Cooties

Do you remember back in grade school, there always seemed to be one or two kids who nobody liked? Maybe they came from poor or otherwise troubled families, and their clothes might be frayed hand-me-downs. They were always the last to be picked for games at recess, and always walked home from school alone. In my small-town grade school, there was Sheila, whose family was very poor. Everyone said that “Sheila has cooties.” As she walked home, the kids would chant, “Sheila has cooties, Sheila has cooties.” Nobody wanted to get too close to Sheila, because if you did, you might get cooties too. I have no idea whatever happened to Sheila, but I doubt she has a lot of fond memories from her years as a student in elementary school.

This week’s Gospel reading (Mark 1:40-45) reminded me of Sheila’s plight. In his travels, Jesus was approached by a leper – a man who had the skin disease of leprosy. Leprosy was a dreaded disease – disfiguring, and thought to be highly contagious. This was 1900 years before the discovery of penicillin or any sort of treatment, and so the only remedy was a public health approach – quarantine and isolation – just as some may remember for TB and flu and other epidemics before the invention of antibiotics. The idea of quarantine is that the authorities couldn’t cure those infected, but they could at least try to slow down or stop the spread of the disease by isolating the sick person. The book of Leviticus has very detailed instructions on how to tell leprosy from other skin diseases, and what procedures were to be taken in case of infection. Leviticus 13:45-46 “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”

In our Gospel today, the leper acted outside of the prescribed procedures – rather than shouting “unclean”, he asked Jesus for healing – “if you choose, you can make me clean.” After which we run headlong into a translation problem. Most of our Bibles say that in response to the leper’s plea, Jesus was moved with compassion. But some more recent translations may have a note at the bottom that says, “alternate translation – Jesus was moved with anger” – perhaps at the isolation the man had to endure. Exactly what Jesus felt, we don’t know – the translators aren’t certain, and neither are we. What we do know from the text is that Jesus said, “I do choose” and healed the man.

We don’t hear much about leprosy these days. As of a few years ago, the last leper colony, on the island of Molokoi, had only a handful of elderly leprosy patients. However, every society treats certain groups of “others” as lepers, or as though they have cooties.

Who are the lepers, the untouchables in our society? You know who they are – among them are the groups whom politicians beat like a piñata every election season, blaming them for all our problems. One example is the homeless, from whom we may avert our eyes as we walk down the street. (I’m as guilty as anyone else.) And it’s true that many of the homeless we see downtown are addicted to drugs and alcohol. Yet many in our society are living closer to the edge than we know, a few paychecks or pension checks away from being out on the street, a few paychecks or pension checks away from being one of those from whom we avert our eyes. And in today’s economy, if we’re not blessed with a strong support network of family and friends and church, we can find ourselves over the edge very quickly indeed.

Those with mental health problems frequently find themselves in extreme isolation. Our society frequently doesn’t treat mental illness as seriously as physical illness – the attitude is that the mentally ill are not “really” sick in the way that people with diabetes or heart disease are sick. Insurance companies frequently offer very limited coverage for mental health treatment – maybe 8 sessions with a therapist - if they offer any at all. Those without insurance may “self-medicate” with alcohol or street drugs. Employers who would offer common decency to a co-worker recovering from a heart attack may not offer anything like the same common decency to a co-worker struggling with severe depression. Jokes about multiple personalities or being treated like “the crazy aunt in the attic” can be funny – except if you’re mentally ill, in which case the punch line can feel like a punch in the gut.

Jesus told the healed leper, “Go, and show yourself to the priest.” In Jesus’ day, the priest had the role of reintroducing the healed leper to the wider society. We in the church have no magic cure for illness, but we do have a cure for the isolation of being shunned by society. The love of Christ enables us – and compels us - to include where others exclude, to embrace those whom others shun. For in the end, we’re every one of us broken in some way or another. All of us struggle with sin, struggle with frailties of body and spirit. While we try to distance ourselves from those who are different, using phrases like “the homeless” or “the mentally ill”, ultimately there’s no “the”, no them, only us, all of us. Ultimately the welcome we offer our society’s untouchables is the welcome God offers us.