February 12, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

We Bring Our Broken Selves

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 30
Mark 1:40–45

“Immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.”

Mark 1:42 (NRSV)

We lay our broken world
in sorrow at your feet,
haunted by hunger, war, and fear,
oppressed by power and hate.

Come, Spirit, on us breathe,
with life and strength anew;
find in us love and hope and trust
and lift us up to you.

Anna Briggs

I had something of a cross-cultural experience earlier this week. In some senses maybe I have a cross-cultural experience every day, being a Scot living in Chicago. But this was one specific issue, a particular cross-cultural controversy that I learned about recently. It’s to do with the new iPhone 4s and its voice-activated control program called Siri. Some of you, I know, have iPhones in your pockets. The purpose of Siri is that you don’t have to type things into the phone; you can just speak into the phone, "Give me Joe’s phone number" and it will get Joe’s phone number. Well, the issue that has arisen is that it seems that Siri doesn’t understand a Scottish accent very well. This is true. If it’s been on YouTube, it must be true! (And I know many of you will be thinking that Siri is not the only one dealing with that issue.)

I was forwarded a YouTube video about it in which a Scottish guy is trying to speak into it with no success. Following that, I actually received a phone call from a producer at the radio station here, the National Public Radio station, WBEZ, whose offices and studios are at Navy Pier. It turns out that this producer is actually a regular attender at worship here at Fourth Church and she is helping to run a podcast radio show that is called How to Do Everything. Some of you may have picked it up by podcast before. So when they heard about this, she thought, "What a great idea: ‘How to Understand a Scottish Accent.’ I’ll call Calum and we’ll bring him in and we’ll experiment with it." So she called and asked if I would be willing to come in and I said, “Of course.” I’ll do anything once.

So I went down to the studio and they had the iPhone 4s there. I said a few things into it, and it understood some of them, but not others. In the interview they asked me about experiences I had, and it was a great opportunity for me to share one of my favorite stories about coming here to Chicago from Scotland. In the first weeks of my arrival, some fourteen-and-a-half years ago, I was teaching the Sunday School kids in Children’s Chapel. I told them a story about Jesus, I guess, and then I asked a question. I like to interact with the kids when I’m doing something like that. So I asked a question and there was this kind of stunned silence and all that was heard was a little boy in the front row who said, in a loud voice, “Is he speaking Spanish?” The program How to Do Everything is linked on our Facebook page, so if you want you can go and hear the interview.

It’s interesting because I was reflecting on this in the context of our scripture text. Jesus in this important story of the healing of the leper is having his own cross-cultural encounter. This is not about language or accent or about nationality, but it’s about a cross-cultural engagement in the context of the religious and cultural norms of Jesus’ own time. This is quite a tender episode in the story that Mark tells, I think. We really encounter the intentionality of Jesus’ compassion as he responds to the leper, “I do choose,” or when we are told Jesus is “moved with pity.” Last week I spoke about how in the text there was a sort of “keep calm and carry on” moment for Jesus, and I think we see what that means this week as we pick up the text in the next section.

Proclamation of God’s kingdom of love by Jesus in acts of restorative healing are what Jesus is called to do; that is his ministry that he is carrying out here. It’s important to remember that in this story there is more than healing of a physical ailment, healing of the body. Remember that the leper asks Jesus not “Will you heal me?” He says, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Leprosy is an illness which in Jesus’ time led to ostracism from the community and that ostracism was overseen by the religious authorities.

John Walton, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, is a good friend and a fine, fine preacher. In a sermon on this passage he reflects about that experience of ostracism and what the leper feels like. He uses an illustration from his own experience and contemporary times and goes back to the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He speaks about a friend who was diagnosed HIV-positive and how that friend left the physician’s office in a daze; the only word he could think of was “unclean.” John goes on to say in his sermon, "It was bad enough to know he was ill, but quite another to feel the social ostracism he might suffer not only from people who did not understand his illness, but also from his friends who he believed would now look down upon him.”

So Jesus’ healing in this context is more than the healing of the body. New Testament professor Sarah Henry says this about the healing, "Jesus’ ministry involves restoration of those cut off from community to a full role in the community. It is God’s will for creation to be serving in community with others.” I think there are echoes here of Psalm 30. It is almost like you could hear the leper reciting it after being restored to health and to community. “You have turned my mourning into dancing.”

Then there is a deep irony that we find in this story of restoration to health and community for the leper, because after restoring the man to health and to a status of purity, in religious terms, it is actually Jesus who experiences ostracism. Jesus is excluded from the regular community. In verse 45, “Jesus could no longer go into a town openly.” Right here in chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel, which begins, “The beginning of the good news [of the gospel] of Jesus Christ.” Here already is the shadow of the cross. Here we find the roots of the response by the culture to Jesus’ actions and preaching, which will ultimately result in his death on the tree, accused of sedition as a political and religious subversive.

Jesus offers a different version of truth and reality, a sub-version. Richard Holloway, a fine churchman and writer from Scotland, writes about this in his book Doubts and Loves. He writes, “Jesus is a kind of creative subversive. He understood and observed the code of his people, but he knew that it had to be challenged if it was to serve humanity, and not the other way around.” The price paid for this is a great reversal; Jesus is the one now treated like a leper. Remember that in touching the unclean leper, in choosing not just to say a word, but to touch the leper to heal him, Jesus himself became unclean, impure according to the religious custom of the day.

So we have this morning a story about Jesus crossing cultures. About Jesus’ complete identification with those who are suffering—such a complete identification that Jesus takes it on himself. For us there is not only irony but paradox that in this radical empathy that Jesus shows is hope that is the gospel, the good news, of Jesus the Christ. Of course we still have cultural norms for inclusion in community and exclusion. Exclusion comes in many different ways—subtle ways many times, through illness or the loss of a job or a relationship breakdown or around issues of gender, sexuality, class. And as Christ’s body, the church, I believe, we are called to be creatively subversive in challenging structures that in culture would exclude. As I said last week, I hope and pray that we will continue to be a church that practices a generous Christianity, one attuned to the needs of our neighbors and those around us.

There is a contemporary hymn I love written by a woman called Anna Briggs. A couple of the stanzas are on the front of your bulletin for your reflection this morning. The second to last stanza goes like this:

We bring our broken selves,
confused and closed and tired;
then through your gift of healing grace
new purpose is inspired.

I hope as a church in transition that we remain a community of that kind of gospel, a place where the broken are welcomed and restored and renewed.

I can never read this text without remembering hearing a mediation being given on it, a meditation that imagined what it must have been like for the leper to go back to the priest and explain that he had been healed. It comes from the Wild Goose Resource Group, the worship arm of the Iona community:

You should have seen the priest’s face when I arrived at the door. I suppose me grinning all over didn’t exactly help. He knew my family, especially my father, who had helped to build the parish hall. My dad and the priest were very close, but they never talked about me. You see, when you get leprosy you don’t belong anymore. You don’t belong to your family; you don’t belong in the church. This was the priest who had confirmed the diagnosis, the priest who had sent me from the sanctuary never to return, asking God to have mercy on my soul, the kind of thing you’d say to a criminal en route to the gallows. But here I was back seven years later, minus an arm, presenting myself as cured. He didn’t know what to say, he didn’t know which book to look for or which page to turn to. He had only ever been taught the ceremonial word with which to send lepers away. He had never learned how to receive them back. It took a long while for him to come within three feet of me. He couldn’t bring himself to touch me. He asked me to put a sack over my head, and he took a pin and began to stick it into different parts of my body, saying, “Where am I touching?” And every time I knew, because every time it hurt. Pain had returned because I was healthy. Then he took the bag off my head and said, “How is this possible?” I said, “It’s possible because in a world where everybody, including my religious friends, has kept back and avoided me, somebody, one man, touched me. No, he didn’t just touch me; he embraced me as if I were the lost brother he’d always wanted to find.” The priest didn’t ask his name. It was as if he knew. As if he were disappointed that what religion turned away from, God embraced. (Wild Goose Resource Group)

Thanks be to God. Amen.