“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.’”
Jesus touched him… the leper in the Gospel typifies the untouchable. Touching the leper is Jesus’ risk and the leper’s greatest need. And Jesus knew the risk must be taken. The Gospel tells that Jesus was moved by compassion toward the leper. This was no intellectual decision. There was no consideration given to the political consequences of identifying with a social outcast. There was no theological reflection on the liturgical correctness of the act. There was not even any concern given to Jesus’ own physical/medical safety. He moved in a reflex action from the very center of his being.
“Compassion,” the contemporary author and theologian Frederick Buechner writes, “is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you.” Often anger arises as a natural response to compassion. Another translation of this passage has Jesus indignant or angry when he saw the leper Not angered by the request but angered by the ravages of the disease, angered by the cruelty of social isolation, angered at a religion more concerned about its law than its people. Anger and compassion energize us to cross the barriers that separate us from the hurting and the outcast of the world. Anger must flow with compassion: it does not stand alone well. Otherwise we war against concepts, institutions, and structures rather than for the people who are being offended by them. Without compassion binding us to the feelings of the ostracized, in our anger we slip into noting our own feelings and begin to take offense from all those who thwart our just intentions. Without compassion our righteousness indignation soon becomes bitterness and in our bitterness we isolate all those with whom we disagree. We become as cold and oppressive as the most narrow religious or the worst authoritarian regimes.
I do not intend to directly speak to you today about the disease of leprosy in the ancient and modern world, or even the obvious comparison to the AIDS epidemic. Rather, I identify in Jesus’ compassion, anger, and healing of the leper in St. Mark’s Gospel the larger issue of confronting society’s scapegoating. This is not a matter relegated to ancient Judean treatment of lepers, along with Samaritans; or to the medieval treatment of Jews; or to the Puritans burning witches. Today’s Scriptures contain an interesting reflection on the notion of “social acceptability.” When people are different from us, those with the most features in common band together and single out the “other.” International wars have been started over these differences, too. Meanwhile, at home the “different” continue to be harassed. The majority limits its range of social contacts with “those people.” Their contacts with society as a whole are restricted, or if forced to interact with the majority, they are sent constant reminders of their unacceptability.
People who are different simply do not “fit in.” Their differences are viewed as “defects” invested with a social stigma the majority does not want to “catch.” The acceptable majority avoids them and above all avoids touching them. Until the Civil Rights Movement, African heritage was such a social disability that white shop keepers would slap black customers’ change on the counter to keep from touching their hands. In some eateries, if African Americans were allowed in, they were allowed to sit only in designated spots and the dishes they eat off of were kept separate just for their use. Public restrooms and drinking fountains were all segregated and if a black person happened to violate the rules they were considered criminals; if a black person happened to swim in a public or hotel swimming pool, it would be immediately closed, drained, and disinfected. Even in many Episcopal parishes in the North (and certainly in the South) until Civil Rights, African Americans were either routinely denied the Sacraments, or required to wait until all the white parishioners had received the chalice before presenting themselves at the altar for Communion. This is the way things went until one day in 1955 in Montgomery, AL a little black lady named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus… and a movement began that could not be squelched by police dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and bombs.
Despite the oppression and prejudice of his society 200 years ago, a former slave named Absalom Jones was ordained the first African American Priest in the Episcopal Church, and the first black American to receive formal ordination in any denomination. Tomorrow, Feb. 13th, is his feast day now on the calendar of the Episcopal Church. He led a wonderfully full and active life working against every form of oppression and slavery, but according to Holy Women, Holy Men, “it was his constant visiting and mild manner that made him beloved by his flock and the community.” He was an activist. He was a leader. Like Jesus, he got people’s attention. But, like Jesus, it wasn’t to point to himself that he did these things; it was to show others what it really meant to live in the kingdom of God.
Through today’s story of the leper, we clearly see how Jesus is calling us to re-examine the barriers we create to ensure that only the “right” people come into our fellowship. But most of all the Holy Spirit is calling us to remember that the systems of power do not limit the power of God’s action to heal and transform the world. The Scriptures teach us, time and time again, that Jesus comes into the world not to support the “centers” of power but to touch and heal the people on the “margins” – the powerless, abandoned, excluded, degraded, exploited, and disregarded. These are those with whom “right” people do not associate but “righteous” people recognize as fully God’s own. The challenge of the Gospel is not to “include” them into “the circle” but to allow God to expand that circle until it most fully reflects the richness that God alone has created.
Many may comment that racial justice in this country has been attained since the days of the Civil Rights movement. True, there are more official laws to protect the rights of racially diverse citizens. True, Jim Crow segregation is now illegal. True, cultural and ethnic sensitivity is more cultivated than before. But it is also true that we, living in metropolitan Southern California, are in a much more tolerant and privileged enclave (for the most part); than most of the rest of the country. Some of you have relocated here from other cities and states for that reason, so you know what I mean. But having had the experience of living in the Deep South for too long, I can attest without hesitation to the fact that racism, along with misogyny and homophobia are still alive and thriving in America today. There is much work left to be done!
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away at its vital unity. Hate destroys one’s sense of values and one’s objectivity. It causes one to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
“Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him…” Jesus came to include. Sin divides, perpetuates alienation. Jesus came to save humanity from sin. He looks at us as individuals and as groups with eyes of love that invites us back into the inner circle, which is a movement rather than a place. This movement is outward, inclusive, and compassionate toward the “them” or “others” who have been sinned against. There are many forms of social leprosy around which need to be healed… we need to be healed and we need to heal… the excluded and marginal, the ostracized and hidden, you and I, await the touch of our compassionate Lord.
Amen.
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