Sermon 02.04.2024: Change of Plans

A chance encounter with an outsider and an unexpected request invite Jesus’ involvement and compel his compassion, challenging his place and plan at the beginning of his public ministry.

Scripture

Mark 1:35-45

A Preaching Tour in Galilee

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Jesus Cleanses a Leper

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesuscould no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

Sermon Text

There are a lot of different ways for the church and its preachers to connect with the healing story from the gospel of Mark, one of the first such stories recorded in the gospels. It is a text of questions—a question asked of Jesus, but also, we might imagine, a question that caused Jesus to ask some hard questions of himself.  We are not strangers, these days, to the hard work of self-interrogation: we are facing a racial reckoning long overdue, justice long deferred in our communities and in our policing and in our ongoing choice to plead ignorance of the continuing cost of structural racism on the soul of our nation and the lives of our people. Civil society protections, from reproductive rights to affirmative action, are being belittled and diminished as recipients of these services and protections are dehumanized. Approaching this year’s election, the politics of division is more acute, and the ongoing cost more dismaying, than ever before.

We live in a deeply polarized society these days…a time when that old  paradigm of “lepers” is played out again and again in communities we “otherize” and avoid—people whose status, or nature, or condition we dismiss, and whose demands on our time, our resources and our hearts we resist. This polarization, these places of resistance in us, impede our ability to fulfill the gospel of love…and yet, it is also true that heeding and embracing those our society and even sometimes our Church dismisses, puts us, and the work we feel called to do, at risk. As an example, let me share a letter I received from a Presbyterian gentleman a while ago who described himself as a “long time supporter” of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, a man who has donated to PDA and volunteered with us in Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina.  He said:

I DO NOT support your activities on our southern border. The people crossing the border are ILLEGAL. They are not coming to the USA to seek asylum, they are coming to the USA for one of two reasons...purely economic or to transport drugs. None of them are fleeing from violence. It is a personal choice of the families in Central and South America to separate, take their children on a long dangerous journey or to give their children to the coyotes that are prevalent in these caravans. The parents knowingly put their children in the hands of gangs and in harm’s way. What do you not understand about the term “illegal?” All of these people are illegal and do not belong in the USA. This has nothing to do with any “biblical” mandate. These are not strangers asking for neighborly love. For you to ask the Presbyterians to fund your activities aiding and abetting illegals is WRONG.

His letter haunts me, and whenever I share it, I still have a deep, gut-wrenching reaction to his fear, his rejection. And not just because he disapproves of our denomination’s stance on refugees, especially those with children at our southern border.  But because it forces upon us a painful, impossible question: who is Us, and who is Them?  Put in the framework of this unusual little story from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, we might ask—who is the Christ in this story, and who is the “leper”?

In the beginning of Mark’s gospel, of course, Jesus is the Christ. When the disciples find him praying, alone and in the dark, and tell him that everyone is hunting for him, Jesus is absolutely clear in communicating what the Christ’s mission is: let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do. How was he to know, how could the disciples predict, that fulfilling that simple mission would become so complicated, so quickly?  How could they have anticipated that stopping to respond to one simple request for healing would change everything, for all of them, forever?

If you choose, you can make me clean.

The man making this oddly framed demand/suggestion is a leper. In the bible, to speak of leprosy is not merely to speak of physical illness, but more, of the potent reality of social contagion. As it was understood, “leprosy” was a judgment from God visible to humankind, dangerous, necessitating permanent social and physical isolation. Lepers were Others, inspiring fear and even disgust. In order for the rest of society to maintain well being; and to get on with “doing what we came out to do”, lepers were throw-aways; a perhaps regrettable but necessary practice to protect the common good. 

Hmm.  It’s an argument we hear far too often about far too many people, these days.

If you choose, you can make me clean. Let’s pause for a moment here and notice how very unusual this request for healing is—how, with no apparent sense of desperation or attempt to manipulate or compel, this man, this absolute outsider in dire straits—believes in his own dignity and treats Jesus like an equal, offering him a free choice—get involved, or don’t, it’s entirely up to you.

Well. Choices have consequences, for us and for others, and sometimes such decisions feel like an overwhelming, gut-wrenching responsibility. In the original Greek, we can better understand this deep feeling that Jesus himself was overwhelmed by when faced with the leper’s demand. 

Splanchnizomai is the Greek verb used here in verse 41, a rare word in the gospels. Most translations say pity or compassion, a few, anger. But it isn’t just anger, and it’s far more than pity. It is also not only a feeling, but more of a compulsion rooted in deepest emotion. It urges movement, involvement, transformation. To try to get at the deeper sense of it, we might put it something like this:  Jesus, moved with pity/compassion/rage/wrenching/gut-twisting deep feeling, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean.”

What moves you? What breaks your heart? What matters enough to this congregation to make you stop in the midst of all the good missional things you usually do, and go a different way, to say: I do choose? I have admired the witness and leaders of this congregation for long years—since I was a young adult newish to pastoral ministry, and your pastor Laird Stewart worked with me and welcomed me as a friend when we were a part of the creation of Covenant Network in 1997. In sheltering and supporting that young organization, and in so many other sustained acts of outreach and social justice, Calvary has been a light in our denomination, and in San Francisco. And at each new moment of engagement, or season of sea change, the Church has to choose anew, whether and how to respond to those who ask us to get involved. Choosing changes what we do, how we do it, and choosing changes us.

The Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian leader and the founder of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, spoke to 350 PCUSA leaders at a Matthew 25 summit in Atlanta, Georgia, two weeks ago. As the war in Gaza rages on, our Church is deeply engaged in supporting humanitarian relief and in calling for a just peace, a ceasefire. PC(USA) works, though imperfectly, to maintain some balance among our policies that support the existence of both the state of Israel and a Palestinian state, and try to interrogate and challenge our lapses into both islamophobia and antisemitism. Dr. Raheb was invited to speak to us about what he is seeing and what we, American neighbors and faith partners, need to see, when we ask the Matthew 25 question of Jesus: but when did we see you naked, unhoused, hungry, abused, imprisoned? He spoke powerfully of the cost of the war in Palestine: of the mounting deaths and the utter devastation of Gaza, a crowded and struggling city, reduced to rubble, from which a million have fled. He shared a story about a moment late last year, when an Orthodox Church in Gaza City was struck by missiles, killing a number of people who were taking shelter there. Because Presbyterian Disaster Assistance had sent emergency funds to that community, and to a long-time partner organization whose staff were sheltering in the Church after its own offices were damaged by missiles, I took particular notice, I wanted to listen, and to truly see. He said: when I learned about the bombing, I called the church right away. I wanted to speak to my close friend whom I knew had taken shelter there with his colleagues, I wanted to know even whether he had survived. After the phone rang for a while, someone picked up, and told me yes, my friend was alive. 

When he came to the phone, he described what had happened, how it was. But in trying to tell me, he was overcome with emotion, and told me he could not speak any more. He handed the phone to one of the Orthodox nuns who was there in the church with them. Because she was a nun, I said to her, Sister!  Sister, we are all praying for you. There was a pause on the line. And then she said—she, a Nun, said this!—she said: Stop praying. Get out into the streets and work. 

It is for each of us, whether it is a leper or a nun who stops us in our tracks, to decide whether we walk away and remain unchanged, or say yes to impossible questions, and learn to live in them. This text, and, if we are listening deeply, the texts of human experience, evoke hard and hard to stomach stories, stories that privilege some and leave others behind. That wonder at salvation, and struggle with its cost. Conversations and opportunities that break our hearts and simultaneously break us open, driving us to new ways of understanding.   

There’s one more struggle most of us go through as we try to practice the Jesus way and discern right action when a stranger asks us to choose. It is the struggle of privilege, of wanting to help but hoping everything in our lives and structures can remain the same when we do. It is how Jesus, mindful of Jewish law, and of his privilege within its protections, tells the man – go, show yourself to the priests, and don’t tell anyone. Why does he do this?   

It would be fair to say that Jesus needs this man to go show himself to the priests more for his own privilege than for the man’s wellbeing. The man knew he was healed: and he didn’t need the priests or the system to tell him what he already felt in his heart and in his body. He understood, maybe even more than Jesus did in that moment, how Jesus’ act of radical generosity changes everything for everybody. 

If the former leper does not choose to go to the priests . . . Jesus’ place in his own tradition is put at risk, he himself is ritually unclean, his strategy for mission, laid out at the beginning of this text, to go into all the cities and share good news, is finished. And that is precisely what did happen: the man did not do what Jesus said—he did not go back to the priests and he did not keep silence. So the story tells us, Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but (had to) stay out in the country. . . by aligning with the leper and respecting his path, Jesus lost his privilege as an insider, and had to pitch his tent in the borderlands. Jesus became the leper! And the former leper, who knew and shared good news when it saved his life…he became a Christ. Could it be that we are each—and all—called to be a little bit of both?