TheoTrek — A Journey with God in Discipleship
Outward Embrace
2nd Kings 5:10-15; Luke 17:11-19: 2nd Timothy 2:8-15
Central Baptist Church—Lowesville, VA
14 October 2007
Today we celebrate World Hunger Sunday. We embrace those in need around the globe with a show of God’s love and provision. Alongside our tithes and regular offerings, we received funds to channel toward alleviating crises of hunger around the world. We picture hunger on the faces of beautiful children suffering through no fault of their own. We look at families suffering from drought, weather disasters, and oppressive poverty. We think of our own children, grandchildren, neighbors, and dole out a portion of our excess in demonstration of love. All the while, we think of ourselves and those we hold dear. Is not the gospel of Christ Jesus more than that? Am I willing to embrace an entire world in need, including those we prefer to despise?
Who did Jesus love and embrace, after all? Does the gospel really mean what it says by things like “Love your enemies,”[1] “Bless those who persecute you,”[2] and “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”[3]? Are we willing to go that far with our offering God’s loving embrace to the world beyond the walls of our fellowship?
We live with pictures of Jesus walking around the Judean countryside doing good and healing people of all sorts of diseases. We developed these pictures back during our childhood Sunday School lessons, looking at the teaching pictures our teachers used to illustrate the events recorded in the gospel accounts. The gospel writers often had other thoughts in mind. Our pictures often don’t do justice to the import of their record. Luke seems to go out of his way to record only some of Jesus’ healings—the more controversial ones.
Today’s reading begins with the innocuous account of Jesus healing a group of lepers. We hear that he is in a region between Samaria and Galilee, but that hardly seems important to the story—until the end, that is. Everything goes along according to the standard expectations of the audience. A group of lepers approaches to the proper distance, calling out for mercy from outside the ring of Jesus’ party. Jesus responds in grace, embracing their need with a demonstration of God’s love. They are sent off to show themselves to the priests, according to the proper rules of reentering society. One turns back. He does not obey Jesus’ instructions. Rather he stops and recognizes that Jesus’ reaching out to him is of much greater worth than all the priestly procedures. More than that, he is a hated foreigner who has found himself embraced by the scope of Yahweh’s grace.
The Jewish lepers are still following Jesus’ orders. They are going about their religious rites as though nothing were more proper. The one who disobeys Jesus is the only one he praises. He is also the only one who could not have obeyed, anyway. A Samaritan would be barred from showing himself to the priest at the Temple. The religious restrictions cut this one off from nearing God’s presence, yet he recognized that God’s grace extended outward to include a world shunned by religious ritual.
The Jews were willing to embrace their own needy. They could provide for God’s unlikely grace toward one of their own they found repulsive, but Jesus’ gospel demanded that they extend their embrace outward toward their enemies and those who made them uncomfortable. His grace and love were meant to encompass the entire world of God’s creation. His words criticize those others who were seemingly following his orders.
Naaman was an idolatrous foreigner, whose nation was often at war with Israel. Arriving in Israel, his words to the king of Israel were taken as a challenge as prelude to war. They were likely meant as such, for the healing of leprosy was unheard of, and this man’s words came as a demand. Even so, Yahweh embraced this foreign enemy with grace and acceptance. Though an enemy of the nation of Israel, though idolatrous, through using his leprous status to incite war, he was accepted under Yahweh’s embrace, including him in the company of redemption. Elisha’s attitude and action seem to proclaim along with God’s redemption that this is but a small demonstration of Yahweh’s power and willingness to embrace all in love—even an enemy of Yahweh’s chosen people.
Paul writes from prison, placed there because he was willing to share God’s overwhelming embrace of love and grace with the entire world. The Jews could not abide such an outrage. They were more concerned with protecting their status in their own eyes than serving a world in need according to the scope of God’s mercy, grace, and love. They embraced their own, but could not allow Paul to extend that embrace beyond the limits of their comfort.
Paul, Elisha, and Jesus went beyond the accepted limits of determining whom they would embrace with God’s love, acceptance, and grace. They recognized a larger world beyond their internal fellowship. They found that Yahweh’s embrace encompassed the needs of a widow of an enemy nation, the war messenger of an enemy power, an immigrant unloved and shunned by the nation, and those who would persecute faithful messengers of the gospel of God’s grace. They looked not at the worth of others in human terms, but the scope of God’s loving embrace. Will we embrace an entire world?
We have a choice as to how we will look upon others. We can choose to see them from our own perspective as threats to our way of life. By so doing, we place our personal issues ahead of God’s. We can choose to view others as embraced by the grace of Christ Jesus, who died not for us alone, but for the entire world. If Jesus’ love and grace is sufficient to encompass them, will we allow God’s embrace to come through us?
God receives sinners. God loves those who are enemies of the cross of Christ Jesus. God loves those who would cheat, steal, terrorize, or grasp power at the expense of others. God is ready to embrace the needs of those we are all too willing to overlook. It is not a question of how far God’s love extends. There is no question about how far God is willing to take an offer of redemption, love, and grace. What is left to answer is whether we are we up to Jesus’ call to embrace liars, thieves, murderers, undocumented immigrants, and terrorists. Are we willing to suffer persecution along with Paul in order for Christ to embrace the world through us?
How far will God’s embrace to move in our lives? Some placed money in the offering plate. Some may feed the homeless at a Lynchburg shelter. Some may walk up to a door in our own community this church has ever visited. Some may set aside prejudices about whom we should approach with God’s embrace. Some may restrict the gospel’s embrace to this fellowship alone. Will we limit or extend the reach of God’s outward embrace? There is an entire world outside our embrace.
—©2007 Christopher B. Harbin