Do you want to know a fairly common situation I find unspeakably odd and disconcerting?

And even though it’s a daily occurrence shared by millions of people, I still get a weird feeling when it happens to me. It really is unlike almost any other experience in life.

So, what is this situation?

It’s that brief period of time after you’ve landed back in your own country on an international flight. You’ve been in a place that’s not only not your home. They don’t even speak the same language.

You’ve spent all this time negotiating a different culture with different customs, prejudices, climate, and topography—usually in a language that far outstrips your high school German or Japanese.

And now, you’re walking down the exit ramp through the maze of hallways with glass walls that look out into the rest of the airport. Through the glass, you can see the Starbucks and the Sharper Image. You can almost smell the coffee. You’re hungry, and the gnawing sensation in your stomach makes you secretly obsessed with the thought of grabbing a twelve-dollar cheeseburger or a piece of real pizza.

But all of that—so tantalizingly close—seems lightyears away because you know that you’re soon going to descend into Dante’s fourth circle of hell—that human cattle pen called Customs and Immigration. With its maze of zig-zagging lines and retractable barriers that make you feel like you’re twelve years old, waiting to ride the corkscrew or the “Hellevator.”

You finally make it to the front of the line—perhaps moments before you need I.V. fluids and a power nap. The Immigration officer, sitting in a glassed-in cubicle with a secret-looking computer that you’re sure has information about that ill-considered water balloon episode in tenth-grade American Lit.

The officer has a sour face and—by the looks of it—a lingering hemorrhoid affliction. They wave for you to come forward. You think you’re okay because you’ve plastered a smile on your face, and you’re waving your passport like a Medieval holy relic meant to ward off the demons of the perpetually disappointed Immigrations person who clearly didn’t get enough sleep the night before.

Janice (or Frank), or whatever their name is, takes your passport, scans it, and holds it up to match the picture on it to your face. At which point, it occurs to you that you didn’t sleep any better the night before than the person on the other side of the glass.

And there’s this awkward pause. It probably only lasts for two or three seconds. But that brief stretch of time feels interminable, long enough that you could probably pay off your mortgage and student loans before Janice or Frank finally utter the words you’ve been waiting desperately to hear, “Welcome home.”

And it occurs to you that you’ve been in this weird notional geographic space for some time now. Even though you landed in your own country, you’ve been occupying some alien shadowlands. Neither the country you’re coming from nor the country you’re coming home to. You’ve languished in what Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa calls the “borderlands.”

She writes that the borderlands aren’t just a geographic boundary between two places. They are “a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.” She says they’re vague, ill-defined places “created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary … the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”

As Francisco Garcia points out, because of this healing encounter of the ten lepers, Jesus “converts the borderlands between Galilee and Samaria from a forbidden wasteland to a sacred place, perhaps even a thin place where the veil between the material and spiritual worlds is lifted.”

After Jesus, it’s a place where heaven touches earth and healing occurs, a restoration to community.

In our Gospel this morning, we meet Jesus wandering around the borderlands, the "almost-but-not-quite-yet" space defined by its prohibited and forbidden inhabitants.

As we open up, Luke tells us we’re back on the road with Jesus, headed toward Jerusalem. Jerusalem, of course, is a code word that lets the director know it’s time for the orchestral swell as the suspense gets ratcheted up a notch.

We’ve seen the end of the movie, though, so we know what happens when Jesus finally gets to Jerusalem. Therefore, all he does on his way is colored by his impending death.

An additional critical stage direction in our drama comes with naming yet another geographical location. That is to say, not only was Jesus heading to Jerusalem to his ultimate demise, but Google Maps, according to Luke, sends him through Samaria.

Now, Samaria, if you haven’t gathered, is the home of that ignominious group of “heretics” called “Samaritans.” Samaritans were close cousins of the Jews, with whom a long and ungenerous family feud took place over a few hundred years.