Reunited

(Scriptures: 2 Kings 5:1-14, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45)

You may recall the book “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Or maybe you saw the 1962 movie version, which start Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, an attorney of great moral integrity raising two young children, Scout and Jem, as a widower in small town Alabama, amid the privations of the Depression and rising racial tension. The early chapters tell of everyday events and learning moments in the lives of the young children. Next door to the Finch family is the home of the mysterious, reclusive Boo Radley, who never leaves the house and whom they’ve never actually seen. All sorts of horrible, grotesque rumors circulate about Boo Radley – rumors that he killed his father, that he’s horribly disfigured - and Scout and Jem and their playmates act out these rumors in weird little skits, in view of Boo Radley’s window, in attempts to get Boo Radley to come out of the house. Boo Radley responds, in his way – at night, when they’re asleep, he leaves small presents – a marble, a wood carving - for Scout and Jem in the knothole of a tree. Atticus Finch defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, earning the wrath of the prejudiced white townspeople. Near the end of the book, the Finch children are attacked and saved from harm by – Boo Radley, who finally came out of the house in order to defend them. Boo asks Scout to walk him back to his home, and before she leaves to go back home, she stands on Boo’s porch for a moment and imagines what it’s like to see the world from Boo Radley’s perspective, has compassion for what it’s like to walk around in Boo Radley’s skin.

We’re continuing in Mark’s Gospel – we’re still not yet through the first chapter – and Jesus has begun to expand his ministry. Having left the town in which he healed the demoniac and cured Simon’s mother in law, he is walking in a deserted area where he meets Boo Radley. Well, not Boo Radley, really, but someone just as isolated and reclusive – a person with leprosy, a leper.

Leprosy was a dreaded disease in ancient times – disfiguring and contagious. Along with skin lesions, it caused nerve and eye damage. There was no known cure, and so the only available way to stop the spread of the disease was to isolate those with leprosy from the general population. Leviticus 13:45-46 offers the following instructions:

“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.”

Considering the instructions of Leviticus 13, the leper in our Gospel reading was quite bold in approaching Jesus. How he knew Jesus could heal him, we do not know, but his desperation overcame any qualms about adhering to the instructions of Leviticus. He offered Jesus a choice – to heal the man and restore him to community, or to leave him in isolation. Jesus was moved – the translation above says “moved with pity”, other translations say “moved with anger” (perhaps at the isolation the man was forced to endure). The Greek word variously translated as pity or anger is connected to the Greek word for stomach or bowels – perhaps the man’s situation simply turned Jesus’ stomach. No matter – whatever emotion it was that moved Jesus, Jesus was moved to action. He chose to heal the man. Warning the man not to tell anyone what had happened, he sent the man off to the priest to go through the Temple ritual of restoration to community. Instead, freed from isolation and overwhelmed by gratitude, the man, who for so long was forced to live alone, went everywhere and ran up to everyone he met, proclaiming what Jesus had done for him.

Today leprosy is quite rare, at least in the United States. However, we can readily think of other circumstances in which disease or other social factors lead to isolation, lead to people being treated as lepers, sometimes to prevent the spread of disease, sometimes due to the irrational fears of society. We may think of India with its caste system, in which those on the very lowest rungs of society – the Dalits – are considered untouchables. Traditionally the Dalits – the untouchables – did manual labor considered beneath those of higher castes, such as removing garbage and dead animals and cleaning streets, sewers, and latrines. Traditionally they were thought to be less than human. In India, where Christianity is very much a minority religion, Christianity’s emphasis on equality and critique of the caste system has attracted many converts among the Dalit population, more so than those from higher castes.

We don’t have to travel the globe to encounter those treated as lepers - there are situations closer to home. In the town in which I grew up, in the early 1900’s, in order to prevent the spread of disease, tuberculosis patients were quarantined in a large, forbidding sanitarium outside the town limits. Later, as TB infections became increasingly rare, the facility was used to house the mentally ill and the mentally disabled, shutting them away from society. (My mother spent most of her career working there as a secretary, and as a child I often visited the facility.) Mental illness, to this day, carries a considerable stigma. Employers who would grant medical leave to employees recovering from a heart attack or stroke may not be so generous with someone recovering from severe depression or a psychotic episode. People who wouldn’t think of making jokes about someone with an artificial limb think nothing of making jokes about someone acting as if they’ve gone off their meds. The punch line may be funny – except to those who are on medication for mental illness, for whom the punch line is a verbal punch in the gut.

The homeless are also treated as lepers. A small proportion are mentally ill - during the 1980’s and 1990’s, many institutions for the mentally ill were closed down, and the former residents left to fend for themselves on the streets. Some are returning veterans, missing limbs or suffering from combat-related mental problems, whose reward for putting their lives on the line for their country is a spot on a heating grate and a hand lettered cardboard sign asking for help. And many homeless are folks down on their luck, unemployed in a difficult economy and without a supportive family, and perhaps having turned to drugs or alcohol to make the pain go away, at least for a little while. Our society’s safety net has been shredded in recent decades, and many of us are ourselves only a few paychecks away from that place on a heating grate. Even though the homeless are very much out in public, they are still treated as lepers, as people avoid making eye contact and even cross the street in order to avoid looking at them, let alone talking to them.

And then there was our society’s response to HIV/AIDS. Many of the first victims of AIDS were from groups that our society has often shunned. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, before there were effective treatments, those who contracted HIV/AIDS dealt not only with the lesions, weight loss, and secondary infections brought on by the disease, but all too often with the stigma of being terminated by employers, disowned by families, cut off by friends, shunned by churches. No less a personage than Philadelphia’s very own Cardinal Krol spoke of AIDS as God’s judgment on especially egregious sinners. Many doctors refused to treat AIDS patients. Many funeral homes refused to handle their remains. In life and in death, they were lepers, untouchables.

There are many whom our society continues to treat as lepers, due to disease, poverty, and other social factors. Like the leper in our Gospel passage, these social lepers offer us a choice: if we choose, we can exile them from our presence , or we can embrace them as beloved children of God. 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. And today, the church still has a role in helping outcasts to be reconciled to their society. We here at Emanuel 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 – indeed, compels us - to include where others exclude, to embrace those whom others shun. Granted, for the safety of our members and our children, there are some we’re just not equipped to welcome – but there are many whom we can embrace, if we’re willing to extend ourselves, to go outside our comfort zones, as Jesus did in healing the leper, even while his guts were churning.

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. Older versions of our prayer of confession included the phrase, “and there is no health in us.” While we try to distance ourselves from those who are different, using phrases like “the homeless” or “the mentally ill” or “the illegal aliens” or “the Muslims” or "the gays", 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.

It won’t be easy. The path of discipleship is really, really hard sometimes. Sometimes we’ll be moved by pity and compassion, sometimes by anger – sometimes we may have to fight feelings that turn our stomachs. In so doing, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the fact that we can’t solve all the world’s problems, that we can’t do everything. We can do something. The fact is that we here at Emanuel already do something. We collect money to feed the hungry. Not a whole lot of strangers find their way here, but we welcome those who do, and they don’t stay strangers for long. We with our small numbers aren’t called to solve all the world’s problems – but we are called to respond faithfully as best we’re able.

Asked by a leper for healing, Jesus said, “I do choose. Be clean.” My prayer is that Emanuel Church will continue to choose to offer healing words and helping acts to those whom God sends our way. Through our choices, may those on society’s margins be restored to community, and moved to proclaim to their neighbors the great things God has done for them. Amen.