Beacons of Hope

18^th Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 23C: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-11

2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

The Rev. Cameron Partridge

October 12, 2025

We went through fire and water, but you brought us out into a place of refreshment.

– Psalm 66:11

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.

There is a children’s book that I miss reading regularly. Our youngest was incredulous that I couldn’t initially remember the title as I recently went to search for it on the shelf: The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. It describes how a child named Liam went out to explore his stark urban neighborhood, a city, “without gardens or trees or greenery of any kind,” the book begins, “a dreary place” in which “most people spent their time indoors.”^[1] Liam would not stay inside however, and finds an abandoned overpass, discovers a few plants struggling to survive, and is inspired to help them. Initially his efforts aren’t so helpful – he has no idea how to garden and nearly kills the poor plants. But then, day by day, he figures it out. The plants began to thrive. They became a garden. But this garden was not content just to thrive where it was. It spread. The way Peter Brown describes plant agency in the process is especially wonderful: “Most gardens stay in one place,” he writes. “But this was no ordinary garden. With miles of open railway ahead of it, the garden was growing restless. It wanted to explore.” Later, after the garden had achieved this initial expansion, Brown continues, “the garden had always wanted to explore the rest of the city, and that spring it was finally ready to make its move.” Intriguingly, that move often targeted large, abandoned items. “The garden was especially curious about old, forgotten things,” we hear, and then receive an illustration of grasses and flowers popping out of an abandoned car. The book was inspired by an elevated railway on the west side of Manhattan that had been shut-down in 1980, now a linear garden that some of you may have visited. This book feels post-apocalyptic to me, and in a deeply hopeful way. I love how it describes the persistence of life welling up from the cracks of things, the cast-off detritus of human folly. I love how the garden has such irrepressible, unchainable vitality, drawing humans into its agency, both putting (or planting) us in our place and drawing us out of it.

I was drawn to share this story most immediately as I reflected on our reading from the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah is speaking to a community who are in exile – the Babylonian exile in particular. The year was 594 B.C.E. Jerusalem had fallen three years earlier, but it was not obliterated, and there was tension within the exiled community about how to orient themselves to their exile.^[2] How long would their exile last? How soon should they press to return to Jerusalem and seek to rebuild? How should they relate to the place where they were in the meantime? Jeremiah expressed God’s call as he heard it, to be present in the place where they had been sent, into exile – even as they longed for home, they needed to survive and seek to thrive where they now were. “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.” Have families. Increase. Bloom and grow, as much as possible, amid displacement, even to the point of “seek[ing] the welfare of the city,” where God had sent them and praying on its behalf (Jeremiah 29:4-7). They were being drawn into a project of new life on the other side of disaster. That new life did not erase their loss. Further life beyond that place also awaited them. But in that moment their call – unexpected and perhaps not entirely welcome – was to open themselves to a wild abundance that sought to draw them into its orbit, to take them into a life they could not imagine on their own.

Our gospel passage also depicts the unexpected emergence of new life, this time in the form of healing, life that opens a new pathway while not erasing what has gone before. In this story, ten lepers hail Jesus from a distance, as was customary given that they were considered ritually unclean. This encounter take space in a broadly evoked terrain and journey – as Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem and somewhere in “the region between Samaria and Galilee” (Luke 17:11). These place names set the stage for the Samaritan in particular, the one among the ten who was doubly outcast, to emerge.^[3] But before this, the ten ask Jesus to have mercy on them, to heal them, which he does without much fanfare. His response, telling them to show themselves to the priest, invited them to go ahead and receive confirmation that they were now clean and able to rejoin the community, to carry on lives integrated within the whole (Luke 17:19).^[4] Recalling that the designation of leprosy could cover a number of skin conditions from eczema to Hansen’s Disease, which we most likely think of as leprosy, it is hard to know how dramatically visible their healing was as they made their way to the priest. But regardless, the Samaritan immediately knew and was moved to return, even before his wholeness could officially be confirmed.

Why was he the only one to do so? Episcopal Priest and writer Robert Farrer Capon argues that the Samaritan leper saw a new life rising out of his social death in a way that the others did not. “It is not,” says Capon, that the Samaritan leper, like the Prodigal Son (to recall the parable we heard in Lent – Luke 15:11-32), “is told to forget about the death out of which he has been raised, or to put it behind him, or to ‘get on with his life.’ That was what the nine lepers, and the Prodigal in his first self-examination had in mind.” But for the leper as for the Prodigal Son, “startlingly new life is… based squarely and only on his death.” (As you may recall, the Prodigal’s Father had declared, “let us eat and be merry: for this my son was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15:32).) Capon emphasizes that contrary to the idea of new life as somehow erasing all that has gone before, “everything about us goes home, because everything about us, good or evil, dies in our death and rises by Christ’s life… And that is a gift” because it acknowledges our history, our struggles, our hard-won experience. “At Jesus’ feet [the Samaritan leper] sees himself whole: dead and risen,” one whose outcast experience is acknowledged and uplifted, even as he is healed.^[5] As theologian Justo Gonzalez notes, Luke’s emphasis on the Samaritan’s heartfelt engagement in this process is a sign of the transformative reversals at the heart of Jesus’ ministry: “those who are most marginal and excluded are also able to be most grateful to this Lord who includes them. Those whose experience of community is most painful may well come to the gospel with an added sense of joy.”^[6] As this Samaritan man, now healed, gets up and makes his way at Jesus’ invitation, his faith having made him well, I imagine his gratitude as a kind of garden, spreading the wildly transformative power of the Good News out into a wider world divided and hurting as ours is, yet also at the same time teeming with possibility and life even amid the ruins of our losses.

We are given these stories of planting, healing, and gratitude this morning in a particular location within the Church year, as well. We are now in the final three weeks of the Season of Creation (in the extended way we observe it here), and a month away from beginning our extended observance of Advent on November 9^th with All Saints and All Souls coming in between. But bridging these seasonal shifts is the season-within-a-season that we begin this morning, our stewardship campaign. Beginning today and concluding with our pledge in-gathering on November 30^th, our theme this year is Beacons of Hope. This phrase came to the team (Doug Barnett, Dave Frangquist, Nicole Miller, Paul Nocero and me) as we reflected on our experiences of St. Aidan’s over the years as well as our call as a community in this moment. We seek to be beacons of hope in the midst of pain and suffering, of fear and overwhelm. Beacons, because we need light in the midst of darkness, torches to guide our way. Hope, because there is so much in our country and our world right now that can make us feel hopeless. If you’ve received our letter introducing this year’s campaign, you’ve seen the image the team imagined and that Nicole brought to life. It is a circle of people gathered around a beacon of light. The scene is rendered in rainbow colors, like the rainbow of hope that Noah saw at the end of the great flood, and suggestive of the championing of LGBTQIA+ people that this community has done for decades. As we imagined this image, I suddenly realized it reminded me of something else: this figurine candle set. The moment I realized this was right behind me in my office during our discussion, I swiveled around in my chair and showed it to the others on Zoom. It was given to me – to us – by Kathy O’Loughlin in 2023 sometime in the year before she died. This morning we light it as a reminder of how we have been, are now, and are called to be beacons of hope. In community we come together to be nourished and strengthened, to receive God’s persistent, unfailing, deeply hopeful light amid whatever shadows may surround us. But that isn’t the end of the story. As we receive this light, we are called to radiate it. We are invited to help to shine it amid the lives and struggles of others. We ourselves are to become beacons of hope. That becoming takes different forms at different times, as has long been true at St. Aidan’s. During a community cleanup day here yesterday, I was reminded of this truth when I came across a framed certificate presented to us in 1988 by the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, an LGBTQIA+ congregation that worshipped here for several years before moving on to its own building. The certificate said we should be “rightfully proud” of our support and solidarity—a wonderful item to find on Coming Out Day, as yesterday happened to be. God calls us continually to become beacons of hope, among and with one another, and out into the world as we make our way in a deeply challenging moment. We are not only to “plant gardens and eat what they produce,” to cultivate our little patch of land here in Diamond Heights, as important as that is, but also to seek the broader welfare of the people in and of this place, to be watered gardens (Isaiah 58:11), curious to explore and eager to spread. We are to be beacons of hope.

^[1] Peter Brown, The Curious Garden (Boston & New York: Little Brown & Co., 2009). There are no page numbers!

^[2] Thomas Overholt, “Jeremiah” in The HarperCollins Bible Commentary (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), 566.

^[3] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theologica Account (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 204-5. Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 323.

^[4] Gonzalez, 205

^[5] Capon, 325

^[6] Gonzalez, 206