Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr. Harold T. Lewis

SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVD DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
12 FEBRUARY 2006


"If you choose, you can make me clean." (Mark 1:40)


At the beginning of Mark's Gospel, we encounter several healing stories. Last week, you may remember, Jesus healed Peter's mother-in-law. Jesus and his disciples, after working hard preaching around Capernaum, come to her house for refreshment and a place to relax, but to everyone's consternation, the lady of the house is in bed with a fever. We chuckle when we read that immediately after the fever left her, she got up and served Jesus and his disciples, since it looked like Jesus had an ulterior motive in performing the miracle. But we have to understand that what Mark is trying to tell us is that in Jesus' day, the inability of a woman to offer the basic gift of hospitality was a disgrace (presumably even if it wasn't her fault) and Jesus, by healing her, restores her dignity and her honor. Later on in this chapter, we see that Jesus heals a paralytic brought to him by his determined friends who cut a hole in the roof when they couldn't come through the door. The paralytic, unable to walk and obviously unfit for work, was an object of derision and pity. By healing him, Jesus restores his dignity as well.

But there is a special poignancy in today's story about the healing of the leper. Leprosy was a disease affecting not only the skin, which was often covered with chancres and sores, but the nerves. In its advanced stages, a person suffering from the disease wouldn't even know his hand was burning in a fire unless he was looking at it. In Jesus' day, once diagnosed with leprosy, the leper in effect spent his life on death row. Because of an erroneous fear of contagion, the leper was isolated and scorned, unable to work, unable to worship, and, being forced to live outside the city walls, was unable to participate in the life of the community. Lepers only had each other for company, and often were forced to wear special clothing, so people would know they were to be avoided. Sometimes they even wore bells, so that as they walked about, they would warn others of their presence. So the leper's skin disorder wasn't the disease he suffered from most. His major affliction was the prescribed social isolation necessitated by the sickness.

So the leper who approaches Jesus in today's Gospel knew exactly what he was meant when he said to Jesus, "If you choose, you can make me clean." The leper was as desirous of being restored to the community as he was of being rid of the physical disease, and he knew that Jesus might have some reservations about being associated with him. To the leper's mind, Jesus, while having no compunction about healing the halt and the lame, or restoring sight to the blind, might worry about what would happen to his reputation if he associated with a leper. The leper thought that there was at least a possibility that Jesus might well decide to take a pass on this particular miracle.

But Jesus surprises and delights the leper, and responds, without hesitation, "I do choose. Be made clean!" And as if to remove all doubt about his intention, Jesus, "moved with pity," as the Gospel tells us, then does something unimaginable, something, in fact, that was strictly forbidden by the law. He touches the leper --- Jesus, who normally heals by simply announcing "Your faith has made thee well," and who, in at least one healing story, performs the miracle from a distance, actually lays his hand on the infected body of a social outcast. This personal act of Jesus, then, has public implications. This is nothing less than an act of solidarity with all the marginalized people of society. And not just a symbolic solidarity, since by touching the leper, Jesus made himself ceremonially unclean. On account of that state, he could not even enter the Temple until a certain amount of time had elapsed.

My friends, what can we learn from this simple miracle story? The first thing we can learn is that leprosy is not confined to first century Palestine. I was reminded about racial lepers in a book I just finished reading, entitled The Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle. It tells the story of a black doctor who moves into a white working-class neighborhood in 1925 Detroit. Predictably, his house was pelted with stones, and a menacing mob of hundreds gathered at his doorstep. He and his family and friends defend their property, and the book tells the story of how Clarence Darrow eventually defends the doctor and his family against a charge of murder. If we want more recent examples, just listen to President Jimmy Carter, who at Coretta Scott King's funeral, told the nation that the pictures of the victims of Katrina reminded us that many people in our nation are still marginalized because of the color of their skin.

It wasn't that long ago that ministers of the Gospel stood in pulpits (thankfully not this one) declaring that AIDS was God's retribution against homosexuals. If indeed homophobia is the last acceptable prejudice, then gay people can be seen as today's lepers. Despite progress made, gays and lesbians still are often treated with contempt and scorn.

If you cannot identity with a) or b) above, you are a leper by virtue of the fact that you are sitting in a pew in Calvary Church, a congregation deemed leprous in this diocese because we dare to embrace the least, the lost, and the last in society, a practice, which, it seems to me, has some Biblical precedent.

Another thing we can learn from this story of healing is that we must regain a sense of the health of the community. We live in a world in which health has been almost entirely relegated to the market economy. So called health clubs promise buff bodies in exchange for membership fees. (I will ask Walter DeForest about the possibility of my joining a class action suit against Club One!) Health insurance agencies charge more and more premiums for less and less coverage, coverage which doesn't begin to address the issues of the health of our families and communities, even as we learn that heart disease, depression, and even cancer, may well have their roots in communal problems like economic stress, social alienation, and abuse of the environment. And although we flock to the therapist's couch, it's to get our own head together, work out our own "issues." We too easily forget that our private healing should have public implications.

Also, we must remember that as we identify the major problems assaulting our society today, be it the AIDS pandemic, poverty, pornography, alcohol abuse and racism or any of a number of other social ills, we are ultimately talking not about problems and issues, but people. And as long as we talk about these things as global problems and not people problems, we depersonalize them. It is people who are broken and wounded, depressed and guilty. People are who rejected, unloved, or as the Negro spiritual says, "'buked and scorned." People who are stressed out and suicidal.

So what does this mean to us who profess and call ourselves Christians? It means that evangelism is not enough. We mustn't only tell people about Jesus, we must also be like Jesus with people. We must not simply tell the good news, but embody it. And that's what we should be about as a church, to be like Jesus was with the leper, compassionate, willing to touch the untouchable. I know this hands-on approach runs against the grain of many of us dyed-in-the-wool Episcopalians, whom President Clinton referred to recently as "God's frozen chosen." But try. And even as we make our bungling attempts, people will be able to see Jesus in us, and be drawn to him. We can, as the marriage service says, "be a sign of Christ's love to this sinful and broken world."

Let us pray:
Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way, Wounded and weary, help me, I pray, Power all power surely is thine! Touch me and heal me, Savior divine! (Lift Every Voice & Sing, II, 145)