There’s an open secret among food service workers, particularly those who work in places that serve breakfast and lunch. Well, I’m sure there are many of them, but this is one. When you work in breakfast or brunch places, most of the front of house staff (the people you get to see) groan when groups of Christians come in. Did you know this? It’s not because people who are not church goers hate those who do or have some bias against them in particular. It’s because these groups tend to be demanding, messy, arrogant, and do not tip well, if at all according to some stories I’ve heard. What a tragic representation of what Christianity is supposed to be about!

When I had a café, the groups my staff loved the most would be other service professionals on their days off. These folks were the best because they were kind, patient, had great senses of humor generally, were fun to care for, and they tipped the best of any group of people.

At least that was the scuttlebutt in Reno when I owned a cafe. Maybe Wenatchee Christians are better behaved.

There are different ways people engage with “the help.” When you’re serving someone who sees you as an equal or sees you as a real person, service is a real joy. It’s fun to delight people, to be hospitable, to help them be comfortable and to surprise them with what you have to offer. Truly, there were many days when owning a café felt like one long play date with my friends who were my customers and my crew.

On the other hand, when you’re working in food service and serving people who do not see you as a fellow human being, however subtle their slights might be, it feels like there is a chasm of separation between who you really are as a person and how you’re seen in that relationship. And there is a chasm of separation between you and the one you’re serving. It’s painful to be on the receiving end of that. Plus, there is no joy, no fun, no connection. That’s when food service work truly becomes work and that play date experience is just gone.

This is why I often say the world would be a better place if everyone had to work in food service for at least six months. There’s a sense of entitlement and separation that people can have that just melts away when you’re on the receiving end, too.

Us humans tend to cling to what we think makes us powerful, gives us status, or makes us special or safe. Our clinging doesn’t work so well if we’re truly open and loving to everyone, including the lowly ones in front of us, working for minimum wage or who are in harder situations.

I’ve read a little about the ultra-rich and how they go to great lengths to buffer themselves from us “mere mortals”, so that they only interact with each other and their highly select paid staff. There’s no walking into a coffee shop for them with the danger of a talkative barista with tattoos and piercings and student debt and horrible health insurance and a broken-down car who still takes pride in their latte art, all the same. Perhaps they don’t want to risk actual relationships and hence compassion for peoples’ lives that are wildly different than their own. That might get complicated in their hearts and minds. The rest of us don’t have the luxury of such extreme buffers as gates with guards and people to run our errands, but perhaps we all have ways of creating buffers that keep us separate.

So, when we read this gospel text and how Jesus was slighted by nine healed people, I thought about how Jesus was a afterall homeless, sometimes troublesome rabble-rouser who the powerful hated and the poor loved. Jesus performed this act of abundant healing for all of these people who were unclean and had to live outside the bounds of normal societal rules. Before this healing, they clung to each other. They formed their own community of people who were unclean. But the moment the ten were healed, only the one turned back to say thank you and that one would have still been considered an outsider as a Samaritan. Only the one who didn’t have a status worth defending thanked the one who so graciously served them all.

And in the first reading, our fancy pants general Naaman had to be led by the wisdom of his servants to understand where healing was to be found. His healing was found by letting his need to be seen as important go and obey a simple command. Did you notice Elisha didn’t even come out to greet him himself, but sent someone in his stead? How insulting to Naaman for him to come all this way with his fancy war apparatus across all that distance. He expected a reception and to receive some epic, dramatic healing that would match the seriousness of the moment and the importance of this man. Instead, he got Elisha’s messenger to tell him to go dip in the water. And from the sound of it, it was puny water, to boot.

All the regalness of his warrior status was not honored because it was meaningless to Elisha, so of course Naaman became angry. All that defined him, in his mind, was nothing to this prophet of God. Demoralizing. Yet, to receive his healing, he had to obey. He had to set all that drama aside and do the simple thing. This act was kind of an admission that all his pomp, all his glorified status was really nothing. And when he obeyed, he was healed and gathered in by God, inspiring him to proclaim that God is the only true God.

He had to stop clinging to his false pretenses to be healed.

This is how some folks interpret baptism and what it means to die with Christ. In baptism, we talk about dying with Christ, meaning that our little petty selves, our false sense of who we are that is based on our capacities, status, or anything that makes us feel special and worthy, eventually dies with Christ so that we can be reborn as one’s who understand our identities to be based solely on Christ. To die with Christ is to let all that false self go, to let it melt so that Christ becomes the source of our identity. We are reborn and transformed to see Christ in everyone, which means we also see ourselves in everyone. We see that we are all the same, regardless of all the games we play to assert otherwise. Status and power lose their meaning and we begin to see Christ, see the Kingdom of God everywhere we look – in each other, in ourselves, and in all of Creation.

Our little selves, our false ideas of who we are, get in the way of the Kingdom of God. Arrogance, for any reason, is an obstacle to receiving gifts from God and from each other. The trick is that we are often blind to our own arrogance. I don’t think there’s any truly arrogant person alive who is aware of their arrogance. I wonder if we only become aware of our arrogance and how we might be clinging to our false selves through adversity, like Naaman. Afterall, there’s no way on this earth that a great and mighty general of a conquering nation would have obeyed the commands of a lowly prophet of a foreign religion who didn’t even come out to admire his power without the great suffering of his skin condition. He was humbled by the reality of his need. Without need, without suffering, we don’t seem interested in letting our false pretenses go.

So, I wonder if there is a gift of healing or grace for you hidden in your suffering? Likewise, we can ask that same question about our communities or our country. Are there pretenses of power and domination at play in places of violence in the world? In how we’re managing conflict in our own country? In how we manage conflict in our families? In how we care for our planet? In how we care for ourselves? Where is pride, pretense, and our false selves getting in the way of the Kingdom of God? Those painful places might just be the perfect places for us to focus on in prayer and to ask God for direction and transformation. This is a big question, one that we can talk about in our Tuesday group.

The truth is we all get caught up in our false selves at one time or another. We do this as individuals, but also as collectives and groups. The truth is, we all need our “Come to Jesus” meetings when we are humbled and brought low, not in humiliation but for the sake of freedom. Think of the baby Jesus, born in a lowly manger. Think of Jesus crucified. He teaches us the way. When we let the pretenses go, we become free to be loved, healed, and to belong without any of our trappings. That is salvation. And when we walk this path, our servers when we someday go out to breakfast will notice and celebrate every time we walk in the door.   

AMEN