"Heal the Leprosy of our Hearts" - Sermon for 18 Pentecost, 10-12-25

Two Sundays ago, a few miles down the road from the last congregation in Michigan that I served, a man who hated Mormons – he had called them the Antichrist – rammed his vehicle into one of their churches, setting the building ablaze, and burning it to the ground. He killed four people in the attack – two by gunshot and two by the fire – and injured eight others. He was killed on the scene by the police.

A Mormon from another church began a Go-Fund-Me campaign that quickly raised $300,000 – not for that congregation or the victims, but for the wife and children of the attacker. He knew that this family – left without a husband and father, and traumatized by the horrors he inflicted – he knew that they needed help, too. “It’s what Jesus commands us to do,” the man gave as the reason for this countercultural act.

I’ve wondered about Mormons. The little I know about them suggests to me that their theology and their socio-political stances don’t square with mine. And are they even Christian? I recall while I was in seminary, a classmate who had been baptized while a Mormon was conditionally baptized in the seminary chapel. My classmate’s bishop and the seminary faculty weren’t certain that Mormons are Christian, so we used the prayer book provision – If you are not already baptized … – just in case.

And they’re a bit odd, aren’t they, the Mormons, with their shirt-and-tied young missionaries, their secretive garments and rituals, and their obsession with genealogy. (But of course, we Anglo-Catholics are a bit odd in our own way, wouldn’t you say?) 

And yet, in that moment, before the embers and ashes of the burned-down-church turned cold, before they knew anything about the attacker or his motives or his family, before they buried their own dead and processed their own grief and trauma, these Mormons gave, quickly and generously. These questionable Christians and cultural punchlines gave $300,000 to the family of a killer “because it’s what Jesus commands us to do.”

I wonder … did God use the dread disease and social contagion of yet one more mass shooting to teach us something about healing and reconciliation? About being made well?

Might we progressive Anglo-Catholics have more in common with those conservative Mormons than we care to admit?

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The Arameans and the Israelites were neighbors and, long before Naaman and Elisha showed up, they held some things in common. They shared some ancestry, good relations, and even language – Aramaic, the language Jesus was to speak. Then things began to sour. Culture, religion, and politics led to Aram and Israel becoming uneasy adversaries. That’s why the King of Israel was so upset. He thought the King of Aram was looking for an edge, an excuse to pick a fight. Aram had already raided Israel, after all, and captured the girl who went on to serve Naaman’s wife. What would they do next?

A similar relationship became true between the Samaritans and the Hebrews. Common stock, then separation, then mutual hatred. That’s why the gospel stories with Samaritans in them – Saint John’s Woman at the Well and Saint Luke’s Good Samaritan and today’s Tenth Leper – sounded so shocking to Jesus’s first audience. They scarcely could imagine, let alone admit, that those backward, insufferable, deplorable Samaritans could be anything but that.

But God, - the maker of heaven and earth, of Arameans and Israelites, of Samaritans and Hebrews – God had something to show us.

Through the Prophet Elisha, the man of God, the proud Arameans and anxious Israelites witnessed a powerful healing that recalled their common roots.

Through Christ Jesus, the Son of God, nine Hebrews and one Samaritan received a powerful healing and were made equally clean.

God used leprosy – a dread disease and a social contagion – as the medium in which God’s Prophet healed one, and God’s Son healed many. This healing of lepers shows us that God desires that we live as outcasts no longer. In Christ’s gift of reconciliation, if we accept it, we find that we have more in common with each other than we either care to remember or dare to admit.

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Naaman, bristling with nationalistic, chauvinistic bluster, at first chose to stay his sorry, diseased self rather than dip even his pinky toe into the adversary’s insignificant, muddy ditch, the so-called River Jordan. To his way of thinking, his rivers back home, the Abana and the Pharpar, were so much better. But, after listening to the inspired, wise, and courageous counsel of his servants, proud Naaman humbled himself and went seven times into the Jordan as God’s prophet Elisha commanded. Naaman accepted the gift. Naaman was made well.

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I hope for our country to be made well. I hope to be made well myself. Some days I wonder what grounds this hope. I recall Jesus’s lament over the Holy City. Weeping, he said, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (Luke 19:42).

To ground my hope in the Almighty, I pray: God our Father, open our eyes to the gift of your healing, as you opened Naaman’s ears to the counsel of his servants. May the tears that your Son Jesus weeps today rain down upon me, upon your Church, upon our country, and upon your world, and heal us from the leprosy in our hearts. Give us the discerning wisdom and courage of the Holy Spirit to seek and find what we hold in common with each other, especially with our uneasy adversaries. Help us to recognize on this day the things that make for peace. Amen.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

18 Pentecost, Proper 23 – October 12, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Heal the Leprosy of our Hearts”