Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Choosing

I have been teaching in the Course of Study for a while now. Ten years or so? I don’t even remember when I started, to be honest. Anyway, the Course of Study is the process in our denomination whereby folks can become local pastors, and many of those I teach have been serving churches for a long time. So it becomes more of a sharing of knowledge and experience, asking them to think of things they might not have taken the time to think about before now.
I enjoy teaching, it is one of my favorite things to do within the wide range of responsibilities as pastor. I even stepped aside from the local church for a time to go and study and then teach full time. It was a great experience, one that I wanted to maintain when returning to a full time pastorate. And that is why I am off teaching this weekend.

One of the most exciting elements of teaching is that you find such interesting people. As I mentioned, in the Course of Study there is a fascinating range of experience in these folks who are answering the call to ministry. Some of them have had full careers in some other field and are now trying to integrate that knowledge into work in the church. Some of the connections are pretty amazing.

But it is not just here that I have found fascinating people. Whenever we engage in learning together we discover how creative God really is. Whether I am teaching young people in confirmation, for example, or older adults in bible study or families or singles, new Christians or long time saints of the church, I am constantly amazed at the giftedness of God’s people.
All of this comes to mind in part because I am heading off to meet a new class of fellow learners, but also because of our subject for this weekend’s worship. In our series titled "Who Really Cares? Faith out of Touch" we have come to "Healing Lepers" as the subject for our consideration. On the one hand, I don’t know how much of a problem leprosy is in Fort Wayne Indiana these days. To be honest, I haven’t encountered anyone struggling with that particular skin disease in my hospital visitation lately. So, why the big deal about healing lepers? Couldn’t we talk about healing in general? Certainly that is still relevant in this modern era. Even if leprosy is not a modern threat.

Well, let’s take a look at the passage for this week before we answer that. And then ask ourselves are there lepers still today?

Mark 1:40 - 45 A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean." 41 Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" 42 Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. 43 After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, 44 saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." 45 But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

"If you choose.." Does that strike you as an odd way to ask that question? It does evidence a considerable faith. The leper knows that Jesus has the power. Not everyone who approached him was quite so confident. But the leper moves the question away from the ability and places it in the area of choice. If you choose, he says, you can make me clean.
The second part of the opening statement (notice it isn’t a question at all!) is also interesting. The leper doesn’t say that you have the power to make me well, he says you can make me clean. Which again is a shift from the normal patterns of healing that the gospels record. What the leper wants, at least according to the words he uses, is not so much a physical healing but a spiritual acceptance.

"Leprosy" represented a host of skin ailments, some of which were serious and others weren’t. But all of them were visible, which is what made them so terrifying to the ancient world. A leper was require by law to separate him/herself from society. He was to not have any communication with any clean person. He was to wear clothes that would draw attention to his affliction, so that no one would accidently find themselves in the company of a leper and thereby become ritually unclean themselves. A leper had to announce, some say by ringing a bell, others claim they merely had to shout "unclean, unclean" whenever they passed by in the street. The law said that if even their shadow crossed the shadow of another person that person would become unclean and therefore not fit for worship or social engagements - until they were pronounced clean by a priest.

What the leper wanted was for Jesus to use his authority (remember the issue in the previous verses was Jesus’ surprising authority) to declare him clean so that everyone else would quit treating him as a non-person. What Jesus did was heal him and then send him to the priest for the official pronouncement. But he didn’t go. He didn’t need their announcement, he didn’t need the strictures of the law that had imprisoned him in his illness. Once he was made clean, he ran and told everyone he knew and some he didn’t know what Jesus had done for him. He began to live clean even before the law pronounced him clean.

When I was teaching in Edinburgh, I had students from all over the world. One student was from India and he was interested in what he called "Dalit theology." Dalit meant the people in Hindi. It was the term that some of them were using to replace the former word that designated the lowest caste of people in India - Untouchable. The Untouchables had been declared clean - or in that culture, declared a true caste, real people. But while the official policy was that no one was untouchable, the practice was that these folks because of their occupation, family background or economic status were still treated as untouchable. They were ignored by the "higher" classes, no one would make eye contact with them in the streets, and if, heaven forbid, a daughter wanted to marry one there would be resistance to ultimate levels - some even considered a dead child to be preferable than one attached to an untouchable - or a Dalit.

The point here is that while legally there was no longer a designation called untouchable, by choice there still was. By choice a group of people had been designated unclean, by choice a lifestyle was declared unworthy, by choice people were marginalized by their "betters." If you choose... Who have you chosen to designate as unclean? Who have you chosen to ignore, or to be afraid of, or to turn away from? The leper’s point was that just as there is a choice to shuffle to the edges, there is also a choice to bring to the center. We could choose to treat even those unlike us, even those with whom we disagree, even those we have shunned in our hearts if not in our living, we could choose to treat them as worthy of attention, of service, of love.

If you choose...

Shalom,
Derek

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