Sunday's Sermon

Mark 1:40-45

Who Are We?

James Sledge February 15, 2009

I recently set up an account on Facebook. For those of you unfamiliar with Facebook, it is an internet-based, social networking site. It’s free and you can post pictures and information about yourself that can be seen by others who are your Facebook “friends.” People with Facebook accounts can send “friend requests” to others on Facebook, who must then confirm or ignore the request. It’s a great way to stay in contact with a lot of people at once. I have found lots of “friends” from my high school, seminary, and from members of Boulevard.

Naturally my Facebook profile says that I am a pastor. And when I become “friends” with people I haven’t seen in decades, it is interesting the assumptions they make about me because I am a pastor. Some assume that I must be conservative politically. Some assume that I want to become part of some anti-gay group. Some assume that I subscribe to a few simplistic, religious formulae and have no use for anyone who disagrees with me. And I’ve taken to posting a few videos or notes on my Facebook profile that skewer some of these religious stereotypes, that hopefully make it clear that I’m not what some folks assume.

But the issue of religious stereotyping doesn’t come up only with Facebook friends. I have a “real” friend who is not religious and who finds me something of an enigma. That is because she tends to assume that Christians are narrow-minded, unthinking sorts. Her image of a Christian is the polar opposite of an intellectual. And while I’m no intellectual, I have tendencies in that direction. Thus I don’t fit easily into the categories my friend has for cataloguing people.

This issue of Christian identity is not simply a matter of the stereotypes that others have about us. Our self understanding of what it means to be Christian is a crucial question. To be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is to live into some sort of identity, some expectation of what Christians do or don’t do. And of course it is very difficult to talk about Christian identity without first wrestling with who we understand Jesus to be. Who we think Jesus was and is will surely impact what we think it means to follow him.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of different pictures of Jesus in circulation. Most of us tend to shape our image of Jesus so that he fits with our view of the world, so that he tends to like the things we like and dislike the things we dislike. Most folks tend to be fairly selective in deciding which scripture passages are the key to Jesus’ identity.

We Presbyterians are no less susceptible to these tendencies than others, but nonetheless, I think that one of the true gifts that Presbyterians offer to the Christian family is our desire truly to wrestle with scripture, to enter into it and appreciate all of its nuance and beauty, to seek to understand it on a fuller and deeper level. It is true that we are sometimes guilty of being too much “head Christians,” ignoring things such as mystery and spiritual experience. We do need to get better at attending to God with all of our being, but I hope we never stop loving God with all our mind. I hope we always utilize all that study and scholarship can teach us about the wonder and depth and subtlety and ambiguity and majesty of scripture.

If ever there was a scripture passage that warrants the full engagement of our minds, today’s reading from Mark is surely one of them. In these few verses we encounter a rich vein with endless treasures to be mined. There is so much going on here that we will miss if we treat these verses as little more than literal account of what happened as Jesus journeyed through Galilee.

On the surface, it is a simple enough story. Jesus heals a leper and tells him not to tell anyone, but to show himself to the priest and make the prescribed offering. But the man instead runs around telling everyone; end of story. Seems plain enough.

Yet Jesus encounters this leper only because he has gone out into the countryside where lepers are to be found. Jesus has taught and healed at the synagogue, has healed those who came to Simon’s house in Capernaum, but has then very intentionally, and over the apparent objections of disciples, left Capernaum to journey through the Galilean countryside.

There a leper approaches Jesus and raises the question of Jesus’ disposition toward the him. There is no question about what Jesus is able to do. The question is about what he chooses to do. Lepers were considered unclean. They couldn’t come to the synagogue or to the house. So how would Jesus react when this unclean leper came up to him out in the countryside?

Here’s where the story gets really interesting. Jesus not only chooses to heal the man, but he reaches out and touches him. He touches a leper, and so Jesus himself is made unclean. He takes on this man’s uncleanness when he touches him and heals him. And I read one commentator who suggested that the reason that Jesus could no longer go into town openly was not because of his popularity, but because he was now unclean.

Clearly Jesus is willing to break the taboos of his day, to reach out to those whom others shunned. Jesus has intentionally gone out into the country where lepers may be found and intentionally touched this leper, has become unclean like a leper himself. Clearly this Jesus is filled with compassion and love for people ostracized and cast out by polite society. And that likely accounts for the way this passage is translated when it says that Jesus was moved with pity when he met the leper. But there are ancient copies of Mark’s gospel where Jesus is not filled with pity but with anger, and many scholars believe this is likely what Mark originally wrote.

But why would Jesus be angry? Obviously not with the leper. Rather it seems that Jesus anger is aimed at the priest. In fact the command to the leper that he show himself to the priest is a more likely a testimony against them rather than the testimony to them we heard in our reading this morning. This testimony against them is not against Jews or Judaism but against religious authorities who ignore the weak and the broken and the outcasts, who relegate them to the fringes of society. It is a testimony against religious institutions that seek to make faith the purview of good, proper folk, testimony against all expressions of faith that fail to break down barriers, to reach out to hurting people that the world fears and shuns.

Jesus is angry at this all too common distortion of religion, but the freshly healed leper is too overjoyed for anger. He simply ignores Jesus’ command and begins to proclaim what Jesus has done for him to anyone who will listen. In the language of the New Testament, he becomes a preacher, sharing the good news. Mark’s gospel does not criticize the man. In fact, this is a pattern that repeats over and over in Mark. To be touched by Jesus’ power seems to carry with it a compulsion to preach and to minister to others. Almost no one Jesus heals ever remains silent, at least not until the very end of Mark’s gospel. On Easter morning, the first witnesses to the resurrection are commanded by Jesus to go and tell the others, but they say nothing because they are afraid.

And that brings us back full circle to post Easter people like us who say we know the risen Christ. Who are we because of this encounter? How does claiming we are Christian define us, and what corrections do we need to put on our Facebook profiles so that people don’t misunderstand what we mean?

Who are we as Christians? Consider who Christ is. He left the comfort and security of home and synagogue to go out into the world and share God’s love, God’s healing and transforming power. Consider a leper who was touched by God’s love, God’s healing and transforming power, and could not stop himself, even when Jesus told him to, from proclaiming the good news of what God had done for him.

Consider who Jesus was and is. Consider what it means to encounter God’s love through him. Perhaps then we can answer the question: Who are we?