Time asked whether it sparked a spiritual crisis, and Levy replied that it was more like a spiritual paralysis. Levy said she didn’t know how to pray – she didn’t believe that God gives people diseases and disasters, that these happen in the course of nature. So if God didn’t give this disease, how could she pray for God to take it away? She found herself not sure what to say to God, unable to feel God’s presence. So she did what any parent would do: she devoted herself to her daughter, and remarkably, her daughter grew and developed.
Despite some physical and learning disabilities, the time came for Noa to prepare for her bat mitzvah, age 13, and she was still strong & healthy. So her mother, the Rabbi, began to teach her the passage of scripture she needed to recite at her bat mitzvah. The next words are Rabbi Levy’s:
“I asked Noa what her [scripture passage] meant to her and she told me, ‘Mom, I think it means if you don't like your life, if you try really hard, you can find hope.’ And then Noa corrected herself. She said, ‘No, Mom, hope will find you.’
“I gasped when Noa said ‘hope will find you.’ I lost my breath. Because I had been trying for so long to hold onto hope or to grasp for hope, but my wise child was telling me I didn't have to try so hard or hold on so desperately. She was telling me to relax, let hope in, like a kind of grace. Noa was telling me hope was looking for me. That hope would track us all down.”
Much later, Rabbi Levy learned the incredible good news that her daughter's diagnosis had been wrong. She didn't have the degenerative disease, and though she has a few learning and physical disabilities, she is now on her high school's volleyball team, and she is growing strong and healthy. What a miracle.
Hope will find us. It’s a kind of wisdom that can come only from someone who has experienced a life crisis, the kind of crisis that requires you to find reserves of faith, strength and courage you didn’t know you had. This is the kind of crisis the people of Israel are experiencing in the reading from Jeremiah today. To give you an idea of what is going on here, the prophet Jeremiah is writing to a people in exile. For years, Jeremiah had been warning that Jerusalem was on the wrong course, politically and socially, that it had strayed away from God’s hopes for it, for a just society that cares for its members and remembers its identity as the people of God; and that if it kept on course, Jerusalem was going to bring disaster on itself.
And for years, Jeremiah was ignored by people who preferred not to see the truth, preferred to listen to false prophets who said everything was fine. In 587 BC, the disaster occurred: Babylon invaded Judah and took its leaders into exile – king, priests, ruling class, artisans, educated people. And now Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, who warned them repeatedly about the disaster to come, begins to speak a new word to people who have lost hope – and that new word is: hope will find you. Wherever you are, he writes to a people in exile, live a life of hope, and hope will find you: build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce; marry and have children and create a life for the future. Where you find yourself, he says, is where hope will find you also. And though life may feel like a disaster now, God is still present in that disaster, and God is working in you and through you to bring new hope for the future.
Jeremiah goes even further than telling people to settle and find new ways to make a life for themselves – he tells them that the place where they are, the place of captivity, loss and exile – that is their mission field. As the people of God, he tells them, they must make this strange and foreign city their own city, they must seek the welfare of Babylon, work to improve it, pray for the people who are holding them captive. And as they bring new life to the city of their captivity, they will find new life for themselves – hope will find them.
If there’s any word we need to hear more clearly in our world today than Jeremiah’s words to a people in exile, I don’t know what it is. Because we are a people in exile too. News commentators tell us that we are suffering from “economic dislocation,” that the way we had learned to make our home in the world, a home built on a foundation of a strong economy and a stable culture, that world no longer exists, and we are a people in exile.
Bad news piles up day by day, news of two wars, of terrorism, of job losses, of ordinary people who can’t make ends meet, of corrupt Wall Street titans who continue to profit from the misfortunes of ordinary people. We are a people in exile from the stable and prosperous world we had known, who have to learn to find hope in a world whose foundations are shaking. And it’s not only the public world that is in exile, there are heartbreaking recent episodes of children who lost hope taking their own lives. And many of us are experiencing personal exile as well – job insecurity, economic losses, personal grief and tragedy, addiction, unstable relationships.
In this world of exile, the last thing we do naturally is what Jeremiah recommends: to pray for our enemies and seek their welfare. It is tempting instead to turn on each other and point fingers at each other, polarizing ourselves into teams that call each other names and refuse to listen or hear or give each other credit for any wisdom or courage. Into such a world, Jeremiah comes – Jesus comes – God comes – to speak a word of hope, telling us to make our home here, and make this world of exile our mission field – to make the welfare of the community around us our dream, devote ourselves to God’s mission of healing and reconciliation among these people, and in that mission we will find our own hope.
Hope means believing that God’s love and God’s mission continues in all the exiles in which we find ourselves. Hope means seeing the world more completely, understanding that underneath the reality of this exile in which we find ourselves lies a hidden dimension: God’s love, promise, and healing that is always with us.
When we read a story of healing like the one in the gospel today, about the healing of ten lepers, it is easy to focus on scientific questions like, can God really heal, and miss the larger message: that God is in every situation, that hope will find us, that what it takes to be healed and restored of all the exiles we find ourselves in is a new kind of eyesight, a sight that begins on the inside, with a complete reorientation of our minds and hearts – with hope.
In the story, tenlepers were cured of their disease; nine of them missed that message of hope. Leprosy in that time wasn’t just the Hansen’s disease that we know – it was any skin disease – an imperfection that made a person impure and disqualified them from entering the temple. And because they were impure, anyone who touched them was also impure – they were spiritually contagious. So they were banished from society and could only associate with each other.
Therefore leprosy was far more than a physical illness – it was an illness that brought slow and agonizing emotional and spiritual death as they left their families behind and went into the heartbreaking exile of leprosy. The story doesn’t say Jesus cured them of their diseases – only that he suggested that they present themselves to the priest who could pronounce them pure. Nine of them were pronounced cured and went home. One realized that hope had found him, and that one was not just cured, but healed.
When Jesus says “your faith has made you well”, he uses different word from just “cured.” Jesus is saying “your faith has made you whole, complete.” Jesus recognizes that many things can bring a cure, but faith brings healing. Faith allows us to recognize that in the place of exile, hope will track us down. It allows us to see that spiritual dimension of reality that brings wholeness and wellness of body, mind and spirit and to know that God has been there with us in exile.
Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, wrote about the moment when her teacher held her hand under a faucet and repeatedly tapped the sign for “water” into her hand until she suddenly understood what language was. "Suddenly," she wrote, "I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -- a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could, in time, be swept away. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. . . . Every object that I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me."
Helen Keller was suddenly able to see, not because her eyes began to work, but because her mind formed a pattern that made sense of the world around her. Like the exiles in Babylon, struggling with a chaotic world and finding that hope came only when then they could reorient their minds and hearts to find new hope in a strange and foreign land, Helen Keller could see, hear, and interact with people only when her soul was awakened with a strange new understanding. She was not cured, but she was healed.
When we begin to see the reality of God’s presence in all the exiles of our lives (the reality that runs through our veins, through the air around us, the reality of new sight that opens our eyes to God’s work all around us) – then, for us as for Naomi Levy, as for Helen Keller, as for the exiles in Babylon, as for the tenth leper who saw what the other nine missed: our faith gives us hope, our hope gives us mission, our mission gives us power to change the world around us, our power brings hope to the world. And this is what it means to believe in God: hope will find us.
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