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‘B’ / Epiphany 6 / 2-15-09 / Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church
Scriptures 2 Kings 5:1-14 Psalm 30 Mark 1:40-45
Healing: From Them to Us
It may seem absurd to us in the post-industrial world that a person such as Naaman in our 2 Kings scripture today could be dipped seven times into a holy body of water and be healed. But it hardly seemed absurd to the people in a tiny, impoverished mountain village in the similarly impoverished southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Nearly a generation of years has passed, but I still remember how our seminary Mission Perspectives class – led by the former General Assembly Moderator and Beirut hostage Ben Weir – was greeted by the people of that village as warmly as the spring day enveloping their terraced town. Their squealing, malnourished children, who ran excited circles around their gigantic North American guests. Their last chicken, saved (as we would later discover) for the midday dinner for their wealthy visitors. The gift of inscribed pottery presented to each of us as we prepared to depart. And who could forget the pride the men of the village took in cultivating the agave plant that grew so widely and wildly in their arid climate. They cut out the flower shoot, collected its sap, fermented it, then distilled it into a spirit known as mezcal – a form of which we know as tequila. (Confession: As a newly sober alcoholic, I was quite interested in that process.)
And yet, many in that village had not rushed to meet us. We could see several of them, waiting longingly outside their homes on surrounding hillsides, as if to show us something.
Which is precisely what they were doing. Waiting to show us their pride-and-joy: a concrete slab in the ground with a hole in the middle. A latrine.
They had saved many a life, these slabs. For no longer would their human waste migrate back into their food and water supply. Indeed: These were holy slabs … restoring their one little mountain stream to the holy water it had once been.
According to 2003 figures, over 1.5 billion people in the world today lack ready access to potable water. If consumption patterns continue, this figure will rise to 3.5 billion – nearly half the world’s population – in 20 years. What’s more,
Contamination denies as many as 3.3 billion people access to clean water supplies. In developing countries, an estimated 90% of wastewater is discharged directly into rivers and streams without treatment. Each year there are about 250 million cases of water-related diseases, with roughly 5 to 10 million deaths … mostly children.1
Let me lift up one sentence from that statistical bombardment: “In developing countries, an estimated 90% of wastewater is discharged directly into rivers and streams without treatment.”
If such be the case for developing countries today: One can only imagine the scenario in the ancient world …
For the leprous Aramean commander Naaman – an honorable, decent man, yet a dead man walking in the eyes of his minions – one might imagine that he would leap for joy at the simple opportunity to dip himself in the cool, muddy water of the river Jordan – indeed: holy water – to cleanse his body of his dread disease.
One might imagine.
Except for the one thing in Naaman that needed cleansing even more than his body – and does for us still, today. That one thing greater: the human soul.
The human soul that seeks not to guide but to control the health of the human body by presuming – to this day – that (a) we cannot trust the abundance and diversity of God’s creation to yield enough for everyone to survive, much less thrive, and (b) because we cannot trust that abundance and that diversity, we must intelligently design systems – physical, political, economic, social, emotional systems – to keep “us” in, and to keep “them” out.
“Is there enough?” we wonder – at its root, a question of fear. And God responds, “Does your neighbor have enough?” – at its root, a response of grace. A response that God has already created enough. Our call is simply to fulfill’s God’s created purpose.
Enough … for all to live on. Enough … for us to give on. Physically, politically, economically, socially, emotionally … spiritually.
If we’d but believe it.
And yet – as long as “we” Arameans continue to engage in holy battle against “them”, the Israelites – how can we believe?
Enter the Son of Man – more broadly put: the Offspring of Humanity – more broadly put, still: The New Human Being.
An itinerant hill country rabbi, offering a new way of being human. Who must have known, or at least must have been intimately familiar with, the rich, detailed, oral traditions of rabbinic Judaism very soon to be collected in an impressive codex of legislation known as the Mishnah – a book that would contain "twenty pages of densely packed rabbinic conversations and judgments on leprosy, all kinds of discussions on color and texture of boils and hair, when to inspect them, who may inspect them …"
To cite but an example – see if you can follow this Mishnah quote, as I role-play it with a volunteer:
“If a man unclean [from leprosy] stood beneath a tree and one that was clean passed by, he becomes unclean; if he that was clean stood beneath the tree and he that was unclean passed by, he remains clean; but if [he that was unclean] stood still the other becomes unclean.” (Negaim 13.7)
To unpack, if I may: “Material contact spread contagion, a shadow is an aspect of the creation, ergo, a shadow can potentially ‘pass’ uncleanness.”
As Jeff Krantz and Michael Hardin write in their online blog Preaching Peace:
These are not unimportant matters to the rabbis. It was a heavy burden to declare someone unclean … The social ostracism associated with leprosy is just as real today as it was in Jesus’ time. We must be careful not to think the rabbis were splitting hairs, they were safeguarding the rights of the community.2
This is the world Yeshua ben Joseph – Jesus, son of Joseph – lived in. And this is the reason that, as more and more scholars now agree, he was not “moved with pity”, as our New Revised Standard Version curiously translates it, but splanknistheis: “his guts were churning”, an expression of anger against the prevailing community health care system – such as it was.3
This is not biomedicine – there was no such thing in Jesus’ day. This is ethnomedicine: care of the body based on care of the soul.4
As it should be – even today. And yet, in an entirely different way.
And Jesus points us to that way.
Points us to the way to a care of the soul that is based on something entirely subversive of the carefully crafted oral tradition of the rabbinate of his day.
For the established rabbis based their theology on the perception that the world is hostile. Therefore, they focused on what is good for a group called “us”, which presumes a casting out of a group called “them”.
Rabbi Jesus, on the other hand – churning guts and all – remembers his Hebrew roots. He remembers, and he believes, that God creates everything, and everything is good. He remembers, and he acts as if he remembers, not that what is good for an “us” presumes a casting out of a “them”, but what is good for a “them” is what is good for an “us.
Because there is no such thing as a “them”, and there is only one such a thing as an “us”, to begin with.
There is no such thing as a “them”; there is only such a thing as an “us”. This is what our rainbow scarves dedication today testifies to our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA). And this is what our Church World Service blanket offering dedication today testifies to a world erected on the sands of distributive injustice.
For this dedication is a healing moment. For this dedication recalls for us the words of the Psalmist today – and in the manner of a Jesus moved with anger today – that “God’s anger is but for a moment; God’s favor is for a lifetime.”
So let us – with God – get angry, as we move toward the favor that is pregnant in even the most intractable of institutions.
So let us – with God – get angry, and act from that anger. Let us act, that the holy touch of clean water and warm blankets and colorful scarves may witness to God’s kingdom: where “us” meets “them”, so that we may find only an us.
It’s hard to improve on the verse “Outwitted” from an early twentieth century American poet named Edwin Markham:
He drew a circle that shut me out –
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!5
Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.
Benediction …
In his book Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill writes, “The net increment to human health and cheerfulness is hard to exaggerate; indeed, it now requires an act of imagination to understand what infectious disease formerly meant to humankind, or even to our own grandfathers.”6
Perhaps … on a medical level. And yet, the infection of fear and its inevitable offspring – hate – remain with us.
For medical curing is one thing. Social caring is another. The former is the calling of a few; the latter, the calling of us all.
Go out into the world in peace – to love and to serve as our servant Lord did: that “them” may be “us”, as only God could imagine that “us” to be.
3Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989), p. 147.
4J. Pilch, cited in ibid., p. 145.
5From Edwin Markham, The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921), p. 1.
6As quoted in Krantz and Hardin, op. cit.
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