February 15, 2009 Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 30; 2 Kings 5:1-14; Mark 1:40-45
“If you choose, you can make me clean.”
“I do choose. Be made clean.”
“If you choose…I do choose.
This formula is the decider of human destiny. It is the hinge on which the
door to God’s realm swings open or shut. The entire Bible is the history of this
movement, from the choices of Eve and Adam and their son Cain that separated
them from God, to the choice of Noah to be a virtuous, faithful man in a corrupt
and self-indulgent society.
Jesus had to make three painfully, difficult choices in the wilderness, with
Satan’s seductive voice saying, “If you choose…” on one side of his heart and
God saying, “If you choose…” on the other. It goes on and on all the way from
Genesis to Revelation.
“If you choose…I do choose.”
At the end of this sermon we will sing a hymn that takes this formula as its
refrain. As a way to structure this sermon I am going to read each of the verses
and set them up like the warp of a loom to weave together some reflections on the
choosing we are all asked to do.
In the first verse someone like the leper from today’s Gospel passage says,
O Christ, I feel impure, unclean,
Made sick by flaws, seen and unseen.
Despair draws near, but I refuse.
You ask I choose and I do choose.
We need to understand who the leper was who asked Jesus to make him
clean. He was someone with a scaly skin disease, but he was worse than that.
Because of his illness the Jewish law declared him ritually impure. It required
that he live in isolation from society, including from his faith community. Any
who touched him would themselves be deemed unclean and have to be isolated
until declared clean by the priests, which required an examination, a costly
sacrifice and enduring a waiting period. The leper would be able to rejoin
society once he had gone through a similar process, but first, he had to be healed.
If he could not be healed, he was sentenced to a life of poverty and isolation.
Most modern translations say that Jesus was moved by pity when the leper
came to him, but some ancient manuscripts say he was moved by anger, not pity.
The leper was a victim. Because of flaws in his skin that he could not help, he
was cut off from community, from God and from any loving touch. He was at the
mercy of a corrupt, greedy system and an impersonal and unjust law. Pity and
anger would both be appropriate. The sickness in this situation was only in small
part the painful, ugly skin affliction you could see. The deeper, larger flaws were
the unjust system that victimized the leper and the humiliating wounds it made in
his lonely heart and soul.
We can imagine that he had already done everything in his power—tried
to negotiate with the priests, tried all the conventional healers, spent all his
money—by the time he fell on his knees before this man who was traveling
through Galilee asking people to choose the kingdom of God above the kingdom
of this world. Facing the choice of despair versus this wild, illogical, unworldly
hope, he chose hope. He chose faith in Christ and his message. That choice
saved him.
Today I am thinking of people I have heard of recently who are like that
leper in some ways. I know of a couple who both got laid off from their job on
the same day this week. Imagine that, in this job market, in this economy. Let
yourself be moved by pity and compassion as you think of the difficult choices
you would face if you and your family lost all income. Think of what is
happening inside them as they ask, why us?
An old blues song says, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.”
Think of this couple’s potential social isolation and the resulting feeling of being
flawed and untouchable. Feel pity, but also feel anger, because it is not their
fault. The greater flaw is in a system that allowed the flaws of many others to
bring about this hardship—the greed, the carelessness and all the myriad choices
that make up our mass culture of self-indulgence that led to this economic
collapse.
There are many other people who also share the leper’s hardships in
various ways. Our society treats many like lepers. I imagine some of us here
today know the feeling. Our Open and Affirming covenant lists some, like
people of oppressed races or people with disabilities or people who are not
heterosexual. There are many others beyond that, including those with certain
mental or physical illnesses that our society tends to fear and shun.
To all who are abused by the world’s flaws or their own, who are down
and out and suffering pain and isolation, Jesus says, “Come to me.”
He says in the second verse of the hymn,
O child, you move me with your cries.
When will the flawed world realize
I came to love where flaws abuse.
You ask I choose and I do choose.
Now we come to a truth that both Gandhi and King saw in Christ. In the
novel the Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Russian Orthodox elder
named Father Zosima put it this way. “At some thoughts one may stand
perplexed, above all at the sight of human sin, asking oneself, ‘Should I take it by
force, or by humble love?’ Always take it by humble love. If you so resolve once
and for all, you will be able to overcome the whole world. A loving humility is a
terrible power; it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing like it.”
Both Christ’s pity and his anger move him to the same place. Through the
nonviolent force of his unconditional, all-forgiving love, he overcomes our flaws
and the world’s.
But we need to remember that this was a choice even for Jesus, and it was
not an easy choice that day with the leper kneeling before him. By touching the
leper Jesus himself became legally impure, and the law required that he go to the
temple priests and be questioned and judged and pay for a sacrifice and then wait
for days or weeks before returning to society. Further, by making the leper clean,
Jesus was committing an act of rebellion, putting himself in the place of the
priests. He was laying his life on the line, breaking an unjust law, rebelling
against an oppressive system.
Humble love is a terrible force, as Father Zosima says. It is nothing like
the sappy, saccharine love of commercial Valentine’s Day. It asks personal risks
of us, it asks we suffer with another, it asks we be willing to become a leper
ourselves. But through that choice, miracles can flow. We can become the
conduit for the Holy Spirit’s power to transform the world, as both Gandhi and
King saw.
The third verse says.
O Christ, you hear my heart’s appeal.
You stretch your hand, forgive and heal.
You give new life for old I lose.
You ask I choose and I do choose.
Christ’s love connects us. It connects us to God, to one another and to our
truest, deepest, best self. All Christ asks is that we choose to open our hearts to
his love, but that requires choosing to let go of many other lesser loves. We have
to be willing to lose our old life. We cannot serve both God and mammon, he
says, both God and worldly treasures. We have to stop craving society’s
approval or wealth or power in order to make this deep connection through his
love. When we seek God with our whole heart, the prophet Jeremiah said, we
will find God. We will connect. We will find new life. We will find joy.
The 20th century theologian Henri Nouwen wrote, “Once our lives are
connected with [Christ’s] we will speak about him, sing his praises, and proclaim
his great deeds, not out of obligation but as a free spontaneous response.” (The
Living Reminder, p33) We see that in the leper. Jesus orders him to tell no one,
but the healed, reconnected leper cannot help himself. As the Psalm says, his
mourning has been turned into dancing. “You have taken off my sackcloth and
clothed me in joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O God, my
God, I will give thanks to you forever.” Christ’s love pours though the leper now
and cannot be stopped.
The last verse of the hymn returns to Jesus’ voice.
O child, the world cries out in pain.
I hear you pray God’s will may reign.
You raise healed hands for me to use.
You ask I choose and I do choose.
We feel moved by pity and anger as we look around at the world, a flawed
world of economic injustice, of environmental abuse, of violence from domestic
to international. Our hearts ache, hearing the victims cry. We ache with the
desire that the politics of love might replace the politics of greed or fear or hate.
We pray fervently to God, thinking of all the homes where abuse is happening
today, or where people are unemployed, or where people are isolated in illness.
We pray, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And that compassionate
prayer is good and as it should be. But we can do more than that. We have more
power than we think.
Henri Nouwen spoke of the power of wounded healers. Wounded healers
have chosen to let Jesus touch them and come into their lives through their
wounds. They become changed as the Apostle Paul described when he said, “It is
no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Nouwen wrote, “What counts
is not our lives, but the life of Christ in us. Ultimately, it is Christ in us from
whom healing comes. Only Christ can break through our human alienation and
restore the broken connection with each other and with God.” (p 34)
“If you choose…I do choose.”
The choice is ours: the choice to turn to Christ for healing; the choice to
be moved by pity or anger to love and heal this world; the choice to trade our
entire existing life for the life of Christ in us; the choice to use our life as Christ
chooses, loving and serving the people and the causes that the Holy Spirit leads
us to love and serve; the choice to live a committed, courageous life.
Let us pray together in silence, making clear to God what we choose, or
asking God’s help to make the choice our heart most desires…
Sermon 02/15/2009