“Inside, Outside, Upside Down”

1 Kings 5:1-14; Mark 1:40-45

Provid= ence United Presbyterian Church

February 15, 2009 (Ord 6B)

Rev. Dr. Mary Jane Hitt

&= nbsp; One of my earliest church memories has to do with ladies’ hats. I bet some of you remember those d= ays, as well, when even when it wasn’t Easter Day, women would wear hats to church. And when it was Easter, just about all the women would wear hats. For little girls, it was a given.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> I have a picture of myself in a li= ttle straw hat one Easter when I was 5 or 6, and I can still remember how its el= astic band would pinch my neck. Tho= se days are long gone, of course. It’s pretty rare to see a hat in church on Easter these days.<= /p>

And Annie Dillard says t= hat we were wearing the wrong kind of hats anyway. This is what she wrote:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blit= hely invoke? Or as I suspect, does= no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixin= g up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw= hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preserver= s and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.

Now you may be wondering= what in the world she is talking about, because you probably don’t feel like children playing on the floor this morning, mixing up a batch of TNT. On the whole, we are pretty comfor= table when we come to church. We know the routines, the people, and the liturgy.&nbs= p; We don’t feel the need for crash helmets or life preservers or signal flares to protect us. = When we come to church, we feel right at home.

But there is something t= o what Dillard says. If we fe= el at home and comfortable in church, Jesus sometimes had a very different experi= ence when he went to the synagogue. For example, did you know that the very first time he preached, (and= his first sermon was delivered at his home synagogue in <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Nazareth), the people ran him out of to= wn and tried to kill him? They inten= ded to hurl him off a cliff, but he got away.&nbs= p; Talk about needing a crash helmet!&= nbsp; He could have used one.

You have to wonder what = in the world Jesus said that day hat would have made people so angry that they wou= ld want to kill him, don’t you? After all, he was a child of Nazareth, one of their own. The people = in the synagogue had watched him grow up, and they were proud of him, at first = 211; maybe a little like some of you felt the first time you heard Steve Cahoon preach at PUPC. So what did J= esus say that had folks in such a rage? He just reminded them of the story that we read together this morning about the healing of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army.

It’s a great story= – the story of a powerful military leader who has no power over one thing = 211; his own body, his own skin condition, which the Bible calls “leprosy.” He had= tried everything he knew to try – he had sought out the very best medical assistance available to him – but nothing worked. So when his wife’s serving g= irl pointed out that there was a prophet in Israel who had the power to h= eal, Naaman sought out Elisha. As = you heard, eventually, reluctantly, Naaman did what Elisha told him to do. He washed in the Jordan River seven times, and his skin became like that of a young boy. He was healed. Like I said, it’s a nice story. So where is the outrage? What is it about this story that made people so angry with Jesus that they tried to kill him?

Just this: At its heart, this is the story of God’s love and concern and healing of the ultimate outsider – Naaman, the successful military general of an enemy nation, who had a skin disease that would have barred him from the community, had he been an Israelite. The Hebrew scriptures are clear about that. A person with leprosy (which, by t= he way, wasn’t just the modern day condition we know as Hansen’s Disease, but could have been any number of skin conditions, from eczema to psoriasis) was considered “unclean.”

And here’s what Je= sus said about this outsider: There were . . . many lepers in Israel = in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. [Luke 4:27] That’s when the people were filled with rage, and drove Jesus = out of town and up to the brow of a cliff in order to hurl him off to his death= . And as you know, he escaped. But from that day on, he had a way= of getting into trouble because he cared for and ministered to and even touched the outsiders of his time.

That is clear in our sec= ond lesson today – our gospel lesson about Jesus healing a leper who came= to him, asking to be made clean. When the leper knelt before Jesus and begged for his help, Jesus response was de= ep and emotional, and probably not a response of pity (as some translations have it), but rather a response of anger.

Now, lest you think I= 217;m playing around with scripture here, let me explain. The oldest manuscripts of MarkR= 17;s gospel do not agree here. Some texts say Jesus was moved with “pity,” and others say he was mo= ved with “anger.” So = Bible scholars have to decide which one is more likely to be the original word. How do they do that? They tend to choose the more diffi= cult reading, which in this case is “anger.” (It is less likely that scribes wo= uld have changed the word “pity” to “anger” than it is = that they would soften the language, changing “anger” to “pity.”)

So let’s explore w= hat it might have meant for Jesus to be moved by anger when the leper knelt before= him and begged to be made clean. = What kind of anger would this have been? Anger at the leper, who had the audacity to ask for healing? I don’t think so. Jesus understood his ministry to b= e all about healing, and so there is no reason to assume he would have been anger= ed when he was asked to do the very thing he came to do.

It seems more likely tha= t Jesus would have been angered by the purity code that made this man an outsider.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Because lepers were the ultimate outsiders in first century Israel. They were considered “unclean” – a threat to society – and so they were ostracized. They not only were forced to live outside the community, but they also were required to wear torn clothes, to keep their hair unkempt, and to cry out “unclean, unclean” wherever they went. <= /span>

And so when Jesus saw a = leper kneeling before him, begging to be made clean, his response was highly emotional. No doubt he felt compassion for the man, but he must also have felt anger at the way in which this man, and so many like him, was treated. And there was something else. Jesus knew that it wasn’t go= ing to go well for him, either, if the word got around that he had been hanging out with a leper. So when the lep= er said, “If you choose, you can make me clean,” Jesus really did = have a choice to make: He could send the leper on his way, or he could heal him. And you know what happened. He stretched out hi= s hand and touched the leper, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” And immediately the leprosy left t= he man, and he was made clean.

Jesus told the man not t= o say anything about what had happened. He told the man just to go to show himself to the priest and do what= he needed to in order to be restored to the community. But the man whose whole life had j= ust been given back to him – this man who now could go home to the family= he loved, and the work he had once done, and the community in which he had been raised – this man couldn’t keep quiet. He told everyone he saw what had happened.

And Jesus paid the price= . As the word got around, it was Jes= us who couldn’t go into town. = It was Jesus who was considered “unclean” for having touched a leper.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> It was Jesus who had to go into hi= ding, because he was a marked man. = It was Jesus who became the “outsider.” But still there were those who sou= ght him out – those who heard the story and identified not with the power= ful insiders in town, but with the outsiders.&= nbsp; They went out into the countryside, where Jesus continued to heal an= d to teach and to minister to all who came.

As I’ve been think= ing about these stories this week – about the story of God’s love f= or two outsiders, Naaman and the unnamed leper – I’ve been struck = once again by how God’s Word continues to speak across the centuries to our own time. Because these thous= ands of years later, we in the church still struggle with who is in and who is out. Insiders still fear and = avoid outsiders, and outsiders still distrust insiders.

There are any number of = people who do not see church as a welcoming or hospitable place. They have learned, often through p= ainful experience, that there is something about them – maybe their race, or their ethnicity, or their socio-economic level, or their sexual orientation= , or their education level, or their life story – that makes them unwelcom= e in the community of faith. We in= siders too often see them as strange, and dangerous, and unclean. They feel like outsiders

But even those of us who= are here today know something of that feeling.= We may hide it, but we know the struggle. Most of us have memories of being = the outsider – the last person chosen for the basketball team in phys ed class; the younger daughter who wore hand-me-downs when all your friends had new clothes; the student who was embarrassed by the math teacher, because algebra wasn’t your thing; the guy who didn’t go to the prom because you just knew the girl you wanted to ask wouldn’t want to be = seen with you. You’ve got yo= ur stories, and I’ve got mine. To state the obvious, it feels pretty awful to be the outsider. It’s enough to make you angr= y.

So, like Jesus, we’= ;ve got a choice to make. We can let = our own outsider experiences – however big or small – lead us to gu= ard the boundaries with everything we’ve got – to hold onto our ins= ider status by keeping others out, at all cost – to smugly imagine ourselv= es superior to all others. Or we= can stretch out our hands, and touch those who are considered “untouchable.”

When we do that – = when we reach out to all people in Jesus’ name – we will learn what he knew: There are no outsiders = in the reign of God. There is no one outside the reach of God’s love and mercy and healing power. That’s the only reason why we “outsiders” are inside these walls today. That is the good news of the gospe= l.

Thanks be to God. Amen.