HEALING: DARING TO TOUCH THE OUTCAST
Psalm 30, Mark 1:40-45
February 12, 2006

“If you choose, you can make me clean.� If you choose, you can make me clean. My God, what a challenge, what a plea! A leper, outcast from all human contact, came to Jesus, knelt before him, and begged him, saying, “If you choose, you can make me clean.� And Jesus, confronted by an entire history and culture of rejection of the one with leprosy, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do choose. Be made clean!�

A few weeks ago, I talked with a man who had come to worship with us. He sat in the back; he kept to himself; he left not long after the service was over. As we talked, he spoke of how unwelcome he was in churches, because of he is black, because of he is gay, because he is homeless. He spoke of living a life of being threatened, struck, told his presence was an affront to God—“How dare you come to church in those clothes!�—the only clothes he had. He has come to expect inhospitality, the hard hand, the hostile stare. He lives a life of isolation and has a hard time believing that it could be any other way.

This is what happens to those who are judged “unclean,� in our time or in ancient times. Unclean—not whole, not wholesome, not welcome, a carrier of difference, of disease, of dis-ease. “Unclean� is only partially an indictment of the person so labeled. It is so much more, an indictment of the surrounding culture, of the fear that drives us apart.

Two years ago, a wonderful friend named Carol died. I miss her still. Carol had a disease called leukoderma, which meant that she had patches of skin on her face and hands that have no pigment, so they look odd against her generally darker complexion. It may have been an auto-immune disease, for the patches got larger and smaller, growing when she was under stress. The disease had no other ill effects: it just makes her look different.

R. K. Harrison, past professor of Hebrew at Wycliffe College of the University of Toronto, wrote an article on leprosy in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. He argued that the leper who approached Jesus in our story today had leukoderma, not Hansen’s disease, which we now call leprosy. There is considerable difficulty in translation, partly caused by the fact that the Hebrew word for leprosy is a generic word for many kinds of eruptive, scaly or patchy skin diseases.

It is clear if you read Leviticus 13 and 14 that the word translated as leprosy covers several different conditions, because two whole chapters are spent describing kinds of skin disease and their level of impurity. It is probable, comparing the descriptions to present medical descriptions, that the Biblical term “leprosy� included Psoriasis, leukoderma, ringworm, as well as what we now call Hanson’s disease, or leprosy.

The problem, for a pre-medical culture, was distinguishing dangerous, contagious diseases from those conditions that were unsightly, but benign. To do this, the priest was instructed to look to the color of the hair growing in the diseased flesh. You see, diseases that attack at a deep level often affect the hair, causing it to grow in white or yellowish. So, white hair in patches became a ritual marker of leprosy, even if it was caused by another disease, even a benign one like leukoderma, where neither the skin nor the hair in the area has pigment.

Our text indicates that Jesus was “moved with pity� at the sight of the man who approached him. This is a mild translation for the original text, which indicates much more emotion and passion in the encounter. Some of the original texts use a word that can be translated as “filled with compassion,� but others use a word that means “becoming angry.� We can follow this discrepancy into a larger heart of the story.

You see, the man was probably perfectly healthy, but isolated from society by religious law, declared unclean, and therefore unfit for human company, because his skin looked different. And the injustice of this made Jesus very angry. The man came up to Jesus, requiring him to interact with someone declared ritually unclean, and said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.� Perhaps this meant that he believed that Jesus could cure his disease—but an alternate text suggests that the meaning is closer to “If you choose, you can declare me clean, you can pronounce me clean.� That is, if you choose, you can recognize that I am being shunned for a condition that is not unhealthy, and claim your power as a religious leader—after all, people are calling you “rabbi�—to challenge the pronouncements of the priests of the temple. If you choose, you can choose truth over a deadly tradition, set me free from isolation, and, in the process, bring down the wrath of the religious leaders of our culture. If you choose, you can take my side against discrimination, stand with me to face down the powers who declare me unclean. If you choose, you can liberate me, and those like me, from a law that is deadly, perhaps at the risk of your own life, or popularity.

Maybe we can understand why the encounter filled Jesus with difficult emotions, pity and anger, compassion and rejection. Last week, we saw that Jesus came to understand that he was called to proclaim God’s love to all people, a message that he set out to spread through Galilee. But now, so fast, his proclamation of love has led to an encounter with injustice, and through it, with religious politics. Maybe he didn’t set out to challenge wrong. Maybe he thought, for a little while, that it would be enough to proclaim God’s love, to stay to the positive side, if you will. But then, here comes the challenge: are you going to proclaim love, and community, for the one who is ritually and religiously excluded? If you do, if you make that one a full part of community, then you are catapulted, like it or not, into the angry, bubbling stewpot of temple—or, in our time, religious and cultural—politics, into a movement for justice.

This week, I read an interview with Hector Aristizábal [A-ris-ti-ZA-bal], a man from a poor neighborhood of Medellin, Columbia. Columbia in 1982 had its own version of our Patriot Act, a provision that encouraged citizens to report any suspected subversive activity. A priest overheard Hector’s younger brother discussing politics and reported the family to the authorities. When soldiers raided their home, they found literature they deemed “subversive� and arrested Hector and his brother. Hector’s brother was sent to prison; Hector was released, but only after he had been tortured—shocked, beaten, held under water, hung from a pole.

Hector stayed in Columbia for another 7 years, working as a psychologist and a human rights activist. In 1989, threatened with death, he escaped to the United States, where he works with torture victims, gang members, AIDS patients, and low-income immigrant families, all people that our culture might label “unclean,� might shun, might refuse to see.

Hector said, in the interview about torture and transformation, that “the blessing lies next to the wound.� He explained that sentiment this way:

Each of us who survive must create meaning from the experience: Why did this happen to me? Why did I survive when other people didn’t? We seek meaning by creating narratives about our lives. The dominant narrative for torture is about “victims.� But I don’t believe in victimhood. People have tried to place me in the category of victim, and I won’t allow it. . . .Anytime you go through a difficult ordeal, it can awaken inner resources. Instead of being a victim, each person can learn the lesson his or her spirit needs to learn.

I have tried to recast the experience of being tortured as an initiation experience. In a traditional society, initiation marks the end of your old life and the beginning of something new. And when the initiation ordeal is over, if you survive, you are welcomed back into the community. People undergo many ordeals—not only torture, but accidents, illness, depression, divorce, imprisonment, even adolescence.

After an ordeal, he claims, people in our day discover that their connections to their community—their language, movements, expectations, relations—all of these have been broken, overturned, ripped apart. This is what strands people in an on-going, inner wilderness, matching the exterior labeling with an internal sense of being “unclean.� To heal from the wrenching pain and isolation of the torture chamber, of the ordeal of life, we must find a key to the internal door of isolation, we must unlock that door. This is the pathway to healing, to fullness, to life.

“If you choose, you can make me clean.� If we choose, we can listen to the one who has been driven out; we can choose to touch, to see, to respect, and to join with the one who has been labeled unclean.

When we choose to be baptized, we claim for ourselves the power to resist oppression in whatever forms it takes. Our baptism is itself an initiation rite, a passage to the strength and understanding necessary to throw off the cultural blinders that would render other human beings, any other human beings, unclean or invisible. If we choose, we can touch the leper, look into the eyes of the homeless, dance with the outcast, make the world whole—clean, undivided, holy—again. If we choose, we can restore the realm of God, encounter by encounter, life by life. If we choose, we can walk with Jesus into unchartered territory, leaving the ways of fear and discrimination, isolation and brokenness behind, resisting religious and cultural rules that would separate us from one another as we welcome everyone we meet into the everlasting love of God. If we choose. Oh, if we choose. Amen.

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