Second Chances
Luke 17:11-19
A man is met at the airport by a friend. They’re on their way to the baggage claim when his friend notices an older woman with a cane struggling up a ramp. The friend stops to help her.
They get the man’s bags, and then head for a cab. On the way, his friend notices two little kids trying to see Santa Claus from behind a crowd of adults. His friend stops to lift them above the crowd so they can see.
While they’re in line for a cab, they hear the guy behind them say that he is late for his daughter’s birthday party. The friend immediately flags down a cab for the guy, helps him load his bags in the trunk, and sends him off with a smile.
Finally, the two men are in the cab on the way home.
“How did you get to be like this?” the man says to his friend.
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. So thoughtful.”
With Every Step
That’s when his friend tells him that he had once been a soldier leading a platoon in combat. For several days, his platoon had to fight their way across a large open meadow strewn with landmines. From time to time, he’d hear an explosion, look back, and see another comrade blown to pieces.
He knew that with every step, his own life was in danger.
Well, he got out alive. He was one of the lucky ones. But when he got home from the war, he decided that he would no longer take his life for granted. He would try to live differently.
He had gotten a second chance. And he seized it. From that day on, there could be no business as usual. He would never be the same again. With every step he took, his life was different.
This can happen when you get a second chance: It gets you thinking. Maybe you narrowly escape a car crash, or survive the onset of cancer, or some creative medical intervention pulls you back from death’s door. You go through some serious self-evaluation, ask yourself some tough questions.
When you’re given a second chance, you have to decide whether you will seize it.
You can, after all, simply take a deep breath and go back to business as usual with perhaps little more than something like a shallow New Year’s resolution to show for it all.
Or, something new can begin to emerge. Maybe you decide not to go back to the life you lived. In that case, your second chance has had an effect.
Seizing the Second Chance
In today’s gospel, only one out of ten seizes the second chance. It’s not a good return, and you can feel the sadness of Jesus. It’s a story of lost opportunities.
But mostly it has to do with that one person who does seize the second chance, who “gets” what that moment is about.
Look back at the story for a moment… When Jesus sees the lepers, he sees more than the sores on their skin. He recognizes their isolation. They are outcasts who must live outside the city, away from family and friends. There were laws on the books meant to protect not the lepers, but society from the lepers. They are kept out, isolated, alone.
Jesus tells the lepers to go and show themselves to the priests.
The priests are the gatekeepers of the community. His command to go see the priests means they are on their way back into the community. If the priests declare them clean, their isolation is over.
At this point in the story, the question becomes: What happens to these people as they re-enter community? Will they simply go back to their old familiar ways as if nothing had happened? Or have they learned something along their solitary journey? Will they be any different once they have returned home?
In this moment of healing, they are being given a second chance. But will they seize it?
The Samaritan, the most unlikely one of the bunch, does seize it. First, he does the most natural, spontaneous thing in such a moment: he bursts out with praise and thanksgiving. And then, when he falls at the feet of Jesus, it’s more than a gesture of reverence. It symbolizes his decision to follow the new way that Jesus teaches. For this man, a normal, respectable life is not enough. Something more beckons.
And Jesus instructs him: “Get up and go.” It is time to live—not to go back home as if nothing had happened, but to find a new way that his faith has begun to forge for him.
Second chances can do that; can send you on new paths, down roads you had never imagined. Often, they send you out of the familiar and comfortable into the unexpected.
It drives Rosa Parks to the front of the bus. Harvey Milk to San Francisco City Hall. Cesar Chavez to the vineyards of Fresno. Dorothy Day to New York’s Bowery.
Second chances do that: They lead you down roads you never imagined. A normal, respectable life is no longer enough. Something more beckons.
This Crazy Parish
Sometimes I think coming here to this crazy, struggling parish has been a second chance for many of us. Here where “LGBT” and “Christian” are not contradictions in terms. Where you’re surrounded by so many who try, each in our own way, to live with a little more compassion, a little more joy, a little more love.
In this parish, some of us have actually found ourselves falling in love with God again, and rediscovering a big part of our own souls.
True, this motley group of people creates much consternation among the religious right. But it also gives much hope to many others. Many of those folks may never cross our threshold: maybe they simply hear about us, stumble across our website, or pick up from a local coffee shop one of those little cards about our concerts, Taize services, and many celebrations. No matter. Our presence has made a difference.
And think of all the flurry these days in the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church. Can you think of a time when a parish like this, in a diocese like this, has been more important? Like it or not, we’re up to our necks in this great historic moment.
Just Make It All Go Away
A personal confession… I have moments when I would be so happy of this whole controversy about gay bishops and gay unions would just go away. Just let me quietly live a normal life: do my job, snuggle in with the man I love, raise our kid, pay the bills. If I didn't have to send money to human rights organizations and letters to congress, solicit signatures on street corners. Please, just make it all go away so I can live a quiet, unperturbed life.
But then I wake up, or something wakes me up and reminds me that business as usual is not the vocation God has given me as a gay man in 2007. Nor is it the vocation of this parish. For whatever reasons, God has placed us in the center of this perfect storm, and called us to keep showing up, speaking our word, giving hope and a second chance not just for our sake but for the sake of many others as well.
And I have to trust that it’s in living out this vocation, not in pining for quieter times and business as usual, that we will find our deepest peace.
Do you remember the story Martin Luther King once told about the old woman he met in one of the picket lines during the height of the civil rights struggle? She'd been out there for hours in the hot sun, ankles swollen, shuffling up and down the picket line carrying her sign. He asked her why she didn't stop and take break. "Aren't you tired," he asked? She said, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
I think you and I in this parish know what she meant.
These thoughts cross my mind on this particular morning as we commission our canvassers and begin our parish pledge drive for the year.
Because seizing a second chance is not just a cerebral exercise. It involves putting one foot in front of another until you find yourself walking a different path. And it can involve adjusting our finances as well, putting our money where our hearts are.
A U-Haul Attached to a Hearse
There’s story about the crusty old tycoon celebrating his 90th birthday. At his birthday party, a local reporter asked him for the secret of his longevity. He said, “It’s simple. I just decided that if I can’t take it with me, I’m not going.”
Well, obviously, he did go. And, no, he did not take it with him.
In fact, Billy Graham gave one of his best lines when he said he’d never seen a U-Haul trailer attached to a hearse.
We can’t take it with us, but we can seize our second chances and put our money where our hearts are.
The healed leper laughed with a joyful, exuberant burst of praise and thanksgiving—but then went further, to become a follower, walking a new path. He recognized his second chance and seized it.
Just as we must do with our second chances. Such moments are not limited to escapes from death or miraculous cures. There’s nothing that stops us right here and now from recognizing that our time on this planet is short, and that the time for more love is right now. We can begin, right now, to direct our steps on the path to that new, fuller life that God so very much wants us to have.
Within Every Step You Take
Because ultimately, the second chance lies within every minute, within every step you take. And the question you and I must ask ourselves today and every day is whether we will seize it.
