A House of Prayer for All People

Here this sermon from Isaiah 56 and the story of Jesus healing the lepers with a modern day application

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

October 26, 2025

“A House of Prayer for All People”

Isaiah 56: 1-8 – Common English Bible

The Lord says:
     Act justly and do what is righteous,
     because my salvation is coming soon,
     and my righteousness will be revealed.
 2 Happy is the one who does this,
     the person who holds it fast,
     who keeps the Sabbath, not making it impure,
     and avoids doing any evil.

3 Don’t let the immigrant who has joined with the Lord say,
     “The Lord will exclude me from the people.”
     And don’t let the eunuch say,
         “I’m just a dry tree.”
 4 The Lord says:
     To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
     choose what I desire,
     and remain loyal to my covenant.
 5     In my temple and courts, I will give them
     a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.
     I will give to them an enduring name
     that won’t be removed.
 6 The immigrants who have joined me,[a]
     serving me and loving my name,[b] becoming my servants,[c]
     everyone who keeps the Sabbath without making it impure,
     and those who hold fast to my covenant:
7     I will bring them to my holy mountain,
     and bring them joy in my house of prayer.
     I will accept their entirely burned offerings and sacrifices on my altar.
     My house will be known as a house of prayer for all peoples,
 8         says the Lord God,
     who gathers Israel’s outcasts.
 I will gather still others to those I have already gathered.

About two years ago I was contacted by staff at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, asking if I would meet with a group of gay and trans inmates looking for a pastor who would not condemn them. That was the beginning of a relationship that has continued to this day.

I have a special affection for many of them, so it was heartbreaking when a couple approached me with news since the last time I had seen them that a chaplain refused to baptize them. He said, “I do not agree with your lifestyle.”  When they told me this, I wasn’t just heartbroken. I was angry, and I said so with expletives that I will not repeat here. I was angry at the spiritual violence.

But this is exactly why I was called into the prison in the first place. I wasn’t called by the chaplain’s office, but by the psychology department. They see the harm religion has done to them and the trauma it leaves behind. These souls do not need saving as much as first they need healing from what was done to them in God’s name.

Scripture has seen spiritual violence before. That’s what Isaiah 56 is about.  Chapter 56 begins after the exiles return home. Not a return to glory but a pile of rubble and ruins. But while the people rebuilt their lives, their leaders embraced gatekeeping and a religion focused on walls of exclusion.  

Why? They never wanted to lose everything again, so trauma rewrote their theology. Rules about purity became a way to feel safe – and thus holiness became distancing from people. They called it holy. As Walter Brueggemann notes, faith after the exile often drifted from covenant justice toward boundary-making.

And that is how they justified shutting out foreigners, eunuchs, the disabled, and anyone who did not fit their system. But when religion does that, the vulnerable always suffer first because religion based on purity does not protect God. It protects power and inflicts spiritual violence.  

And you can feel the ache in the text: people who were convinced they did not belong. So God speaks up. Do not let the foreigner say, “The Lord will keep me separate.” Do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” Do not let them believe the lie that they have been forgotten or cursed by me. God says, I will give them a name that will never be cut off.

And so Isaiah 56 redefines holiness not as separation but as how we reflect the heart of God, which means:
 • Holiness looks like gathering, not excluding

• Holiness looks like justice, not rule-keeping
 • Holiness is not purity, it is restoration.
 
 

Centuries later, Jesus stands in this same prophetic stream and lives it publicly. We see it in the story of the ten lepers standing at a distance outside a village, crying out to be seen. If only he would see them, maybe something would happen.

They are not outside the city by choice but by religious command. In the ancient world, people with visible skin conditions were forced out of community life. Many assume this was to prevent disease, but that is a modern assumption, not a biblical one. Scripture calls their condition tzaraat, not modern leprosy, but a ritual category used to declare people unfit for community and worship.

This same pattern of exclusion shows up in Isaiah 56. Eunuchs were excluded not because they were impure, but because they broke the illusion that the world is binary, neatly divided into male and female, clean and unclean. Their very existence exposed the lie of purity culture. The same fear that erased eunuchs then is used against trans and nonbinary people today.

Foreigners were excluded not because they were unclean, but because fear and nationalism turned difference into danger. God rejected that exclusion in Isaiah 56, yet religion keeps trying to declare it holy.

But this is how purity religion operates. It hides social prejudice behind holy language, blesses exclusion, and calls it righteousness. It has nothing to do with God. It is about control, and it always chooses exclusion over mercy.

This is why Isaiah 56 is a revolution. It refuses religious gatekeeping and declares God’s welcome for the very people religion pushed out.  

And that is why the story of Jesus and the lepers is so radical. Isaiah announced the heart of God. Jesus put it into motion. Jewish scholar Jonathan Klawans reminds us that biblical impurity is a ritual and social category, not a medical one. Many things declared impure, like sexual activity or menstruation, were temporary. And let us be clear, calling a woman impure for having a body that functions as God created it is absurd – it is nothing but anti-woman theology hiding behind the word purity. 

Tzaraat alone carried the power of long-term isolation because only a priest could declare someone clean again. So Jesus is not just healing illness. He is breaking a system. These men were not dangerous. They were not suffering from disease alone. They were suffering from religion. Jesus walks straight across that boundary and does the holiest thing a person can do. He gives them back their place in the human family. The message is unmistakable. Exclusion is never the will of God.

So in this story, as throughout his ministry, Jesus does not reinforce the purity system. He overturns it. He tells the men, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” In other words, return to the very system that declared you unclean. Stand before the gatekeepers who shut you out and reclaim your life. And as they go, they are healed.

This is not a private miracle. This is a public act of liberation. Jesus is dismantling a religious order that declared some people unworthy of God. Only one man returns in gratitude, and scripture makes sure we know who he is: a Samaritan. The one religion rejected is the one God lifts up. The same truth we saw in Isaiah 56 appears again: God gathers those religion tries to separate.

But, like so much of scripture, this is not just ancient history. The labels have changed, but the logic remains the same. The same religious impulse to exclude in God’s name is still alive. We see it in pastors who refuse baptism. In churches that exclude queer people. In pulpits that silence women and then work to write those exclusions into law, quoting scripture to baptize cruelty instead of compassion.

That is what Christian nationalism does. It uses the name of Jesus to control rather than liberate, to turn exclusion into holiness. But make no mistake: this is not about God. It is about power disguised as faith. And now, across the country, this narrow religion is being built into law. We are dangerously close to the Supreme Court reconsidering marriage equality for LGBTQ people. This is not theoretical. It is a real threat and a direct assault on the Gospel Jesus preached.

Because when you strip away the slogans and the politics and ask the only question that matters – what kind of faith heals, and what kind of faith harms – the truth is not hard to see. What does Jesus say to the man? Does he ask, has your doctrine saved you? No. He says, your faith has made you whole. Whole – not tolerated, not allowed to exist at the edges – whole. That is the work of God: restoring people to community and dignity.

Even after being wounded by religion, the inmates at Donovan keep coming. Their resilience amazes me every time I go back. They still come searching for confirmation of their relationship with God. That is why there are regulars at my Bible Study. But there are always individuals who show up for the first time. Some come joyful. In others, you can see the apprehension in their face, the way they sit with their arms and legs crossed. They have never been in a religious space where they were welcomed. Their suspicions and fears are on high alert – for good reason.

I have heard every version of the lie, and perhaps you have too: “God does not want people like me.” Pastors said it. Parents said it. Churches said it. So you learned to accept your exile, to keep your distance from God, to stand outside and watch. But after all the rejection, shame, and condemnation endured, we still long for God. Something inside refuses to let cruelty be the last word about faith. Their resilience is holy. Your resilience is holy.

And when I see that longing, I know what my job is: to tell the truth. “They lied to you. And I am sorry that they used God to do it. That is not faith. That is abuse. And you deserved better than that.” Some believe me. Some cannot. The rejection is too deeply planted to uproot with one hopeful voice. So I repeat: do not let anyone tell you that you do not belong to God – just as you are. All of them. As Bryan Stevenson says, “We are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done” – a truth not confined to prison walls.

As I look around this sanctuary, I know there are people who understand what it feels like to be kept at a distance – maybe not because you are queer, but because somewhere, at some time, someone decided you do not belong. Someone here knows what exile feels like – because of divorce, or doubt, or mental illness, or a pregnancy you ended. Or perhaps because you couldn’t say the words of a creed.

At Susan Shurin’s memorial service a few weeks ago, mourners heard what she wrote in her own words: “One of the reasons I am comfortable in UCC churches is that no one has ever cared whether or not I buy the dogma.” She liked the hymns – mostly for the music, but, she wrote, “The words usually refer to theological concepts I can’t swallow.”  “I do not believe in the Trinity. I think the immaculate conception is a complete crock. I am dubious at best about the divinity of Jesus, who seems like a very cool dude (her words), and I am offended by any literal interpretation of communion, or cannibal Sunday as my friend Marian calls it.”  

But, she knew here, she was accepted.  And that’s our mission as Mission Hills United Church of Christ.  Not a museum to faith for the comfortable but the restoration of God’s people to a faith that welcomes us all in and calls us all out to serve. We are not here to protect a religion but to repair we who have been broken.  Here to say to every weary soul, dismissed by society, every person who has fallen and is trying to stand again, every prisoner and everyone else who wonders if they are still loved, you belong here. Your life matters here. Your healing matters to us. 

The same God who spoke to foreigners and eunuchs through Isaiah is speaking still. The same Christ who restored the leper is restoring still. The same Spirit who gathered the exiles is gathering still. And as long as God refuses to give up on people, neither will we. 

And so back to the prison.  When the chaplain said no, Chris replied, “but what about the Ethiopian eunuch?  As the eunuch asked Philip, what is to prevent me from being baptized?”  Philip immediately stopped the chariot and found water to baptize him. 

I hope hearing scripture quoted back to him caused the chaplain to wrestle with his faith. What it did for this couple was deepen their hunger for God and strengthen their trust in what we are building together. At one of our upcoming Bible studies, our group will hold a baptism – because no one gets to take away what God has already given.

I pray that those who have had to protect themselves for so long will dare to uncross their arms, take their place, and pull up a chair at the feast of God. Because this is the Gospel: no outsiders. No gatekeepers. No distance from God.  Because every church is meant to be a house of prayer for all people – no exceptions.