Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
February 15, 2009
Mark 1:40-45
As I was reflecting on this text this week, I came across these words from pastor and author Eugene Peterson. He wonders if people like us, people with a modern, fairly secular mindset, can really deal with the prospect of genuine, inexplicable mystery. So he writes, "The secularized mind is terrorized by mysteries. Thus it makes lists, labels people, assigns roles and solves problems. But a solved life is a reduced life." I love that phrase. A solved life is a reduced life. "These tightly buttoned up people never take great risks or make convincing love talk. They deny or ignore the mysteries and diminish human existence to what can be managed, controlled and fixed. We live in a cult of experts who explain and solve. The vast technological apparatus around us give the impression that there is a tool for everything if we can only afford it." Is he right? Have we progressive, educated, rational people with progressive, educated, rational minds, pretty much managed to squeeze the mystery and wonder out of life? In fact, can wonder and mystery actually be a bit threatening to our efforts to manage and control our lives?
Now, today is the third Sunday in a row - all the Sundays of February - that our morning text has come from the first chapter of Mark. Three Sundays and we are still not out of the first chapter. And the texts for all of these Sundays have involved healings: Kristen talked about the man in the synagogue with an unclean spirit, last week it was Simon-Peter's mother-in-law healed in their home, and today, a leper who dares to approach Jesus on the street. We've barely begun the story, and have already witnessed three dramatic healings. A coincidence? Not hardly. No, Mark is telling us something significant here about this Jesus of Nazareth. He's telling us that the game is on, the battle against the forces of darkness and evil has been joined. Mark wants us to see the overwhelming, liberating power of God's kingdom in all human spaces and circumstances, and indeed all human lives. A power, a liberation, made flesh in Jesus. Make no mistake about it, this is no doctor comforting the sick. This is no faith-healing TV preacher, "Put your hands on the television!" Mark wants us to know that this is nothing less than an intrusion among us of a miraculous, life-giving power.
Fine for Mark. I mean, he's a pre-modern first century guy. But what are we modern, sophisticated, insightful, rational, progressive and enlightened people going to do with this? It seems that we are left here with more questions than answers. What does it do to our closed, orderly, carefully managed world if this pre-modern Jesus strides in among us and starts healing people, heavens, maybe even raising them from the dead? I'm not sure we can allow that kind of behavior. If you don't stay inside the lines, Jesus, we're just going to have to take your crayons away! I believe that right here, in the first chapter, Mark wants to get into our face. He wants us to understand that this Jesus has intruded into our settled, closed, modern arrangements with power, the power to heal, to give new life, a power that is absolutely free from our attempts to control, contain and explain.
In his book, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity - which our Sunday morning class with Jim McAllister has been looking at - John Polkinghorne shares a tale told by the philosopher, John Leslie. He writes, "You are about to be executed." A pleasant thought on a Sunday morning. "You are about to be executed. You are tied to the stake and your eyes are bandaged. Ten highly trained marksmen have their rifles leveled at your chest. The officer gives the command to fire and the shots ring out. But you find you have survived. You are still very much alive! What do you do? Just shrug your shoulders and say, 'Well, here we are then. That was a close one.' Of course not! You will want to understand what happened, why you are still alive." Leslie suggests that there are only two rational explanations for your good fortune. One is that many, many executions are taking place today, and you just happened to be in the one where everybody missed. The other explanation is that more was going on than you had realized; for some unknown reason, the firing party was on your side.
Some words of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, come to mind: "If a man could pass through paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke...Ay! And what then?" I think Mark wants us to consider the possibility of waking with that flower in our hand. He dares to suggest that in this Jesus, there just may be more going on than we realize. Are we terrified by the inexplicable, by wonder and mystery, or are we open to letting them in, to expanding our often limited vision of what is possible? So many questions when Jesus shows up, so few obvious answers, and maybe that's not all bad.
But let's stay with this text for a moment. Jesus chooses to heal a leper...no small thing. You know about lepers in the first century. Outcasts, ritually unclean, not permitted to work, forced to beg, not allowed to interact or worship with the larger community. No community, no home, no family - as good as dead, maybe worse. "Jesus, if you choose, you can make me clean." Jesus chooses. And in so choosing, he reaches across the boundary of disease, the boundary of acceptable behavior (no one would touch a leper), the boundary of safety, even the boundary of religious custom and law. Actually our resident child theologian, Drew Thomas, was absolutely right. He restores this man, to his community gives him some friends and makes everyone say he's OK. Another theologian, perhaps not as eloquent, P.C. Ennis says, "In a perilous act of solidarity, instead of confirming the man's exclusion by shunning him, Jesus reaches out and symbolically draws him in. He shatters the traditional boundaries of purity and in the process rewrites the book on the nature of God's beloved community...Jesus breaks down the walls that have been carefully built and maintained by well-meaning religious types. When he touches the leper, he dares to do the unconventional, in fact the unlawful, so that he may accomplish the unlikely." Once again, in Jesus, we see an adventurous, mysterious, living God at work. A God who won't be limited by our conventions and customs no matter how sacred they may be to us; a God who's going to surprise us; a God who doesn't hesitate to leave us with a few more questions than answers. There goes Jesus again… always, always widening the circle.
And the final piece of this puzzling text comes in the form of Jesus' instructions to the now healed leper: "See that you say nothing to anyone. Yes, go to the synagogue, show yourself to the priest. Show him you're now clean, so that you can rejoin the community of the living, but don't tell anyone how you got this way." So the man goes out and, of course, immediately ignores everything Jesus has just said - shares his amazing story of healing and new life with anyone he encounters. I must confess, as a preacher, that I do find it a bit comforting to know that at times even Jesus was totally ignored. But why, why this curious command of silence? Why does Jesus refuse to use the man's healing as an opportunity to advance his ministry, as a sign of his power, as a way to bring even more people to God? I guess he never read anything about church growth. This could make him bigger than Herod and Caesar. He could be his own one-man stimulus plan. But he says no - keep it to yourself. So many questions. What's going on here? It's perplexing, we're perplexed, not only by the miraculous intervention into a suffering man's life, but also by the strange instruction to tell no one.
I don't know, maybe Jesus was just shy. Maybe he never really wanted to be the pastor of a large church. Maybe he's a little frightened by his own power - kind of like how FOX News seems terrified of Barack Obama. (I'm sorry, the devil made me say it.) I mean, all of this is possible. Or maybe he just wants us to decide for ourselves. Maybe his enigmatic instruction to say nothing reflects his impatience with those who demand the sensational to validate their faith or confirm God's presence among them. Maybe what ultimately matters is not the sign, not finding an answer, but rather being in touch with Jesus, and the healing and liberation that comes from that relationship - the awareness that in some remarkable way, God has touched human life - our life - in him.
As I said last Saturday, a week ago, Betty's father died very suddenly. I got the phone call, she wasn't even home. I couldn't get a hold of her, couldn't get a hold of her sister, so I went over to the home where he was staying. The paramedics were there, but there was really nothing they could do. I called the funeral home. In those moments you just want to do something. So I started just taking some things, put them in my truck and went home. Well, I still couldn't get a hold of anybody, so I called a couple friends. One said, "What can I do? I'll be there." I said, “Well, I’ll let you know later. There is a chair and a desk and I might need your truck to help. I'll let you know." I went back to the home, packed up another load, opened the door and there just getting out of his truck and walking toward me was my friend. He had dropped everything and had come to help, just to be there. Well, you know what it’s like. I hadn't been really thinking, I'd just been moving, but when I saw him, my knees just buckled and I just lost it for a moment. That he could be there. I'll never forget it. The touch of his hand and just his presence with me. No spectacular miracle. The sun didn't stop in the sky, didn't see the image of the Virgin Mary in a taco or anything like that. But, in that moment, just in the face of my friend, the healing power of Christ was real.
Maybe that's Jesus’ point. Yes, this is a wondrous, even miraculous world God has created, a world bursting with possibilities. And we need to be open to the wonder and mystery all around us. But, rather than looking for all manner of miraculous signs to validate our faith or to answer all our questions, maybe, what we need to do is read our own story by the light of our faith, to see Christ's power because we claim it, to glimpse the eternal all around us, even in the helping hand of a friend. Perhaps rather than looking for a sign, for that final answer, our task is to be a sign - God getting out into the world through us. I've got to tell you, last Saturday, that was just about all the miracle I needed.