I preached this week, which means that I spent a lot of time last week writing, and little to none of that time was spent writing for this blog, erring on the side of none. But I know that my faithful reader is pining for my words of wisdom, so I will take the preacher’s way out and let you read what I wrote and what I spoke. As you are reading, please remember that I wrote this for preaching, not for reading. It might be a good idea to imagine the words spoken in my deep (high-pitched?), rich (nasally?) voice.
The gospel lesson of the day was Mark 1:40-45, which reads,
A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
And now, brace yourself, the text of the sermon itself:
Father, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee,
His jointure in the knottie Trinitie
Hee keeps, and gives to me his deaths conquest.
This Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest,
Was from the worlds beginning slaine, and he
Hath made two Wills, which with the Legacie
Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest.
Yet such are thy laws, that men argue yet
Whether a man those statutes can fulfill;
None doth; but all-healing grace and spirit
Revive again what law and letter kill.
Thy laws abridgement, and thy last command
Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!
-John Donne
Holy Sonnets XVIIn 1968, Jose Ramirez was living in Laredo, Texas, when, after years doctor and hospital visits, he was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease. Throughout his childhood, he had been afflicted off and on with high fevers, lack of sensation in his arms and hands, and sores that would not heal for days or even weeks. He was twenty years old when he finally got his diagnosis. Again, it’s called Hansen’s Disease, but you may know it better as Leprosy. At the time the Texas Health Department required that he be sent 600 miles away to the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana. The thing is, Laredo’s ambulance companies had decided that ambulances were for the living, while hearses were for the dead, so he rode those 600 miles in the back of a hearse, with people peeking at him through the windows every time they stopped for gas. In other words, as soon as Mr. Ramirez was diagnosed with leprosy he was cast out, away from his family, away from his community, to a hospital campus filled with people whose only connection to one another was a dreaded disease. Indeed, as far as the city and the state were concerned, he was left for dead. What was the healing this young man was looking for as he was taken from his family, from his home? Was it a cure for the disease? Or was it something else?
In the book of Leviticus, in the midst of the law as handed by God to Moses, chapters 13 and 14 are entirely devoted to the issue of leprosy. Honestly, leprosy as referred to in the bible is probably not the Hansen’s Disease that Mr. Ramirez had, but that doesn’t really matter for our story, because the first person to recognize his condition, a Mexican curandero, called it “a disease of the bible.” Whatever the disease actually was, the connection in society’s mind to a biblical plague got him banished to Louisiana. You see, in these chapters of Leviticus, a person with a skin disease—with certain sores, spots, and rashes—was instructed to present to a priest, and the priest was to make a decision, and if that person was deemed to be leprous, then he or she was deemed unclean and forced to live outside the community. Sound familiar? Then, as if the physical distance from the community wasn’t enough, the person diagnosed with leprosy was supposed to wear torn clothes, muss his hair, cover her lip, and shout continually, “Unclean! Unclean!” You know, to warn people. The law had the effect of turning the person diagnosed with leprosy into a pariah, something which didn’t change in the thousands of years from Sinai to Mr. Ramirez’s diagnosis.
That is the context of today’s gospel passage. A man, “A leper,” according to the scripture, approaches Jesus asking to be made clean. At this point, according to our translation, Jesus is “filled with pity”. Interestingly, the New International Version tells us that Jesus is “indignant”. So one translation says “indignant,” as in angry; and another says “filled with pity,” as in compassionate. And these are somehow to mesh together?
I should mention that while I was in seminary, my Greek professor warned us to be careful putting too much interpretive stock in the meanings of single words. Maybe the literal translation of a word, he was telling us, has little to do with its actual meaning as it is used in any particular sentence or passage. For instance, let’s say that centuries from now a class in Ancient American English dissects such historical documents as the description of last week’s Super Bowl. They quickly find the word, “football”. As good Ancient American English students, they break the word into its component parts. They check the lexicon and find that “foot” is the thing at the bottom of your leg, and “ball” is that spherical object that people play games with. So what is a football? Is it a something round with the picture of a foot on it? Is it a sphere stuck to the bottom of the leg? Maybe the running back wears one in order to run faster and jump higher? Don’t get me started on the term “Super Bowl” itself. Maybe a cereal bowl with a spoon sticking out and a red “S” painted on it? But, of course, those words are obvious to today’s American readers. They are simple vocabulary words. When we read Greek or any other ancient language, we can’t just find the fifth definition down in a word’s dictionary entry and shout, “Eureka! This changes the entire meaning of Christianity!” We need to look at the word in its context: the whole sentence, paragraph, chapter, book…even the entire bible.
And yet, even as I say that, I am intrigued by single words from today’s passage, the Greek word that is translated in our version as “filled with pity,” and, in its place, in the NIV as “indignant”. You see, most translations render the word as, in some form, compassion. But others don’t. Indeed, a significant number of scholars would say that something about anger is probably correct. So I want to do a bit of a thought experiment with you this morning. How can one version talk about Jesus’ compassion, and the other about his anger? In this case, it’s not about two different translations of the same word, it’s about two different words.
Let’s remember that the New Testament as we have it comes from the careful, critical study of many Greek manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have the word splangxnistheis–which means “moved by pity”—while others have orgistheis–which means, “was angered”. Two words, two different sets of manuscripts, each thought of highly enough to make it into a well-respected translation. So they each have a pedigree, they each have their place in the tradition. They are each legitimate words in the context of this passage.
Now far be it from me, especially 2000 years later, to pretend that I know what exactly Jesus was thinking especially based solely on these two words, but what if there is not a mistake here? What if both words are correct? What if Jesus was moved by pity for the man who knelt in front of him, and was angered by the real cause of his suffering?
When this man knelt before Jesus, he did not ask to be healed. No, let us make no mistake, he did not ask to be healed, and he did not ask to be cured. He asked to be made clean. Did you catch that earlier in our discussion about Leviticus? A person with leprosy is exiled from the community upon being declared unclean. Hear it again, the person is declared unclean. And, particularly as the nation of Israel grew, something that is unclean, be it a food, an object, or a person, cannot have a place in society. So Jesus felt pity for this man whose physical condition holds him out of society.
Mr. Ramirez—you remember him—felt this exile while in residence at the National Leprosarium in the late 1960s. He felt it during his treatments, wondering if walking might be a thing of the past. He felt it as he missed Magdalena, his girlfriend back in Laredo, asking himself while seeing the scars the disfigured others’ hands, if he would ever again be able to hold her hand. He was in exile from his friends, from his family, from the girl he loved, from the ones who might hold him close, tell him that things will be okay. How does one not feel compassion for that story?
So, back to our scripture passage, Jesus felt compassion for this man who wanted to be declared clean, who wanted to take part in society, who wanted to take his rightful place as one of God’s chosen people. The man said, “if you choose…you can make me clean.” And by doing so he was saying something powerful about Jesus. He was saying that Jesus had the right, that Jesus had the power, that Jesus had the authority not to cure him but to make him clean. You see, Jesus did cure him, but that, friends, that is not the healing; that, saints, is not the miracle. The miracle is that this man who had spent I can only imagine how long in exile, rejected by society was brought back. He could see his family, he could spend time with friends, he could proclaim to all who would listen that Jesus had taken away the shame which had been imposed upon him.
As we said, compassion is not the only emotion given to Jesus in this case. The other one is anger. I work with kids, we all know what it is like to hold two emotions around the same moment, how on one hand we need to be stern when they rig up their newest contraption that they hope will allow them to jump safely off the second floor balcony, while on the other hand we think, “That’s really clever, I should try that sometime!” So Jesus felt compassion, and also anger. I would suggest his anger was pointed toward the system that forced this man into exile; toward the system that was enslaved by law rather than free to show compassion under that same law.
I think this is a good time to point out that I am not ridiculing the laws as we find them in Leviticus. Those laws came from God, and in their moment, I think large parts could be thought of as revolutionary. In this case, the law was there to keep people from spreading a dangerous, communicable disease. If somebody enters a hospital today with a highly contagious disease, the first thing to happen is that person will be quarantined. The person will be taken away from the rest of the population while being cared for. And this law from Leviticus, thousands of years before such things as bacteria were even thought of, was doing the same thing. Or, at least, it could have been if it was used correctly, if it was used while keeping in mind a few very important words from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” For when we love God with our entire beings, with everything inside of us, we will not help but follow up this greatest commandment like Jesus does when he says, “And the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Perhaps, looking at Mr. Ramirez’s situation, we can get angry at the state’s Health Department, which sent him into exile. And yet I say this with all respect due to public health officials who work so hard for the well-being of so many. Or we might find our anger pointed toward those decided it was better that he ride in a hearse, for that is how the dead travel. And yet I know personally how much respect must be given those who normally drive and operate ambulances. I have myself more than once been lifted by their caring hands. These structures find our anger not due to their existence nor due to those who serve and operate them. No, we become indignant, as the scripture may say, when those structures are used without compassion. The law commands that the one who is found to be unclean must live outside the camp and must live alone, but does it command that he must journey through life without love? Does it command that we deride him for this illness which already brings him suffering? Or can we dig deeper and find a command to show compassion, to lift him up, to love him when society has come around to say that he is unlovable?
In compassion toward the man and in anger toward the system that brought him to his state, Jesus works a miracle. “Be made clean!” he says. Then, we are told, leprosy leaves the man and he is made clean. Jesus works a miracle and he cures the disease. The miracle is not the cure, or rather the cure is not the miracle. Yes, the curing of the disease shows Jesus’ power over the ways of nature. It shows that Jesus is more powerful than even our best antibiotics. But if the cure is the miracle, then is it in the lab that we are getting so close to being like Jesus?
I submit to you that the miracle of today’s gospel passage is not in the curing but in the healing. The man was healed when he was found to be clean. Not when his skin cleared up, but when people looked at him and said, “He is again one of us.” He was healed not when the disease left, but when Jesus, whom the man had already compared to God when he spoke the words, “If you choose, you can make me clean,” he was healed when Jesus said, “I do choose, I call you clean, I call you God’s child.” Would it have been any less of a miracle had Jesus not closed up the sores, but moved the hearts and minds of those around him to embrace this man regardless of what was on his skin? Would he have run into the streets and proclaimed Jesus’ name any less passionately had he, diseased and all, been able to again go and hold his loved ones? This, my friends; this, beloved; this, saints; this is how we can work miracles.
There is a joyful, or at least hopeful, ending to the story of our friend Mr. Jose Ramirez. At first he had lost hope. He had lost hope listening to the stories of the people who knew best what he was going through, the stories from the lips of his fellow residents in Carville where he was sent by the State of Texas. But then those same people, those same fellow-journeyers, built him back up and showed him hope again. Of them he says, “The community definitely was self-sustaining, and they are the ones who helped me to overcome that feeling of hopelessness. They – I think they saw something in me that they did not want to be repeated. I was the youngest person at that time, and even now when I go and visit, they all call me son.” I don’t want to put words in this man’s mouth, but it sounds to me as if he described two parallel paths—one in which he was cured by medicine, and one in which he was healed by people. Eventually Jose left Carville and he went back home, and he was loved by his mother, who made sure he knew that he held the same place in her heart as any of his brothers or sisters. He went home, and he not only held Magdalena’s hand again, but he married her. His cure came from medicine, but his healing came from people.
It is true that we are not whole when we are sick, and it is then that we need a cure and sometimes a healer. But neither are we whole when we fear; neither are we whole when we are guilty; neither are we whole when we are hopeless; neither are we whole when we are in chains; neither are we whole when we are ashamed; neither are we whole when we are in exile from a loving and caring community. It is then, when we are in exile, when we are afraid, hopeless, in chains, it is then that we are in need of a healer. And we, here, in this space, we can heal. We, here, now can work miracles.
Soon after what we read today, Jesus will call the twelve to him, and he will send them out, giving them authority much like his own—to teach and to heal. This is why they were called apostles, called the ones who were sent. Well we, too, are apostles. We, too, are sent by Jesus. We, too, are sent to be healers, to recover sight for the blind, to set the captive free. The man in our Gospel passage was healed when he was once again embraced by a society. Are we not here, in this room, and within the sound of my voice, and all those called by Jesus, are we not a society? Can we not reach out and love those unloved by the world? Can we not hold tight to those the world calls untouchable? Can we not say to every person who literally or figuratively crosses our threshold, “I don’t care what you have done; I don’t care what the world says you are; I don’t care what scars you hold either in the flesh or in the soul, you are one of us, I call you clean, I call you God’s child”? Can we not be that force in the world? Here, I’ll start. I say to each one of you who can hear my voice, I don’t care what you have done; I don’t care what the world says you are; I don’t care what scars you hold, I call you clean, you are one of us, I call you God’s child. And I love you.
Amen?
Is Baseball Theological? 