight billion people in the world as our brothers and sisters. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. We know that not everyone can be trusted, but we also know that we need to trust strangers sometimes.

Two fences with a road running between them and two pedestrians passing with their back to camera.
Us and Them – the West Belfast Peace Line at Conway Street, 6 June 2020.

Subconsciously, whether we admit it or not, when we meet strangers we are always hunting for clues about whether we can trust them or not. This might be whether they look and sound like us, which can have damaging consequences for society, but we also often trust people who are different from us if their behaviour is what we expect, or their beliefs are like ours. The Samaritans were the most dangerous kind of outsiders – they looked and sounded similar to the Second Temple Jewish community that Jesus came from, and their beliefs were largely similar, but very different in some important respects. All of us who lived in Northern Ireland during The Troubles became very adept at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from our own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders.

In the Roman Empire of St Paul’s time, to claim that an executed criminal was God made human was a weird, even creepy, belief. So to be a Christian was to make oneself into something of an outsider. Therefore in the Second Letter to Timothy, which our Epistle this morning came from, there is a repeated theme of Paul telling Timothy not to be ashamed of the Gospel. For Paul himself, the Gospel is so valuable that he has allowed himself to suffer what must have been the ultimate indignity for this proud Roman citizen – he was a jailbird.

What was so valuable that it was worth being “chained like a criminal”, treated as the ultimate outsider? It was that Jesus Christ was “raised from the dead” and that: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” That was the treasure worth paying any price for.

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