The Lord Speaks for Us
BMCC Sunday Sermon · 14 Jun 2026
On a rainy Sunday morning in June, Prof. Kung Lap-yan came once again to Blessed Ministry Community Church (BMCC) to share from Luke’s Gospel. He had just returned from leading a group of friends on a visit to Romania, where they spent time in Eastern Orthodox churches. Unlike Hong Kong’s typical church settings with fixed pews, those spaces had no assigned seating: some people knelt, some brought mats to prostrate on, others stood just outside the doors — each finding their own way to meet with God. That freedom, he reflected, stayed with him.
Before beginning, he mentioned that a young friend had fed the day’s scripture into an AI tool to predict what he would say: “In the style of Prof. Kung, this passage is about learning to be thankful.” He smiled and shook his head. “The AI was completely wrong. What I want to share today is something AI could not have thought of.”
Today’s scripture comes from Luke 17:11–19. As Jesus was travelling toward Jerusalem through the region between Samaria and Galilee, ten men with leprosy stood at a distance and called out: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Jesus instructed them to go show themselves to the priests, and as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, seeing that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and fell at Jesus’s feet in gratitude. Jesus asked: “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
Many people — including his students, aided by AI — interpret this passage as being simply about gratitude: we should learn to give thanks. But he found the key point elsewhere: it is not gratitude per se, but the identity of the one who returned — he was a Samaritan.
To grasp the weight of that detail, one must understand who the Samaritans were in Jewish eyes. In 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and occupied the region of Samaria. The occupiers relocated outsiders into the territory to reshape the local population — a technique, he noted, with deep precedents in history. Over one, two, three hundred years, the Jews who remained in Samaria intermarried with the incoming peoples, forming a distinct mixed-heritage community.
He offered the analogy of Nyonya culture: in Southeast Asia, early Chinese settlers who married local people produced a distinctive hybrid culture — “Nyonya” cuisine reflects that blending, with familiar Chinese flavours given a spicy, aromatic twist. The Samaritans were something similar: they retained monotheism and accepted the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) as their scripture, but their holy mountain was Gerizim, not Jerusalem’s Zion. The book of Ezra records that returning Jewish exiles were commanded to separate from their foreign wives. Against this background, Samaritans were a stigmatised community in Jewish society: impure in bloodline, irregular in canon, wrong in their choice of sacred site.
In the Gospel of Luke, Prof. Kung identified a clear pattern: Jesus deliberately and repeatedly acted to de-stigmatise the Samaritans. In chapter 9, Jesus chose to travel through Samaria rather than take the detour most Jews used to avoid it — even though he was eventually turned away. In chapter 10, the Parable of the Good Samaritan casts a Samaritan as the truest example of “neighbour,” while the priest and Levite pass by on the other side. And in chapter 17, among the ten who are healed, the one who returns to give thanks is, once again, a Samaritan.
“I don’t believe this is coincidence,” he said. “Jesus is deliberate. Again and again, before crowds that included Pharisees and ordinary people, he places Samaritans at the centre of acts of dignity and love. The message is: the people you stigmatise are loved by God — and they love God in return.”
But here he turned to a more searching question. “When we say a Samaritan deserves respect because he came back, because he was a good person — that logic has a problem.” If a Samaritan’s dignity depends on his behaviour, then a Samaritan who did not return is still open to discrimination; we can still say that the traditional Jewish critique of Samaritans was justified. De-stigmatisation cannot stop at the level of “see, some of them are actually good people.” True respect must be grounded in something deeper: not in what someone does, but in who they are — a person made in the image of God.
“We are loved by God,” he said, “not because we are good people, not because we know how to give thanks, but because we are created by God.”
He then turned the lens on today’s church. Who are the “Samaritans” in contemporary Christian communities? He named several: those who have married non-believers; divorced people; and LGBTQ people. For decades, many churches have treated these groups with the same logic applied to Samaritans — their faith is impure, their behaviour irregular, their claim to full belonging questionable.
“But today,” he said, “we pray together, sing together, and listen to God’s word together. I know that God loves us, and wants to speak to us, and wants to de-stigmatise us. We are Christians. We can live with full dignity in the church.”
He ended with a question for the congregation: now that we ourselves have been de-stigmatised by God’s love, how do we speak for those who are still being marginalised? And crucially, advocacy must not be premised on first making people appear pitiable — that would be only another form of stigmatisation. Dignity does not need to be earned through suffering.
Blessed Ministry Community Church (BMCC) is a home where all are welcome. Wherever you are in life, whether or not you have been wounded by the gaze of church or society, there is a space here for you to be still, and to hear the voice that says: you are made in God’s image, and you are loved. If you are looking for a faith community where you can live with full dignity, you are welcome to join us for Sunday worship.
