CLEAN IN CHRIST
A sermon for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

When I was a little boy, I hated to get dirty. Later I learned to dig underground tunnels, unfazed by what got under my fingernails. But there is a photo of me in my earliest years, sitting in a sandbox, wearing a cowboy hat…and gloves. Gloves, my mother tells me, because I didn’t want to get my hands dirty. If you’re wondering, I don’t wear gloves in the sandbox anymore.

In today’s gospel account from Mark, Jesus encounters a leper. Leprosy was not one skin disease. It covered a multitude of various kinds of illness, such as the phrase “skin cancer” does today. We do not know the exact nature of this man’s problem. But his sickness was so serious, it made him an outcast, forcing him to live outside his city and his world. Just imagine the shame.

The leper sees Jesus and a way out of his dilemma. He says, “If you choose, you can make me clean” (1:40). His faith is showing, and Jesus responds. But first, and only in Mark’s telling of this story, something happens. Something takes place deep within the very soul of Jesus. He is “moved with pity” (1:41).

That little phrase is actually translated in several different ways. “Deeply moved,” says Eugene Peterson in his 21 st century version of the Bible he calls The Message. “Moved to anger,” we find in the Revised English Bible. “Filled with compassion,” says the New International Version. Now, I wasn’t there when Jesus healed the leper, but from what I have learned about Jesus, I think that last rendering may be the most accurate. That’s not to say that anger and pity aren’t part of what Jesus must have been feeling.

But if we do know anything about Jesus, it is this: he is so deeply moved by the leper and his faith that he is “filled with compassion.” He “suffers with.” That’s literally what com–passion means. Jesus suffers with the leper. He can’t help but be moved, from his compassion to action, extending his healing touch. His action, however, has consequences. In Jesus’ time, when someone laid hands on a person with leprosy or anyone who was in violation of the Jewish purity code, the one who touched the outcast also became an outcast. I wonder: what might that have been like for Jesus? I wonder: have we enlightened 21 st-century Christians moved past that kind of mindset? How might we still believe that people who touch, or speak to, or care for, or love an outcast need to be cast out themselves – out of our inner circle, even out of our church?

When I was in seminary I was asked by a friend named Bernie to visit a man who was sick. Bernie’s request emerged from a new ministry to persons with a disease that did not even have a name at the time. Later we named it: AIDS. I visited Steven, a man who lived alone, in Brooklyn. When I knocked on his door, he couldn’t hear me, because his TV was turned up too loud. I knocked again, shouted “Hello!?” and let myself in through his unlocked door. Steven didn’t hear or see me until I entered his living room. He was sitting in a chair, wrapped in a blanket and shivering, watching a televangelist. The TV preacher was saying something about how sinful people are. I said “hello” again, and we introduced ourselves. Then Steven said, “Why do TV preachers always sound so full of judgment and hate? I thought the Christian God was a God of love.”

Steven told me that neither his family nor his rabbi would come visit him. He told me how much he appreciated my coming that day. I promised I would return. But I didn’t. I broke my promise. A few weeks later I called and said that I just couldn’t come to visit again because of my extremely busy schedule. The truth: I was scared. I was scared of his unnamed disease. I was fearful of him. And I was afraid of what God seemed to be asking me to do. I guess you could say the whole situation felt “unclean.” In any event, I gave in to my fear. One day, a few months later, Bernie came to me and said, “I just thought you’d want to know: Steven died yesterday.”

The fear of the unclean, I have come to believe, is like any other fear. It can rule your life. Or you and I can face that fear, as we have learned to do with other fears in our lives. Last Sunday’s gospel account told us that Jesus ended his first day of ministry by going off to a deserted place to pray. Jesus was a person of deep compassion, perhaps because he took his fears to prayer. Courage, they say, is fear that has said its prayers. My prayer for us here at All Saints’ Church is that we keep facing our fears together, in prayer.

The dying, the depressed, the homeless, the jobless, the addicted, the mentally ill, the chronically ill, the incarcerated, the traumatized. These and others are the lepers of our day, forced to the margins of society. They are all around us. They could well BE, or have been, us. I have learned that what I see as unclean in others is usually my own reflection and projection onto them of what is unclean in me. We all need to feel clean and whole. We all need a healing touch. I believe Jesus is ready to offer us that cleansing and that healing.

We who come to claim our faith in Jesus want to carry on his ministry, in his name. Yet we sometimes forge ahead, unaware of the unintended consequences, the costs of our discipleship. One of those costs is that those who seek to follow Jesus and care for “the least of these,” as Jesus called them, may well get the same treatment he got. After he heals the leper, Jesus does not return to the city. He stays in the country, where those who cannot be integrated into city life must go. Between the press of the crowds who need healing and the stigma of hanging out with so many sin-sick souls, Jesus is pushed to the margins, just like them. He is subjected to separation and isolation, just like them. But Jesus is also different. He doesn’t just listen to the leper. Over and over again, he reaches out, he extends a healing touch, the touch of God.

In a powerful new movie called “Gran Torino,” Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet and retired auto worker, whose wife has just died. Walt is struggling to stay in his own home in a neighborhood now filled with immigrants and a rising fear of the foreign. He is not having an easy time adjusting, whether to the loss of his wife or to the gain of new neighbors all around him. Slowly, he makes a few, new non-native friends. A young man next door, who wants to be macho and not cast out by a local gang, gets caught trying to steal Walt’s prize car. That’s when things change for everyone. The young man and his sister become something of a healing team, helping their neighbor deal with his anger, grief, loneliness and pain.

One night, Walt takes his anger out on the kitchen cabinets, after a young neighbor woman is violated by the gang. Later, he sits talking with his young priest, hands still dirtied with blood. He realizes he still has blood on his hands from the Korean conflict, but it’s really his soul that feels soiled by that war. The priest, who has been growing up fast as he cares for this embittered man, persists in confronting him about his life. He shows Walt how he is holding on to his wounds, how he is disconnected from the ones he loves.

When he realizes how the violence perpetrated against his new Southeast Asian neighbor has something to do with his own, decades-old violence in Korea, Walt is transformed. In a compassionate act of nonviolence, he follows in the footsteps of Jesus, no longer seeing his immigrant neighbors as foreign, different or unclean. He gives up trying to carry all his pain and shame. First a lapsed Catholic, now a recovering Christian, no longer an aging version of “Dirty Harry,” Walt (and perhaps Clint Eastwood himself?) finally learns that “washed in the blood of the Lamb” does not mean “killing a Commie for Christ.” By the way, although this is a movie well worth seeing, it is also filled with “language” and does contain violence.

Washing in healing waters can help when we are sick. Some truly benefit from rivers like the Jordan, baths in Hot Springs, pools at Lourdes. We Christians claim that, in Baptism, God’s Spirit cleans and heals and empowers us in ways we can’t begin to imagine. But for most of us, we cannot be made clean and stay that way with one or more washings. Most of us, perhaps all of us need a thorough, deeper soul cleaning – perhaps more than once. All of us, it seems, need the healing touch of Jesus throughout our lives.

Our Wednesday 5:30 pm healing Eucharist, with the laying on of hands and anointing with oil; our new Care Teams and our new Health Ministry; our times of fellowship together, when we can give and receive a healing touch – all these moments are life-giving to us! It is so important to let others reach out and offer a healing touch to us. And it is just as important for us to reach out and offer to touch the untouched, even the untouchable. It’s been said that you or I may be the only Bible someone will ever read. You or I may be the only one who offers the healing touch of Jesus to someone else – perhaps even here, today.

In ten days the season of Lent begins. On that Wednesday, those of us who come to church will be reminded of our sin, our sickness, even our own mortality. When we come on Ash Wednesday, before we receive communion, a priest will offer to put ashes on our foreheads, saying, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” No matter how dirty we get, no matter how unclean we feel, no matter how sick or sinful we actually are, the healing touch of Jesus is available to us – on Ash Wednesday, on this day. We need only ask.

After the service today, the clergy will remain at the altar rails to offer the laying on of hands, anointing with oil and prayers for anyone who seeks God’s healing touch. Just come on up immediately following the service. May we all come to Jesus for the cleansing, healing and forgiveness we need – in our minds, our bodies, our spirits, our souls. And may we step out in faith and follow Jesus, offering a cleansing, healing touch to others who may greet us.

Amen.

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
All Saints’ Episcopal Church Frederick , Maryland
February 15, 2009