11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus[a] was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten men with a skin disease approached him. Keeping their distance, 13 they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” 14 When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16 He prostrated himself at Jesus’s[b] feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine? 18 Did none of them return to give glory to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17: 11-19)

I love Bethel’s Zoom Prayer Time.  I love it for several reasons:  First and foremost, its because it exemplifies Bethel as a community.  Every week we log in,  share our concerns and our joys, then pray through our prayer list.  There is honest sharing about our experiences; both the good and the bad.  Sometimes there are tears.  Most of the time there’s a lot of laughing.  But the bottom line is that this is a trusted community of believers who really want to support and care for each other. 

The other reason I love the Zoom Prayer Time is because even though we’ve been doing this for 3 years now, every week we have the same conversation with each other and it usually goes like this:

“I can see you but I can’t hear you”.  “You’re muted”.   “No, go down to the taskbar at the bottom of your screen and click on the thingy that looks like a microphone”.  “Wait, no, you’re on a tablet.  O.k. someone with a tablet tell us where the task bar is”.  “You’re gonna have to take out your earbuds because we can’t hear you with that little microphone”  (….or variations of the theme of hearing and seeing and problems of using technology that we didn’t grow up using).  Its often fuel for a whole lot of hilarity.  My favourite time was when one of us switched their tablet to another one and we could hear them on one tablet but see them on the other. 

But somehow we still manage.  Not only do we manage with the technology that is still uncomfortable for us even though we’ve been using it every week since the first lockdown, but we also manage to really ‘see’ and ‘hear’ each other in the fullest sense of the words. 

And honestly, that’s a rare thing. 

I know that for me, dealing with the social distancing and the self-isolation of the pandemic meant that there were many times that it was clear that not only could people not ‘see’ or ‘hear’ me physically, but they also couldn’t ‘see’ or ‘hear’ me emotionally either.  To be fair, I also struggled to see and hear other people during this time.  For a lot of reasons, right!  It was a time when we were isolated in our collective trauma and none of us really got the support that was needed when we needed it.  And, as we were sitting alone in our self-isolation it was hard to really see other people’s trauma because we were so consumed with our own fear and our own loneliness.  Several times I found myself being resentful that people couldn’t ‘see’ me struggling, and realized pretty quickly that the trauma I experienced was trauma they were experiencing too. 

Its like the collective trauma has set us back several centuries in our faith commandment to ‘love one another as I have loved you’.  (John 13:34).  Or, maybe, more realistically, its just highlighted the very human self-centeredness that we all live with all the time. 

I love that the Gospel reading for this Sunday, for Thanksgiving Sunday, is the story about the 10 lepers.  You see, Jesus walked through a borderland, and heard 10 people calling out to them.  When he saw them he told them to “Go show yourselves to the priests”.  The priests couldn’t see them in their unwell state, but could see them and welcome back to the community when they were healed.  I also hope you noticed that their healing wasn’t dependent on them seeing Jesus for who he was and thanking him like the one person did.  They were just healed because Jesus could see them.  That’s it. 

Healing offered and love given just because.  Not because they acted in a certain way or did things in a way that is approved on.  Not even because the lepers fully understood Jesus as God and returned to thank him.  Only because of who God is.  That’s it. 

I’m so grateful for Bethel ‘seeing’ me and ‘seeing’ each other as we learn again what it means to be community after such a long time of being called away from community.  I’m so grateful that you continue to work to have Jesus as the example for how we are to care and love each other.  And I’m so grateful that we have a technology that keeps us connected in a very really way even though our use of it is so flawed.  Because, really, our very human reality is that we are flawed in the same way; and we aren’t called to perfection, we are simply called to follow Jesus. 

Blessings today, and remember you are loved.

~Rev Lynne