Who are lepers? It is not fair to say that a leper is anyone we exclude, either deliberately or unintentionally. It is also not fair to say that a leper is one particular group of alienated peoples relative to our own day and age. So, to say that lepers are black people or gay people or ugly people or “you fill in-your own personal outcast” people is not fair. Lepers were cast out in Jesus’ day because they were considered physically diseased. The sores on their bodies were sometimes open sores, oozing blood or fluid. This was forbidden in God’s law. I suspect as an early form of quarantine for the sake of public health. The assumption was that people with this kind of disease were contagious. Blood diseases were particularly frightening and dangerous. Women were basically excommunicated monthly because of cyclical bleeding. And such was the concern for lepers. Because the law stated that these people were to be cast out for a period of time to be determined by the priests. Timing was important. If you leave someone back into the community too son, others may become sick too. If you wait too long the outcast may die or become so estranged as to have not economic place in a household or village.
Religion does become a purity cult sometimes, excluding others to propagate ones own identity and value. So it is troubling when religious communities exclude or reject people based on a consensus about what is good or normal or safe. And it is always a good experiment to look around and see who is in our communities and neighborhoods but is not in our religious community. Lutherans have struggled with race matters. Less than 10 % of the ELCA is non-white. The problem is not that we exclude people of color overtly based on some prejudice or opposition to the presence of non-white people in our churches or communities. Although that may be the case in some places. I should hope that many of us are beyond that in this day. But the issue is a cultural one. Racial issues are cross-cultural issues and require that we learn and accept a different cultural heritage, a different historical viewpoint, and a different language.
In college chapel people from the state mental hospital came to worship with us. They were noisy and required a lot of attention, sometimes distracting, but participatory in their own way. You know how sometimes a children’s sermon gets out of hand? Imagine that happening randomly throughout worship. And then there was Eric, mentally ill and very faithful. He sat in the front row, a characteristically unlutheran move. There was a desire on the part of some to quell his enthusiasm, to silence his mannerisms, to move him to the back of the nave. He insisted on being part of our pre-worship prayer in the sacristy and insisted on a pastoral hug, too.
I wonder what it will be like when Dan and Justin start coming to worship and showing up for things after they are released from prison? Will people feel unsafe enough to leave this congregation?
Jesus chooses to declare someone clean before his time is up. He pardons him early, releases him from his imprisonment to a disease or ailment he did not choose not could he control. The results of his leprosy must have been cruel because he begs Jesus to heal him. He was ready to resume life on the inside of the community, to be part of a living and sustainable economy with food and family and friend and faith. Things the “clean” take for granted. Clean and unclean is not a thing of history. It is a way people perceive people, how we organize ourselves as communities, how we live. Hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, group homes…But Jesus touches him, making himself potentially unclean. He is saying something here: GOD is unclean. GOD is not in favor of any rules written or unwritten that render some people normal and others abnormal. GOD is not in favor of rules that remove those who are different from the benefits of community life. GOD embraces us all. To the chagrine of the clean among us and to the absolute joy of the unclean. Privilege is a wonderful thing that provides security, essential resources, and the viewpoint from above that requires keeping the underprivileged or the less fortunate at arms length. If we let them in, what will happen to us?
Jesus doesn’t care. He lets them in. he loves them all. And he expects them same of us. Jesus was not religious, no purist. But he demanded a new kind of religion that was just and hospitable and inclusive and compassionate toward the very least and most vulnerable and he knew that laws that did not embody that same spirit were meant to be broken. No wonder they crucified him. His love was broader and stronger than their dividing walls. Whatever separates, whatever breaks down, whatever dismantles and destroys relationships—these are powers Jesus came to abolish. 21 centuries later, Jesus Christ has overcome time and distance and human failings to come to us, to welcome us in ,to make us God’s own children. May the walls in our hearts be torn down. May we meet the leper and welcome him by joining him wherever he is and may we create a community that looks like the Kingdom announced by Jesus, the one who reaches out for us and chooses us. Amen.
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