A Homily for the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17  2 Timothy 2:8-13  Luke 17:11-19

What is the first step in healing? Knowing what ails you! If you do not know what is wrong, how can you apply a remedy? 

Ellen Berry recently reinforced this truth in a New York Times article entitled “Autism, A.D.H.D., Anxiety: Can a Diagnosis Make You Better?” Also included were those 

who received midlife diagnoses of binge eating disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder…Nearly all of them said the diagnosis provided relief. Sometimes it led to an effective treatment. But sometimes, simply identifying the problem — putting a name to it — seemed to help.

The same is true of purely physical pathologies. How does one remedy the unrecognized? Sometimes we do not even see our suffering as sickness. Instead, we come to believe that this is the way it must be, and in doing so, we fail to recognize that healing is possible. 

Naaman of Aram knew two things. He was sick with leprosy, and he knew where to go for healing. The same is true of the lepers who approach our Lord in the Gospel of Luke, crying out: “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!” (17:13).

But what of those who cannot see their own sickness, who accept the abnormal as normal? And what if that is true of us? The revelation of God’s existence is tied to the recognition that we are sinners. So much so that it is hard to say which dawns first: the awareness of our brokenness or the acknowledgment that God is our savior, the one who makes us whole. 

This is all the more true when we speak of societal sin. Pervasive attitudes can embed themselves within cultures, becoming so commonplace, so shared with others, that we fail to see them as pathologies, as limitations upon our growth into wholeness. How else does one explain the long tenure of what are now recognized as abnormalities of the past: things such as slavery and the imposition of capital punishments that far exceeded the crimes committed? And unfortunately, even today, none of us look upon racism, sexism or any other social pathology from afar. How can we when we have been raised in societies that still accept the same?

In “The Day the Music Died,” the Atlantic critic Spencer Kornhaber recently asked if popular culture is in terminal decline. For example, why have popular music and fashion changed so little in the last 20 years? Sometimes the diagnosis is easy enough. Unlike the record labels of days past, Spotify does not take risks by promoting new talent. It pays out based on downloads, reinforcing the status quo. 

But Kornhaber suggested a more basic pathology: isolationism. The interaction with others that creativity demands is retreating from our culture. We simply do not encounter strangers—those who are different than we are—as we once did, and we are paying the price. 

The United States was once the most mobile society in history. Yoni Appelbaum, also an Atlantic author, writes that in the 19th century, one in three Americans moved every year. Even as late as the 1960s, one in five still moved yearly. So, where other people feared the newcomer, Americans developed their own, unique salutation, “Howdy Stranger!” In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved in any given year (“How Progressives Froze the American Dream”). Most of us now live in increasingly stagnant environments. Fourteen million American homes are now in gated communities. 

Ironically, the great engine of social progress, the internet, is part of the pathology. At a rate much faster than the technologies that came before—the printing press, radio and television—the World Wide Web has rapidly become a self-selected isolation chamber, where we only interact with those who share our beliefs, preferences and prejudices. Couple this with the decline in real social engagement—joining clubs, going to church and opting for extra-curricular activities in schools. The result is a society that is no longer as vibrant as it once was. People no longer grow through creative interaction with others. 

As the art critic Dean Kissick put it,

The culture we have is so obsessed with ourselves, with people’s identities and personalities. Perhaps we’ll be able to transcend that somehow. Perhaps we will get over this deeply individualistic, deeply self-obsessed moment. But I don’t know how that would happen.

We’d better. Our acceptance of the Gospel and our maturation within it depend upon it. 

St. Thomas Aquinas drew a contrast between humans and angels. He suggested that each angel is its own species, meaning that one angel is as different from another as a rhinoceros is from a fish. This is because, as the saint explained, each angel perfectly fulfills what it means to be an angel, what God intended. We humans, in contrast, are all members of a single species. No one of us embodies the human. We only become what it means to be human, we only find ourselves, fulfilling what the creator intended, when we interact with each other.

How can we heal without seeing the sickness? Isolation is social leprosy. We fear others as infectious, only to isolate ourselves. If we continue to reject the immigrant, the outcast and the stranger, will we ever find ourselves? Muscles do not grow without meeting resistance. Neither do people. Chaos makes us all uncomfortable, but it births creativity. 

Healing follows diagnosis, and that must come from some other, from someone standing outside the sickness. If everyone is ill, they fail to see the pathology, much less to challenge it. This is why our faith proclaims a savior, a stranger, sent by the creator himself. He comes among us, saying that it does not need to be this way, that we can be healed. 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.