Luke 17

There is nothing wrong with the nine. There is something extraordinary about the one.

Jesus doesn’t seem to think so.

Maybe the lepers know that Jesus likes being in the borderland.

 Have you noticed God’s preference for small things?

I should have known better. Grandma had nine decades under her belt of doing things her way.

When I read this week's Gospel, I remember two lepers I saw at a train station in India—how alone they were.

I'm more than a bit smitten with the image of rekindling the gift of God within us.

The lepers all received healing. What a happy shock that must've been! But only one, a Samaritan, returned and thanked Jesus.

There are moments when you just know what’s coming next. No one has to confirm it for you; the feeling in your gut is confirmation enough. After I lay on the ultrasound table for two minutes, the technician left me alone while she went to find the radiologist. I knew I was in trouble. No one had biopsied anything. No one had uttered the word “cancer,” much less “lobular invasive carcinoma,” but I knew.

An emphasis on the decision character of faith has a long and deep history in the American psyche going back to our Puritan and evangelical ancestors. From Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney to Billy Sunday, Billy Graham and their successors, faith, as encountered in the idiom both of born-again revivalism and of religious “progressives,” has served as shorthand for “I have decided to follow Jesus.” But the biblical meaning of faith cannot be reduced to individualistic voluntarism.