A sermon on Luke 17:11-19 and 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
Preached at Saratoga Springs UMC on Sunday, October 12, 2025

Would you pray with me?

God of the outcasts, thank you for bringing us together to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I first learned about the National Leprosarium of the United States, the image on the front of the bulletin, in an episode of the podcast Criminal, titled “No Place Like Home,” Neil White, a magazine publisher convicted of white-collar crime, is sent to a minimum-security prison. Normal enough, but it turns out that Neil was part of a short-lived experiment: the prison he was sent to was none other than the Hansen’s Disease Center in Carville, Louisiana. He served his eighteen-month sentence along with other incarcerated folks and the patients at the continental United States’s last leper colony.

Now, what we know as Hansen’s Disease today might not be exactly what the biblical writers meant when they said leprosy, but it’s definitely what we mean today when we say leprosy. Hansen’s Disease is a skin disease caused by bacteria, Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis, but there’s a genetic component too: not everyone who has the bacteria develops symptoms. And, it turns out, leprosy doesn’t spread that quickly. 95% of people who contract or are exposed to M. leprae bacteria don’t develop the disease. Still, those who do develop the disease can have incredibly debilitating symptoms, so it’s great that we found a combination of medications that first treated Hansen’s Disease in the 1950s, making it untransmissible, and cured it in the 80s. We went from 5.2 million cases of Hansen’s Disease in the 80s globally to just two hundred thousand in 2020.

All of which is to say that when Neil White went to Carville in the 90s, the National Leprosarium should have been empty. We had a cure. And the patients in Carville were indeed cured: there was no chance of them continuing to suffer the ill effects of the disease or spreading it.

So why were they still there?

I want to come back to that.

But first, let’s talk about Jesus. Jesus and Naaman.

I gotta say, I am frustrated by Jesus’s behavior in this passage. Same with Naaman. Why are they so petulant?

Now, I’m willing to do work to apologize for Jesus. He is heading toward the cross, so he likely has a lot on his mind. And, to his credit, he does immediately offer healing to the ten people who are shouting at him from a distance, so he is still pouring out compassion on folks. But gosh, I am so irritated at the “Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” First off, Jesus, you know as well as I do that you’re right by Samaria, so it’s not really fair to call this man a foreigner, and second off, Samaritans are just descendants of the people of Israel, which is literally where the prophet Elisha is from and I can’t believe you’re being this petty over a disagreement about which temple to worship in. And THIRDLY, I know you’re the literal Son of God and all, but isn’t it a bit prideful to demand worship from someone you did a favor for? It’s not like you had a hard job here, buddy!

And you know, it’s the same thing with Naaman. It’s not like he had a hard job. I mean, yes, he did travel to Israel to be healed, but dude, all you have to do is dip yourself in the river seven times. It’s not difficult. Can you not trust people for once in your life?

Because that is what this is ultimately about. It’s about trust and community.

Naaman is an Aramean. He is truly a foreigner. But he hasn’t found healing in his own land, and so, when a girl who had been kidnapped from Israel and trafficked into Aram talks about how the prophet in Samaria, Elisha, could heal him, he’s willing to take a risk. He goes to his king, who trusts Naaman enough to write a letter on his behalf to the king of Israel, asking for him to heal Naaman.

Now, the king of Israel has no trust. He thinks it’s the king of Aram trying to pick a fight by asking him to heal the incurable Naaman. Elisha steps in, gives Naaman his very simple instructions for healing, and Naaman… is infuriated. “What’s wrong with the rivers of Damascus? Aren’t they better than the river here?” The bible literally says that he goes away in a rage. He trusted this girl, he used his trust with the king to get here, and now he’s being tricked?

It's up to the servants to give him some perspective. “Hey, if this had been some complicated healing ointment that took three months to make, you’d have done it. So why fight it when it’s simple?” Naaman, for all his rage, seems to value the words of his servants. It’s his redeeming grace. He trusts them. He goes and does as Elisha says, and is cured.

And for Naaman, the way his trust has been rewarded, it’s his entry into what we might call the community of faith. He’s healed, and he’ll remember this healing worshipping God. It would be nice if, when he got back to Aram, he freed the girl who told him about Elisha in the first place, but we have to take what we can get. One step at a time.

Now, we know that Jesus knows this story. 2nd Kings would have been scripture for Jesus, scripture he would have definitely read and potentially memorized. Maybe that’s where his comment comes from. Maybe he has Naaman in mind when he calls the man who came back a foreigner. And maybe he was hoping that this healing would end the same way Naaman’s did: in community. Maybe it’s not anger or pettiness in his voice. Maybe it’s sadness.

Let’s go back to Carville.

In the episode of Criminal, we hear from a patient from the Hansen’s Disease Center in Carville: Mr. Pete. Mr. Pete was born in the Virgin Islands and was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease and quarantined at 6 years old. He spent his childhood in a hospital there, unable to touch or be touched by his family, until he turned 21 and was sent to Carville. He never saw his family again. In 2015, he was one of the six last patients to stay at Carville.

When asked why he stayed there so long, when he could have left as early as the 1950s, Mr. Pete said that it was easier to stay. He said, “Sometimes I wish I was out on the outside, and I could get out, but when I look, I say, well, people are going to ask me a lot of questions. ‘What happened to your fingers? Why you got this spot? Why this?’ I say, well, I don't want to go through all that. I stay here.”

The trust is broken.

It’s not that Mr. Pete couldn’t have a normal life out in the world. It’s not that he’s not capable of that. It’s that the world doesn’t trust Mr. Pete, and he doesn’t trust the world. Even when given the opportunity to be completely free, out in the world, he would rather stay in the ever-emptier halls of Carville and dream of his final resting place under the pecan tree in the cemetery.

Do you feel the weight of that sadness, of that loss? There is the beauty of found family, the joy of made community, yes, but for someone like Jesus, someone who came to make all things new, there is the deep, lingering sadness of broken trust.

Because think of all the things that would have to change for Mr. Pete to willingly choose to be out in the world, to trust the people he meets. First, everyone would have to learn about Hansen’s Disease. Everyone would have to internalize the fact that Hansen’s Disease isn’t easily transmitted and is, in fact, curable. Then, we would need to teach people to understand that a physical difference doesn’t mean someone is any less than you. We would need people to be chill about bodies, and we’ve been having trouble to get people to understand that for quite some time now. And then, once we’ve done all of that, we would still need to do the work of connecting individual folks to Mr. Pete and rebuilding first trust, then community.

Why didn’t all ten people come back to Jesus after being healed? Well, we can’t answer that. As they went toward the priests, trusting in Jesus’s instructions, they were healed of their illnesses. Maybe some of them had recently been shunned from society because of their skin condition, and went rejoicing back to their homes, but others certainly had spent years, maybe decades at a distance from everyone who wasn’t sick. Maybe they couldn’t believe they were healed. Maybe they didn’t think others would believe them. Whatever the reason, physical healing wasn’t enough for them to join in the community. Like Mr. Pete, they needed more.

Now, maybe this is me wishing to be told to go back to the rivers of Damascus for my solution, rather than dipping myself seven times in the Jordan. Maybe I want something bigger and flashier, rather than something simple. And if that’s the case, thank God for Naaman.

Because you and I, we can’t make the entire world safe for people like Mr. Pete, people who have been stigmatized, who have been rejected, who have lost their trust in the world. But maybe we don’t need to make the whole world safe. Maybe we just need to make enough of it safe. And we do that by building trust and building community. It’s as simple and as impossible as that.

Friends, the world we live in is a challenging place, and there are many, many people who have lost their trust in it. We will have work to do in this world for all the days of our lives and sometimes we, like Jesus, will see the results of our work and have to bear the deep sadness that there is still more to be done.

But we can always start again: Listen to others. Show up when you’re needed. That’s how you build trust. And once you have trust, all community needs is time. And once you have community… well, that, my friends, is how we transform the world.

Let’s go and do it.

Amen.