Season of Epiphany, Proper 6
II Kings 5:1-14
Mark 1:40-45
In a mere forty verses, the young, developing ministry of Jesus of Nazareth has run the gamut. From the Center where his healing work began in synagogue, home and the village square to the extreme outskirts beyond the reach and the sanction of community: it is a decidedly downwardly mobile trajectory that we might assume (correctly) does not bode well for his future. By only the forty-first verse of the first chapter of the gospel, the healing work of Jesus crash lands at the ultimate “outside”, on the fringes of town where the unclean, the forgotten and the forbidden make their beds and scratch out a living.
Scene One : A Typical Day-in-the-Life
As Jesus leads his anxious band of disciples out the gate, bound for the next town where he must do what he has come to do, there is a man—a beggar, an outcast, a “leper.” Timidly, deferentially, this man approaches Jesus, kneeling, begging: his voice can scarcely be heard over the shouts and laughter of the travelers, but there it is: If you choose, you can make me clean.
If you stop to think about it, it’s not all that atypical a scene… and of course, that’s the problem in a nutshell. A man—a man! —Is groveling, kneeling, begging for the most basic of his human needs to be addressed, and only Jesus stops to listen . . .why, in the name of all that’s holy, isn’t it atypical?
The man, we are told, is a leper. In the bible, it doesn’t get much worse than that. In the bible, to speak of disease—of such a disease! —is not to speak merely of physical illness, but more, of the potent reality of social disease. Worse still, what the man has is probably not leprosy as we understand it, but may be nothing more than a severe skin rash or a chronic case of eczema. But as they understood it, “leprosy” was an undifferentiated condition, a judgment from God visible to the humankind, necessitating exclusion. And not just a polite exclusion, a looking the other way or changing the subject or choosing one’s friends or neighbors with care; but an absolute exclusion mandated by law and custom and monitored by the culture’s religious mores.
Let’s just think about that for a moment… let’s create in each of our minds an image of who that leper might be today… put that face on the body of this man in Mark’s gospel, this man begging and kneeling as he challenges… If YOU choose, YOU can make me “clean.”
Can we bear to have such responsibility? Do we want to get involved?
Scene Two: Double Dares
There are a variety of ways for Jesus–or for us— to “choose” to make someone clean.
Some of those ways are private, others, less so.
Some of those ways challenge us and those who have made their way to our “outskirts”,
Others challenge not just ourselves and those who would be clean, but also the communities and society in which we all have found (if not made peace with) our place.
Jesus can, if he chooses, do the former.
(In the story from II Kings that is the First Testament offering in this morning’s lectionary, that is the path chosen. The story is about another leper, Naaman the Aramean, commander of the enemy army that defeated Israel, and the prophet Elisha of Samaria who healed him. There are systemic exclusions aplenty, here; political, economic, class, and race distinctions that make “leprosy” merely one disqualifying condition in a long list. Surely the opportunities for healing and reconciliation are both broad and numerous. Yet, Elisha never ventures outside his own door in order to effect the healing . . .but keeps the social structures intact and his own purity unassailed, sending a messenger whose prescription is supported and interpreted by servants and whose object—the enemy commander of the conquering army of Syria—receives his health again without ever threatening the social, religious and political constraints that keep these two men separated; no threat to each other’s peace of mind . . .and even less to the embattled systems they represent. Though two nations and an array of social conditions stand to benefit from the meeting of Elisha and Naaman, the story settles for the merely miraculous. One person is healed, no more.)
We can, and do, choose the former as well. When confronted with “lepers” whose circumstance we pity or abhor, we can always send money, make friends in private, not ask, and never tell. We can legislate a little change, settle for “good enough for now.” And whenever we choose that smaller path of healing as the way for us and others, we may change a little, by risking loving a lot. And the one we choose thus to love may also be healed, after a fashion… But if we leave it at that, at the mere miracle of healing, no one will be made “clean,” even if they are made well.
Let me illustrate. In the sanctuary of progressive churches and synagogues and in the temporary haven of the state of California, thousands of loving LGBT couples were legally married during the last half of 2008. In November, Proposition 2 reversed that sanctifying law, declaring GLBT marriages illegal. And what of those who are legally married, like their heterosexual friends? It was all well and good, but far from clean. A legal action is now pending in the state of California to forcibly divorce all LGBT couples married under the 2008 law, since the continued existence of their legal union is, in a word, “unclean.”
If you choose, you can make me clean. The dare implicit in this invitation is a double dare: it is thrown at Jesus, and rebounds on the leper himself: involving, in the end, everyone who stands near or passes by in a category-shattering act of world-making, which is the kin-dom of God breaking in.
Scene Three: What are we feeling, anyway?
Now, the translation of this next bit in the story gives scholars a problem. The word for what Jesus felt when the leper spoke to him has been translated variously, no one knows quite how it ought to be rendered. Some translations say pity or compassion, others, anger. To try to get at the deeper sense of it, we might put it something like this:
Jesus, moved with pity/compassion/rage/wrenching/stomach-twisting deep feeling, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean.”
Splanchnizomai is the verb used here, a rare word in the gospels. The translation is difficult. It doesn’t mean pity, or compassion alone. It isn’t just anger, or rage. It is also not only a feeling, but more of a compulsion rooted in deepest emotion, an emotion that compels movement, involvement, transformation.
Some Markan commentators, translating this text “he snorted at him and pushed him out,”1 maintain that Jesus was snorting with indignation at the callous inflexibility of a social system that placed such an insurmountable barricade before the suffering outsider. Ched Meyers, in Binding the Strong Man, another commentary on the gospel of Mark, suggests that Jesus was thus indignant because the man had already been to the priests earlier and had his petition rejected.
The German liberation theologian, Dorothee Soelle called it justice. In her book Not Just Yes and Amen, she tells a story about her girlhood in Nazi-occupied Germany, how one day as she was watching several large boys beat up a little boy and steal his bicycle, she knew herself too small to help and felt sickened: justice is a feeling of rage in the pit of my stomach, she said.
Think about this. Get an image. Feel it. Let me help you. About a year after Richard and Tony brought Angelina into their family and had her baptized into Riviera’s, they went on a family trip. It’s hard to juggle a wriggling baby, diaper bags and other paraphernalia in those narrow airplane aisles! As Richard handed Angelina over to Tony in their seats, a person sitting just ahead of them hissed how disgusting, homosexuals with that baby. When Richard told me about it, I wanted to throw up, to throw things, to weep, to stand in the breach. It made me physically sick, to imagine someone violating a child of this church that way. Here’s another: A few days after Barak Obama was inaugurated as president, an African-American mother in the church went with her nine year old son to a nice Mexican restaurant in Coconut Grove. As they ate dinner on the patio, a man rode by on a bicycle, yelling, I’m going to kill me a N—– tonight! When Pam said, I talked to Jordan about it, and he seems to be okay, but. . . ., I almost broke down and cried. It makes me physically ill to imagine this church, or this community, without the beauty and fineness of Pam and Jordan, Richard, Tony, Angelina and all the rest of you; and to think of any of our children being violated in such a manner is almost unbearable.
When Jesus saw the man—a human being made in the image of God—begging; when he knew that the religious and social system was entirely indifferent, if not utterly hostile, to a person’s desire to be more than well, to be clean; Jesus put out his hand and touched him, making himself unclean, because it was the only thing left for him to do. Touching him, he drew the man into his circle… and placed himself ritually outside.
Scene Four: Going to the Priests
However rageful and passionate, however loving and healing we make our own small and private choices, our own sanctuaries; until we, too, are outside and “unclean,” until the systems of faith and family, of town and country, are able to declare along with us, I do choose, be clean,” no one will be clean. Put another way, in the words of the old gospel song, none of us are free, none of us are free, none of us are free with one of us in chains, , none of us are free.
It is not enough to create sanctuaries where we are clean and free… because when we and those we have welcomed leave those sanctuaries to take up our larger place in our cities, our culture, our work and our faith traditions, our partial healing, our conditional cleanness, will become painfully, unbearably apparent. Sanctuaries are not enough: we must create a world, a faith, a denomination, a city… .where all of us are clean.
Yesterday, a group of us joined our religious neighbors in completing the “Faith House” for Habitat for Humanity’s Miami Blitz Build. You haven’t lived until you’ve walled up thirty people from sixteen different, theologically oppositional communities. . .and given them exacto-knives, hammers, and power tools. Anyway, we were landscaping yesterday, and I ran into some colleagues from another Presbyterian congregation in Miami who said, guess you’ll be at the presbytery meeting for THE VOTE this Saturday. The new associate pastor and I had been talking seminary education and our church’s impending return to our sanctuary after a year of restoration from hurricane damage, when the rest of the Riviera gang walked up, and I introduced them around. When I got to Mari, I introduced her as our newest member, and then remarked how excited and honored we were to be baptizing her and her partner’s daughter in the first sacramental act in our renewed sanctuary. That turned out to be kind of a conversation stopper, and we went back to mulching. That was daring,” said the chair of our board of deacons. Maybe, I replied . . .but it shouldn’t have been. When I returned to the garden, Mari, who left a Baptist church because they offered to baptize the baby in the pastor’s office, but not in front of church “with two women” said I’m not used to being so public in church. It feels different. You know what it is? It is the difference between feeling better… and being Clean.
Our Presbytery does indeed vote on the revised Amendment B this coming Saturday. A minister who serves with our clerk of session and me on the Peace, Unity, and Purity Discernment Commission has suggested that we might consider, in light of General Assembly successes and the increasing fear and anxiety of our brothers and sisters on the conservative side of this issue, a vote of “no action.” I have friends throughout the PCUSA whom I deeply respect who have struggled with this same question. We who practice full inclusion of GLBT persons in the church have, legally, enough room to breathe now, enough room to keep our sanctuaries of inclusion safe and free . . .A “no action” vote says, “let’s not push it now, let’s leave room so that the rest of the system, those on the inside who now feel threatened and marginalized, can have some time to learn what it means to declare “you are clean.” My friends who advocate this position make a moving, even compelling argument. Who wants to be on the margin? We didn’t—and don’t —like it. We feel compassion, even pity, for those who now feel that our actions have threatened their clean bill of health, their place at the Table. And to choose to wait a little longer. . . when indeed that choice may be made for us anyway … could that not be a kinder, more peaceable way?
Is it possible for the leper in Mark’s story merely to be healed and to forget until later about going to the priests for a declaration of full inclusion? I, too, worry about losing long-beloved friends to schism; I have no desire to fracture the unity of the church. Surely, by and by, they will come along and join in… if we are patient, loving, and don’t push harder than the system can bear.
If we do that, we can be well. But can we be clean? We can be healed, but not whole. We can be politic, but not honest. We can have a private, even a small public arena of loving, healing space . . .but we cannot be clean. And until we can all be clean, none of us is clean, and the kindom for which Jesus worked and died cannot come among us.
So it was that Jesus took the dare, the risk that day… and so did the man who was more than healed of leprosy. And when he went to the priests and was declared clean . . .a tiny crack opened up in the Wall that separated us from them, the clean from the unclean.
Much is made of the fact that, when Jesus told the man not to tell anyone, he immediately went out and told EVERYONE. What was that all about? Why could he not keep silent? Did he not know that his refusal to practice “no action” just about blew Jesus’ ability to work inside the system, within the city walls? Didn’t he understand his speaking out was risking everybody, and everything? But then again, how could he keep silent, when being clean made him want everyone to celebrate?
I don’t pretend to understand what Jesus had in mind . . .but I think I get why the man could do nothing other than tell. Because once he was clean . . .once he knew what it was to be clean, he couldn’t bear for anyone not to have that same opportunity. I think of him this morning, and I hear him singing this song:
My life goes on in endless song above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging,
since Love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing? 2
1 Lamar Williamson Jr., Mark, Interpretation Series (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1983) 59.
2 How Can I Keep From Singing, by Robert Lowry, #2212 in “Sing the Faith,” Geneva Press, Louisville, KY 2003.