Liminal Space- What’s Next?

Beloved people of God, grace and peace to you from God, the great artist of the Creation.  Amen.

          Growing up, Thanksgiving morning always began with watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on television while my mother and grandmother were busy in the kitchen.  My brother and I would watch as the high school bands marched by, always excited if there was one from someplace familiar to us.  We’d rank our favorite floats:  Charlie Brown and the Cat in the Hat and Garfield.  But there was no question who we were really waiting to see. As the parade would near its end, we would scoot closer to the television screen as though we were getting a better view.  Do you know who we were waiting on?  Santa, of course!

          And he’d always arrive in style….high atop a float bedazzled with Christmas tree lights and bedecked with dazzling decorations, his eight tiny reindeer there with Rudolph leading the way. 

          I still watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and I still watch it to the end so I don’t miss Santa. 

          I wonder if this isn’t how we expect God to arrive?  Even some parts of Scripture describe the arrival of God as this great and powerful being riding on the clouds, shining like the sun, with trumpets sounding and angels singing.  And maybe, at the last day, it will be something like that.  But so far, God has a tendency to show up in far more ordinary ways and in far more ordinary places.

          In our reading from 2 Kings today, Naaman was a great and powerful commander in Aram.  Everyone held him in high esteem. According to the text, God even favored Naaman. But there was a problem.  Naaman had a skin condition scripture calls leprosy.  And the thing about skin conditions is that we can’t really hide them.  One can’t look at a person and tell they have diabetes or a heart issue, but those with a skin disease wear it, literally, for all to see. 

And Naaman was desperate for a cure.  He sent a letter to the ruler of Israel asking for help.  But it seemed that the help he longed for was actually going to come from a prophet of God and at the suggestion of a servant girl Naaman had captured in battle and brought back as plunder for his wife.

          Naaman was not looking to go to some backwater prophet, though. He was appealing to the king of Israel for a cure.   Finally convinced that he should go see the prophet Elisha, Naaman gathers up his horses and chariots and parades up to Elisha’s house, stopping at the door.  A show of just how mighty and powerful a warrior he was. 

          And Elisha doesn’t even bother to come out. He sends a message out to Naaman and says “Go and wash 7 times in the Jordan river and that will restore you.” 

          Naaman is not happy with this response.  He says: I thought he would at least come out and wave his hands around and call on the name of God and cure me right here and right now!  I don’t want to go wash in the Jordan when I have perfectly good rivers right in my own country.  And he turns on his heel and leaves.  It takes a mighty effort by his attendants and servants to convince him to give Elisha’s method a try. 

          In a similar story from Luke’s Gospel today there are ten people with leprosy in a village Jesus enters at the border between Samaria and Galilee.   They ask Jesus for mercy and Jesus offers them an unlikely prescription for healing:  Go and show yourselves to the priests.  Again, no great show of might and power.  No angels singing, no trumpets sounding, no waving about of hands….just go show yourselves to the priests.  While that seems strange to us, showing themselves to the priests would be the only way they would be allowed to live back in the village with the people they loved.  The priests wouldn’t heal their skin disease, but they would restore them to community.  There would be no other reason to see the priests for these ten people, unless they were healed.  And as they were going to the priests, they were healed.  Just as they were walking along….nothing different about this day from any other…..walking a road that they’d likely walked many times before in this village….and as they were going, they were healed.

          A remarkable and often overlooked detail about this story is that it takes place at the border of Samaria and Galilee.  It is not a place that would be rich with tradition or even necessarily a place anyone would journey TO.  It’s the border.  It’s a crossing.  It’s a liminal space….a threshold between one place and another.  And yet, for those ten people with leprosy it was the place they were healed. 

          Naaman and the ten people with leprosy were both healed in unexpected ways and in unexpected places.  Naaman was in another country, seeking help from a prophet that was known to the people Naaman had captured, though not to his own people.  There was nothing familiar or even promising to this scenario and, except for the suggestion of a servant girl, Naaman wouldn’t have known Elisha even existed.  And while he argued and fumed along the way, he eventually did what Elisha directed and he was healed.

          The ten with leprosy were healed along the border….in a place between one space and another.  Only the Samaritan, who was an outsider to those Luke was telling the story to, comes back in gratitude.

          It’s never easy to be in liminal spaces.  In thresholds between one thing and the next.  In places where this thing has been accomplished and what is to happen next has not yet been revealed.   People who have finished school and are waiting on a job know this feeling.   And maybe we know it here too.  For so long we have worked tirelessly to provide a way for those without homes among us, in our community.  We did so much ground work (literally)….hearing the stories and transferring the land, and then we endured the joyous chaos of the construction and then we celebrated when the ribbon was cut….and….now what? 

          Like Naaman I’d like some grand plan to be revealed that might involve calling on the name of God and waving hands over us and hearing God proclaim:  “Here’s What I Want You to Do Next”.  But remember, in these stories and in our story that’s not how God works.  God works in the unexpected places and in the unexpected people.  God works in the foreigner, the Samaritan who gives thanks and the servant girl who mentions that there is prophet in Samaria.  God works at the border….the place between this place and that one. 

          God does not come among us like Santa on the Macy’s day float.  God always comes in the places and the ways we would least expect God to show up.  But I know this for sure….what’s next for us as God’s people in this place waits for us only when we are willing to try what God is calling us to.  Only when, like Naaman and like the ten with leprosy we are willing to try something new, or unfamiliar. When we hear that the children next door need a safe place to trick or treat….well that doesn’t look very big and grand and parade worthy.  Aren’t there places they can trick or treat without us having to, you know, actually engage?  Aren’t the rivers of Damascus, better than any of the waters of Israel?

Or when we have the opportunity to learn about refugee resettlement which is the historic work of the Lutheran Church….but it feels uncomfortable and maybe too political….although throughout Scripture God literally demands that we care for refugees.

          Beloved God is not Santa Clause.  God does not reward our good behaviors with the items on our wish list and God does not ride in at the end of the parade.  God walks with lepers.  God sits at the border. God holds the hands of the refugees. God wades in the water.  

God calls us to new ways of being that weren’t what we were expecting at all… that likely seem unfamiliar and unappealing and that we might be reluctant to engage in… but that will, in the end, be what saves us.          
Thanks be to God and let the Church say…Amen.