Sermon: Popping the Bubble

Texts:  Luke 17:11-19; Psalm 66:1-12

Date: October 14, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            Having a terrible skin disease seems bad enough.  The words translated “leper” and “leprosy” in stories like this one covered a wide range of skin disorders, so we can’t be absolutely sure of the nature of the diseases from which the ten “lepers” were suffering.  But this we can be sure of: they had been kicked out of camp, “voted off the island.”  Their disfiguring skin condition meant that they had to stay clean away from the uninfected.  They had to shout out “Unclean, unclean,” whenever they were roving around so that those who were ritually clean could steer clear of them.  Awful.

            It was as if they were confined to a bubble that they carried around with them, a moving membrane of impurity.  I’m sure it got real lonely in there.  At least these ten “lepers” had each other.  They could clump together in their miserable state of ill health and exile.  Can you see them, in their ten-person bubble of wretchedness, calling out to Jesus, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

            And he does.  Have mercy, that is.  He sends them off to the priests; they are the ones in the Hebrew tradition who will have to declare them healed before they can return to the community.  Along the way to see the priests, they are made clean, glory hallelujah!  One immediate effect is that the invisible but potent bubble of uncleanness is popped.  Gone, poof, like a soap bubble poked by a child. The lepers are, in an instant, “brought out to a spacious place.”

            I’ve been rolling that phrase from Psalm 66 around in my head since I read it.  It’s such a beautiful expression of God’s saving work: “You have brought us out to a spacious place.”  I think most of us, once we’re over the infancy stage of liking to be swaddled, really enjoy spacious places.  There’s something about being out on the mountain top, or in the middle of the prairie under an enormous sky, or getting a glimpse of a million stars that allows the spirit to soar.  “You have brought us out to a spacious place;” it’s a spiritual metaphor that resonates with me. 

            The one grateful leper featured in the story seems to have recognized the spacious place he had landed in right away.  He turned back as soon as he was healed, loudly praising God and seeking Jesus, who had been the instrument of God’s healing power.  He threw himself at Jesus’ feet, thanking him profusely.  He appeared to be lost in wonder as he glorified God.  It’s a very expansive moment, isn’t it; his heart has expanded with gratitude so much that he has to sing and shout and let the whole world know  that God is great. 

            “But the other nine, where are they?”  That’s the question Jesus raises after seeing the one Samaritan leper return to praise God.  The other nine, didn’t they realize that God had brought them, also, out into a spacious place?  What’s the deal?

            We don’t really know the rest of the story for the other nine, so that allows our theological imaginations some freedom.  Here’s where my imagination went.  I started thinking about the “Boy in a Bubble” stories in our culture.  I’ve been polling people all week, asking whether they get a picture in their heads if I say “Boy in a bubble.”  Most people do, based on the real life stories of a couple of youngsters who were raised in sterile environments because their disease made them unable to fight off germs, or based on the movies, television shows and songs that have followed.  There is something about the image of a little kid inside a big plastic bubble that really sticks with you. 

            Suppose that the other nine didn’t experience what the psalmist called “a spacious place” because for one reason or another they were still psychologically confined to a sort of “bubble” even after Jesus’ healing popped the invisible “Unclean” membrane?   What if their individual “bubbles,” a confinement of their own invention, inflated immediately to take the place of the invisible “unclean” bubble?  So that they were physically healed, but not set free?

            Someone has written an imaginative explanation of why the other nine did not turn back:  One waited to see if the cure was real.  One waited to see if it would last.  One said he would see Jesus later.  One decided that he had never had leprosy in the first place.  One said he would have gotten well anyway.  One gave the glory to the priests.  One said, "O, well, Jesus didn't really do anything."  One said, "Any rabbi could have done it."  One said, "I was already much improved."[1]

            Of course, this is purely theological imagination.  But if there is any hypothetical truth in this, most of the nine reasons for not returning to Jesus lean toward a perennial problem for humankind: self-absorption of one kind or another.  It’s the “it’s all about ME” syndrome in a variety of forms.  If I am at the command center of my own little world, I won’t be able to recognize or trust in other powers.  I will think any really good thing that happens to me came about because of my own virtue or hard work.  I will only honor what I can see and touch in my own little sphere.  I will make looking out for number one Job One.  I think a lot of us go around in little invisible bubbles of our own creation, occasionally colliding with other bubbles.

            The boys who were in plastic bubbles for medical reasons had to stay confined to their sterile environments in order to keep germs out.  Any articles that went into the sterile space had to be specially treated to remove any possible infectious germs.  They needed a barrier between them and the messy world out there. 

            Those of us who are in invisible bubbles of our own invention want protection from the messy world as well.  We don’t necessarily welcome strange ideas or strange people who think and act differently.  We put up a lot of psychological defenses around our ideologies, as if we had to keep infectious notions out.  We resist being reminded that we are not in total control of our destinies.  We like the idea of free agency so much that we don’t like being told we might have obligations to other creatures outside our own personal bubbles. 

  The bubble boys could only touch and be touched through gloves that reached into and out of their sterile environments.  All their touching—from hugs to fist fights with little sisters—was done with thick gloves on that were attached to the outside membrane.  I’ve met plenty of people who seem to go through life with this kind of emotional protection built in.  Many of us don’t like being deeply touched emotionally very much because it involves a loss of control.  We put up all kinds of barriers to keep ourselves distant, both from other humans and from God. 

People may also put up psychological barriers between them and the big messy world in order to shut out what seem like too many problems out there.  I was reading a Jim Hightower book last week that ended with a chapter entitled “Don’t be an idiot.”  He writes, “The original Greek word idiotes referred to people who might have had a high IQ but were so self-involved that they focused exclusively on their own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about public concerns and the common good.”  He speculates that the Powers That Be—governing authorities and corporate characters—prefer that you be an idiot in this sense.  His sense of the message that emanates from the Powers That Be sounds like this: “Get a job, keep your head down, play the lottery, don’t be different, take a pill, watch ‘reality TV,’ buy things, play it safe, live vicariously, don’t make waves, prepay your funeral…Go about your business—be a good idiot.”[2]

There’s a problem with being a good idiot who is confined by a little globe of self-involvement.  You know what happens scientifically if you have a closed system.  If you breathe nothing but your own air eventually you poison yourself.  Look what happened to Biosphere II, which was an elegantly designed closed system that was supposed to be self-sufficient indefinitely.  The air filtration didn’t work right.  Pollution levels quickly built.  The people couldn’t get along with each other even in that tiny community of eight.  Most of the species inside the sphere went extinct before the two-year trial was up.  I’m borrowing Biosphere as a metaphor—I don’t believe we are really meant to live in bubbles of any kind. 

Once we recognize that we may have confined ourselves in our own little self-absorbed world, we might wonder how we can get out.  One of the stories I read about one of the Bubble Boys was that his caretakers left a sharp object in there with him when he was a little fella and he started poking holes in his bubble.  I think gratitude is the kind of sharp instrument that pops a bubble of self-absorption from the inside.  Let me explain.

There is something about giving thanks that lifts up your heart and expands the space you’re in.  I saw it in the beautiful face of Leslie Gordon last week when she came to a meeting.  I take it that her morning’s work had been difficult.  Then she took their dog Oscar out for a walk.  And the leaves on the trees were brilliant colors in the autumn sun, and everything shifted.  She lifted up her eyes and her heart.  She said WOW, which also meant Thank You.  She passed on the WOW, her gratitude, to those of us in the small office for a meeting, and even though we were still indoors, we lifted up our hearts in gratitude for the gift of creation, in which we are a small part.

Even such simple, ordinary thanksgiving relocates us from our own little spheres where we are apt to spin and spin on the axis of our own little worries and dissatisfactions.  Giving thanks, we suddenly find ourselves transported to a spacious place, the unspeakably beautiful and complex web of life.  Listen to the way poet Mary Oliver turns words of gratitude about the great variety of insects into an instrument to deflate the “It’s all about me” bubble:

Eighty-eight thousand six-hundred
different species in North America. In the trees, the grasses
around us. Maybe more, maybe
several million on each acre of earth. This one
as well as any other. Where you are standing
at dusk. Where the moon
appears to be climbing the eastern sky. Where the wind
seems to be traveling through the trees, and the frogs
are content in their black ponds or else
why do they sing? Where you feel
a power that is not you but flows
into you like a river. Where you lie down and breathe
the sweet honey of the grass and count
the stars; where you fall asleep listening
to the simple chords repeated, repeated.
Where, resting, you feel
the perfection, the rising, the happiness
of their dark wings.

It’s not that I’m all that fond of insects or love to contemplate that many different species of winged creatures—but she nails it when she writes of feeling “a power that is not you but flows into you like a river.”  Gratitude frees us to feel that power, which I would name as Divine power, power that is not us but wants to heal us and use us.  Feeling it allows us to embody it, to let it flow through us.

I think that when the one leper turned back to give thanks, when he lifted up his eyes to glorify God for what God had done, he opened himself for the power that had healed him to flow full circle through him.  He was not only healed, he was made well, made whole.  He was given new life.  He was brought to a spacious place with a newly opened heart.  I don’t know what happened to him when he went home, but I imagine he was a force for healing the world when he got back to his place.  Gratitude for what God has created and is creating, for what God has healed and is healing, opens you to participate, powerfully, in the creative and restorative work of God. 

Have you been acting like an idiot lately?  That is, have you been trapped in the little bubble of your own life, subconsciously toying with the idea that it really is all about you?  Have you been spending a lot of energy trying to keep the messy world out of your field of concern?  Are you sick to death of breathing your own tiresome air?  God wants to bring you to a more spacious place.  Punch a hole in the shiny bubble of ego with some gratitude for the one who made you and who gave you everything that sustains you.  Breathe in the fresh wind of the spirit.  You are a tiny but irreplaceable instrument in the hands of God.   To God be the glory.

[1] Anonymously quoted in  an illustrations e-newsletter, illustrations@CLERGY.NET

[2] Hightower, Jim  Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time to Take It Back New York: Plume Books, 2003, p. 238