12 February 2012

2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45

Life can get messy.  In the prayer for the day we talked about our “sinfulness which divides.”  Any morning sit down with your coffee and the Denver Post.  Any front page headline will speak of this mess.  Much of the political debate is about the American dream and who is in and who is out.  The economic debate has been about who got it and who lost it. The medical care debate is about who qualifies or who doesn’t.  Read advice columns like “Ask Amy,” and we have questions such as “Do we leave Aunt Matilda off the invitation list because she cranky and demanding and demeaning?”  Or the son who is losing himself in drugs: do we go with compassion or do we kick him out?  People sift and label.

And we don’t need the Post to report that we, too, divide into the good and bad, the insiders and outsiders.  List any combination: black or white, Arab or Jew, straight or gay, young or old, rich or poor, and then we add our moral implications and innuendos about who’s good and who’s bad, who we include and who we leave out.  We contribute to the messiness.  We sift and we label.  When you read the Post, I hope your morning coffee is strong.

The leper
The leper’s life was messy, too.  He is anonymous; St. Mark does not give us his name.  He has some sort of skin disease; scholars say that the word can cover anything from a simple skin eruption to Hansen’s disease.  Whatever his sickness, the community had purity codes, and the leper was trapped by a code which said he was ceremonially unclean, religiously sick.  And the code drew a line that left him on the outside, requiring that he “must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’  He must live alone; he must live outside the camp” (Leviticus 13:45-46). Nor was he allowed in the temple which in Jewish thought excluded him from God’s presence.   For a Jew to be cut off was to lose “who you are.” Taken away were most aspects of human identity: work, family, social group.  Lepers were the living dead – untouchable!     

As if this were not enough, there was the moral stigma on leprosy.  The thinking went, “God doesn’t let bad things happen to good people.”  A leper was perceived divinely judged, socially and religiously ostracized in the name of fidelity to Moses.  “He got what he deserved.”  Buffeted, beaten, bruised by any system, life is messy.  

The leper desires cleansing.
So the leper hurts.  He knows he’s powerless, yet he yearns to reconnect, wants to be a whole person.  He senses something in the ministry and words of Jesus.  He comes.  He aches, and so dares to cross the boundary set by the purity code.  Faith drives people not to let rules and traditions stand in one’s way of getting to Jesus.  He plants himself in front of Jesus: “Here I am.”  It’s an in-your-face approach.   He challenges Jesus: “You can do it, so make me clean if you will!” Standing before Jesus he knows he has no power of his own.   The Greek suggests repeated calling.  “If you will, if you will, if you will…”

Yet, he does not ask to be healed.  He does not ask to be cured.  He asks to be made clean. He wants again connection to community.  He wants the stigma of exclusion erased.  He wants to be recognized for who he is, one of God’s people, and not be defined by some characteristic external to who he is.  

Jesus’ anger
Then we read that Jesus “snorts with indignation.”  Yes, in the oldest Greek manuscripts, that’s the verb:   “snorts.” Jesus is angry.  He boils over.  Angry at what?  Indignant at the leper’s breach of the Law?  Angry at the leper’s challenge to him to cleanse?  Outraged at the foul disease of leprosy?   

From what happens next, I think Jesus is angry at the system, a system which says a person’s illness defines him, that says this illness justifies exclusion.  Jesus’ record indicates his anger at any system which draws rigid circles that exclude based on a person’s characteristics, mental ability, health, idiosyncrasies, quirks, and skin color.

Systems and covenants and procedures are needed, but they are corrupted when the system becomes more important than the person.  In his challenge to the ancient Law, Jesus said that tradition, no matter how rock-ribbed, must make way for compassion.  When the system is more important than the person, then we have it backward, Jesus says, and summed it up in the principle, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  So Jesus ate with the unclean, associated with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, let his disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath, and did not require his disciples to wash their hands before eating, let a woman touch him and wash his feet.  In a single sentence Jesus articulated a principle that wiped out the basis for the entire system of defilement and purification: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (Mark 7:15). Jesus shifts the margins.  A system’s requirements are not the gateway to God and grace.  Jesus’ friendship is based not on limiting boundaries, but in grace and love.  

Jesus touches
There is no mistaking it. Jesus is angry, and what does he do? Does he condemn? Does he withhold? No. He heals.  “…stretching out his hand, he touched him…”  The leper cannot change his leprous spots.  But Jesus can.  And he does: “I will; be clean.”  We know the value of touch.  Ask the elderly, the ill, the depressed, or the isolated just how rare and beautiful human touch is.  We hold our children or grandchildren to embrace them in warmth of love so that they experience security and connection in a world where much is messy and fractured.  Jesus reaches through the circle and drew the leper in with his touch.

Leper as witness
And once cleansed, he sends the man to witness to the priests, the custodians of the Law.  The system needs the cleansing.  The cleansed man is witness over and against a system that violates God’s mercy for those who are weak and outside the circle. Showing himself to the priest would be testimony of the grace-filled healing of Jesus.  A new power has been loosed, the power of love and grace.

Jesus enters our mess to cleanse us
To touch a leper was considered a violation of the ceremonial law of uncleanness (Leviticus 5:3). When Jesus touches the leper, he becomes contaminated.  The cleansed leper is now on the inside; Jesus is the outsider.  Jesus could not enter the town, but had to stay in the desert to become ritually clean.  Whatever the reason and whatever the risk, he nevertheless heals.  Love costs.  Yet that is what we find in God.  To become “dirty” did not dissuade Jesus.  He picks up the mop and bucket and gets down on his knees in the middle of the mess.  He mediated the compassionate power of God. “I will; be clean.”  This is a shadow of the Cross and the portent of what he would do for the sins of the whole world.  The Apostle John writes, “God is light…and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
The man goes to speak. The man went out and “made the whole thing public, talking freely and widely.”  Now among his people, cleansed by Jesus’ word, he is released to serve.

On the outside?
To those here who feel as if you are on the outside, Jesus says, “Come in.”  Sometimes we conclude that no one cares, that we matter ultimately to no one.  Jesus cares.  Jesus will not fail you.  We ask, “If you will…”, and the gracious answer is, “I will; be clean.”  How healing or connection will come or what form it will take, we don’t know.  But dare to trust Jesus.  Into your aloneness will come one who stretches out his hand and crosses the barriers and empty spaces to find and restore and give back life again.

On the inside?
To those who are on the inside, in the congregation, Jesus’ word is to stretch out the hand and touch.  

Not only did this system exact a personal price from the leper, the practices of exclusion exact a corporate price as well.  A community can easily come to find its own identity determined by those it excludes.  “We” are not “them.”   Differing traditions exclude in different ways, whether it comes to color, race, gender, economic levels, doctrinal purity, letting women serve at the altar. Each needs to observe who it is whom one considers to be lepers.  Jesus’ anger is directed at the idea that the spiritual good of the community is enhanced by sending out those who are “sick,” different, unlike us.  Rather, Jesus suggests that in kingdom economy the spiritual good of the community is enhanced by bringing in “the other.”   There are those, John Powell, says, who are in fact waiting for a miracle: someone to love them and call them back from the dead.  “For he who does not love his brother whom has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (James 4:20).   

The community of the baptized is God’s people in this divisive, fractured, messy world.  We are his body, his hands, his feet.  Whatever divisions or tensions we personally add to the mess, we do not let that mess be the final definition.  This morning you banged off the snooze alarm and crawled out of bed and came out of the mess of this world because you desired to be touched by the hand of Christ and hear again his healing and connecting power.   God reaches down to touch us in the sacrament, materially, bread, wine, body, blood: “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”  In the exchange of peace our hellos, handshakes, and hugs are symbols of our desire to include.  Then Jesus hands us the mop and bucket.  God’s work is in our hands.  

“If you choose, make me clean, make me whole, make me an instrument of your love and peace.”  I hope your morning coffee is strong.  Life can be messy and dirty.  Just remember, you are included; you have been washed.  Baptized.