Proper 24-25 (RCL modified)
Texts: Luke 18:1-14;
Genesis 32:22-31
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ECBiPP-xaSw
Sermon Take-Home Notes
PARABLES OF WOKENESS FOR THE NEW WAY OF BEING HUMAN
I’d like to begin in a somewhat strange place: with a translation issue from last week’s Gospel that I believe sheds light on today’s Gospel. To be honest, I didn’t even notice it last week, partly because I’ve been clueless that our denomination has now switched the official translation of the Bible which it uses and features. Since it came out in 1989, the ELCA has used the New Revised Standard Version, the NRSV, as its main translation.1 But four years ago, there quietly appeared an Updated Edition of the NRSV — the NRSVue. So when Cathi goes to the website each week to download the scripture readings for Sunday, she is now downloading the NRSVue — “Update Edition.”
And last week, without our realizing it, we saw a difference. In Luke 17 verse 12, when ten men approach Jesus for healing, the former NRSV simply says, “ten lepers approached Jesus . . .” But last week, using the NRSVue for the first time with this particular reading, we read “ten men with a skin disease approached Jesus. . .” From “ten lepers” to “ten men with a skin disease.” We might ask, “Is this an example of “Wokeness” that MAGA Christians like to mock us for? Is it wrong to simply say ‘ten lepers’?” Before we answer these questions, I can quickly add that your Sermon Notes show that the NRSVue does actually more accurately translate the original Greek. The word “men” does appear in the Greek.2
But’s what’s at stake with changing from “ten lepers” to “ten men with skin disease.” It is in line with the more careful use of language which I’ve been trying to observe in recent years. For example, I try not to say “slave” anymore, but instead “enslaved person.” Do you see the difference? Simply saying “slave” makes being enslaved the sole identity marker for that person. But saying “enslaved person” keeps their personhood central. Another example which is super important right now, with the way masked I.C.E. agents are sweeping up brown people for deportation, is to say “undocumented person” rather than “illegals.” Is this just silly “Wokeness”?
Or is something very important at stake? I believe it’s really important. Because if we aren’t careful with our language in these kinds of situations, I believe we are making it easier to lose sight of one another’s full humanity. Their personhood. And as soon as we do that, we can begin to justify violence against others since they are somehow less human than we are. We are able, for example, to cheer when ICE gets those “illegals” out of here. Do you see? When they are “illegals,” it is easier to see them as less human than we are. If they are “undocumented persons,” we might more fully take their personhood into account. They are more like us. We can better relate to them and have compassion for them.
“Wokeness” at its best seeks to hold onto the full humanity of all people. It does so by raising awareness of times and places in our history where injustices have been carried out against those whom the dominant culture sees as less human, or even as no longer human. When that happens, we can name the others as “monsters,” “beasts,” “vermin” — and then we can justify any violence we do to them. So please hear me when I say that this is one the things Jesus came to stop. He even let himself be accused as being on the side of Satan, thus giving the leaders in Jerusalem an excuse to crucify him. The new way of being human tries to nip that way of treating other human beings in the bud. In short, I believe that Jesus was Woke, and that being woke is a crucial part of the better way of being human that he came to teach us.
Today’s Gospel Reading gives us another two examples. It consists of two parables, each with two main characters, where Jesus shows one character, who people in first century culture would have been inclined to see in a position of honor. But that honored, esteemed character fails to recognize the full humanity of the other character, who people in first century culture would have not been inclined to see in a position of honor. In your Sermon Notes, I detail how the judge fills the role of an honorable person failing to recognize the full humanity of the widow, and similarly the Pharisee and the tax collector in the second parable. (We might see the Pharisees as villains in the Gospels, but that’s
Jesus’s so-called ‘moral of the story’ for the first parable essentially asks us: isn’t God someone who sees everyone’s full humanity such that God is inclined to hear us and grant justice? And, will the “Son of Man,” who represents the new way to be human, find people who live faithfully in the way of a God who treasures each person’s full humanity? And Jesus’ ‘moral of the story’ for the second parable is that God treats both the Pharisee and the tax collector as having full humanity, and so having equality of justice before God. In your Sermon Notes, I explain a better translation that leads to seeing the Pharisee and tax collector as side-by-side in God’s eyes.3 When those we humans exalt — like the Pharisee — are humbled and those we humans humble — like the tax collector — are exalted, they end up side-by-side — equal, parallel, in God’s sight. [Using hands to show:] Humbling the exalted and exalting the humble is not a matter of God reversing the positions [hands at different heights simply switching heights]. It’s a matter of God leveling what we humans tend to make unequal — of God seeing each person equally as a child of God [hands at different heights coming to the same level].
I’d like to end, then, with two very different kinds of story. The first is a personal testimony. It’s from a book I just started reading, titled Why Christians Should Be Leftists.4 Now, I’m not nearly far enough in the book to judge whether his claim is true. But he gets started in a way I find compelling way with a personal testimony. The author, Phil Christman, had been raised in fundamentalist churches. One of the first things to happen to him when he left home for college was to meet with a new group of friends to read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount together. He had recently broken up with a girlfriend, so he began to wonder if this is what lonely guys without girlfriends begin to do. To sit down with relative strangers to read the Bible? “Am I some kind of loser?” he thought. He explains that he had tended in his life to that point to judge himself, to judge everyone, in terms of winners and losers. “Mentally and emotionally,” he writes, “I lived in a savage economy of winners and losers, and I spent a lot of time feeling like [a loser].”5
But something happened to him that day as he and his fellow students began to read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He describes what was the beginning of a conversion experience:
I won’t say that these other people were suddenly transfigured in my mind, that I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces. But a fundamentally other way of thinking about them suddenly appeared to me as an option; a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which . . . each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, and unvarying love. . . . I felt aware of the possibility of an impersonal but absolute love: a sense of what it might be like if all of us willed what was best for each other as intensely as we will what’s best for ourselves [“Love our neighbors as ourselves”], and the possibility of letting go of my self-will because I know that every other person cherishes me as though I were their own life. No longer rigidly holding on to myself, because I know I am upheld. What I felt was the possibility of universal solidarity.6
The other story I’d like to briefly share has the same basic insight, but in a children’s book. I recommend it: You Are Special, by Max Lucado.7 It’s about a village of little wooden people, called Wemmicks, who play that same game of pegging everyone as winners of losers. When someone does something winning, they stick them with a star. When someone does something losing, they get stuck with a dot. So everyone walks around with some combination of stars and dots stuck all over them.
Punchinello was someone who had only dots. Until one day he meets someone, Lucinda, who has neither stars nor dots. Punchinello asks her how that could be. Lucinda says that she began losing all her stars and dots when she made regular trips to visit Eli, their maker, whose workshop was on a hill at the edge of town. She encourages Punchinello to pay Eli a visit. One day he finally does, and this is how it goes:
Eli stooped down and picked [Punchinello] up and set him on the bench. “Hmm,” the maker spoke thoughtfully as he looked at the gray dots. “Looks like you’ve been given some bad marks.”
“I didn’t mean to, Eli. I really tried hard.”
“Oh, you don’t have to defend yourself to me, child. I don’t care what the other Wemmicks think.”
“You don’t?”
“No, and you shouldn’t either. Who are they to give stars or dots? They’re Wemmicks just like you. What they think doesn’t matter, Punchinello. All that matters is what I think. And I think you are pretty special.” And as Punchinello left, one of his dots fell off.8
Siblings in Christ, how do you and I fit into the story of our times being written right now? As rising nationalism compels people to divide the world into winners and losers, friends and enemies, how might we respond? The Son of Man, representing the new way of being human, has come into the world. That’s our faith! Will he find us faithful to that new way of being human which he has pioneered? A way of being human that stops dividing the world into winners and losers and instead strives to see every human being as created equal in God’s sight? Now that the Son of Man has come into the world, letting himself be counted among the losers on the cross, what does being faithful to him look like? Do we simply watch as so many people have their humanity devalued in justification for purging them? Or do we find ways of speaking out against such practices and advocate for our undocumented neighbors? There’s ways we can get involved. I understand that this coming Saturday’s there’s going to be planned protests. I plan on being there. I invite you to find ways of speaking out. Of living this new way of being human, which puts behind us dividing the world into winners and losers and instead strives to see each person as equally a child of God. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, October 12, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ECBiPP-xaSw
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. My denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), is an active member of the National Council of Churches, which is the para-organization that has overseen the projects of the translation ‘family’ to update the King James Version: first, the Revised Standard Version (RSV) in 1952; then, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) in 1989; now, the New Revised Standard Version—Updated Edition (NRSVue) in 2021.
2. As I detail in the Sermon Notes, the Greek is deka leproi andres — most literally: “ten leprous men.”
3. See Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (HarperOne, 2014), 191-193. She translates para in 18:14 as “alongside” instead of “rather than” (NRSVue), yielding, “To you I say, descending to his house, this one is justified, alongside that one.” She evens argues that it could be translated “this one is justified because of that one.” The most common meaning of para is “alongside” or “with.” To translate para as a contrasting “rather than” is possible, if there is a context that warrants contrast, but it is not common. Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, wonders if the long history of Christian interpreters seeing Pharisees in a negative light creates bias to see this context in a contrasting manner.
4. Phil Christman, Why Christians Should Be Leftists (Eerdmans, 2025).
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Ibid., 8-9
7. Max Lucado, You Are Special. Illustrations by Sergio Martinez (Crossway Books, 1997).
8. Ibid., 25.
