His Stomach Turned (Epiphany 6B)

His Stomach Turned

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
12 February 2012; Single 9 am Sung Mass

(Followed by annual Parish Meeting)
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "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. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, 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." 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. (Mark 1:40-45)

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen. 

A few years ago, I was serving as altar assistant and cantor for Wednesday noon services at a small Church in Washington DC.  Most of the people who came were employees from the nearby Department of State.  But I remember one member of the congregation very graphically.  He was clearly disabled by mental illness: he often was unable to care for his basic hygiene needs, and unwilling to seek help.  Most of the other worshippers clustered on the other side of the church away from him, because, frankly, his behavior was bizarre and he smelled very bad.  One priest began to get help for the man’s hygienic and then his medical needs.  The man became belligerent and drew away.  Another priest used later the sacrament as a reward to encourage the man to change his behaviors, with some good results.  He began to take his meds and make his talk-therapy appointments.  

In this, I learnt an important thing.   We in the Church are an odd mix of misfits and walking-wounded.  Those of us most thankful for the grace God has shown us are the most engaged with those still suffering, the most patient with the debasements of others.   They also tend to be the least sentimental, and the least willing to make things worse by engaging in enabling behavior that just delays recovery. 

In today’s Gospel reading, one of the “living dead” appears:  a leper.  He begs to be made clean.

Leprosy in the Bible is probably not merely Hansen’s disease, the highly communicable and, until antibiotics were discovered, hopelessly disfiguring and fatal disease that we call leprosy. In the Bible, it almost certainly includes any fungal or viral disease of the skin like ringworm or athlete’s foot.  Leprosy was highly polluting in terms of ritual impurity, and was to be avoided at all costs for this reason. It was a source of “dirt,” disgusting filth, and was contagiously contaminating.

Lepers were beyond the pale of society.  They lived apart from family, community, or village.  They had to warn others they were even approaching: true pariahs, untouchables.  No one wanted to see them, hear them, or even know of them. 

Jesus as a practicing Jew, believed that the purity rules were God’s commandments.  These included the laws that allowed for lepers, once their symptoms disappeared, to be ritually purged of uncleanness through a small sacrifice, a ritual washing, and a declaration of cleanness by a priest in the Temple. 

The leper says to Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”    He kneels, and begs Jesus to cure him and remove the ritual uncleanness. 

Jesus’ is deeply moved in reaction.  But the text here is somewhat unclear.  Some manuscripts say Jesus is angry or indignant, presumably at the sight of a person whose situation sums up what is wrong with the world.  Other copies say simply that “his stomach turned.”  The usual translation follows the most common Koine Greek sense of the word and takes this as meaning, “his stomach turned with pity.”  But the original core meaning of the word here in this context suggests another possibility:  “his stomach turned in disgust.”

The sense would be, “Although Jesus’ stomach was turning in disgust, he stretched forth his hand and said to the man, “I do so choose.  Be made clean!”” 

He heals the man and declares him clean, in one act overthrowing all the claims of the Temple establishment and righteous interpreters of the Law.  They claimed that salvation and purity were found only through the orthodox, authoritative religious Temple brand. 

To calm things a bit and keep a lid on the story of miracle-working that had been attracting huge audiences but no congregations, Jesus tells the man to go through the motions of the Law to reclaim legal purity.  But he still has overturned the claims of the Temple rites. 

“Though his stomach was turning, Jesus said, ‘I do so choose. Be healed.’”

Jesus is revolted by the leper.  His religion tells him the man is untouchable.  The commandments of his God tell him that the man is impure, filthy, something to be fled.  Like the man in my old Wednesday parish, the leper was filthy and stank.  He had no business coming near the worship of the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

But for Jesus, mercy and humanity were always more important than purity.  The sufferer in front of him trumped all the sub-clauses of God’s Law. He held his nose, as it were, and still reached out and hugged the smelly wretch. 

This really marks just how radical Jesus was. The religion of the day declared, with the full authority of scripture literally cited and interpreted through authoritative tradition, that impurity was contagious. It spread from the unclean to the clean. People who want to please God must avoid it, lest they commit sacrilege against the Temple of God, the land, and risk God’s wrath.

Despite this, Jesus knew that love and goodness were more contagious than impurity, because of who God was—a loving parent who would always give the child the best food, a wonderful master of the weather who gave the blessings of rain and sunshine to righteous and wicked alike, a merciful friend who would get up in the middle of the night for a friend just because he was knocking at the door.  This is what Jesus preached, and what Jesus lived.  He spent most of his time with the dregs of society:  drunks, traitors, and whores.  “It is the ill who need a physician,” he would said, “not the well.” 

“Though his stomach was turning, Jesus said, ‘I do so choose. Be healed.’”

Despite his revulsion, Jesus chooses to heal the man, even to touch him in the process. 

Love for us Christians is not a condition of the feelings.  It is a state of the will, a choice made by the one who loves.  It is the disposition to serve, help, forgive, and engage for the good of the beloved, whether kindly or fiercely. 

Here in Ashland, land of New Age and Spiritual-but-Not-Religious, we often hear it said, “Trust your feelings.”

I have to say, with some embarrassment, that whenever I hear that, I cringe. 

This is not because I have buried my feelings, cut off emotion, and learned the rigorous discipline of logic and data.  It is because in my experience, feelings can be very dangerous guides to thought and action. 

I have seen far too many families ruined, lives unhinged, marriages and partnerships destroyed, and people put in jail because they were “following their feelings.” 

As a result, whenever I see the first Star Wars movie, when the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi comes to Luke Skywalker and tells him, “Luke, trust your feelings,” I want to jump out of my chair, and yell, “NO, LUKE!  DO NOT TRUST YOUR FEELINGS.  THEY ARE VERY, VERY DANGEROUS!” 

The adviceto trust feelings is good, as far as it goes.  We process a lot of material at a subconscious level, and our gut intuition sometimes is a very valuable—even a life-saving—factor in crisis situations.  And being authentically in touch with our emotions and able to sort our good ones and not-so-good ones is a crucial skill. 

But the fact is, none of us is perfect, and none of us have perfectly trained consciences or feelings.  We need to learn when and how to trust our feelings to not be misled by them.  And this is done in community.  It is what spiritual direction and retreats is about.  It is what Church is about.  It is what going to group is about—whether therapy or support group, or 12-Step meeting.  One of the things we first learn is how important our feelings are—not as signs of the truth of the world and what we should do, but rather as indicators about what is going on inside of us and of danger areas for us. 

We need never think that our uncleanness is a barrier keeping us from Jesus. We need not fear that a disability we may have can keep us from the love of Jesus.   What keeps us from Jesus is our fear itself. Our fear may make us so nervous that we might not, like this leper, run to Jesus and kneel before him and beg him to heal us. We need to reach out to Jesus and beg him to heal us. 

And then, in thankfulness for his grace, we follow Jesus.  The fact that our stomach may turn, whether in disgust, fear, or trepidation, when we are called upon to do some service of one kind or another, or help a person particularly offensive to us, is not a sign that Jesus is not calling us.  It is a sign perhaps that He is calling us beyond our comfort zone to a good that we could not have aspired to ourselves. 

Disfiguring skin disease is unpleasant.  Smelly and messy lack of hygiene is gross.  But this is what we are called at times to embrace.  And what about HIV/AIDS?  Or nasty, ugly, just plain mean mental illness? Drug or alcohol addiction?  The madness and dementia of old age? 

Like Jesus, we need to choose to heal, to reach out and touch the leper, to choose to welcome the smelly and crazy guest.  This act of choice is what we call love.  And it is where God intersects with human life. 

May we so serve and follow God’s call. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.