Sermon February 15, 2009

If We Choose

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

Rev. Richard Wohlschlaeger

Swarthmore Presbyterian Church

February 15, 2009

At noon on Tuesday I went to SWIM. Perhaps I should clarify. I didn’t go to swim as in a pool, but to have lunch with my colleagues in ministry in the Swarthmore Wallingford Interfaith Ministerium. That SWIM. We do this every month, and I like it very much. Were it not for SWIM, I likely would not know as many of the other clergy in town as well as I do now, if at all. We’re all busy creatures, it seems, and even one Tuesday lunch a month challenges our schedules. But when we can be, we’re together; and the friendships we have made are remarkably close and supportive.

We call it “interfaith,” but we’re mostly Christians, reflective, of course, of our communities’ religious makeup. Last week there were ten of us around the table: one Lutheran, one Methodist, three Quakers, one Muslim, and three Presbyterians. We were hosted by my good friend, Jim Bajorek, the Roman Catholic priest at St. John Chrysostom. The rabbi was not among us that day as he’s getting ready to move soon with his family to Israel. Comings and goings are natural to a group of clergy. I remember when Frank Gillespie took me to SWIM for the first time. Now I’m the senior member of the group.

Our conversations are generally informal and relaxed, though we count on the host to give us something to think about from his or her tradition or local parish. We learned this week about the extensive renovations going on in the sanctuary at St. John. Jim told us that it’s a two million dollar project soon to be completed. The sanctuary needed to be renovated, he said, to accommodate changing worship styles and practices. After all, he said, the sanctuary’s forty years old already and nothing’s been done to it in that time! They currently have no room for their choirs in worship, he reported. My antennae naturally extended a bit to hear a clearer signal. “When did you begin your fundraising?” I asked. “Two years ago,” he said. And I mused quietly to myself, regretfully and wistfully. Maybe God will show us a sign at SPC, I thought.

But the discussion turned to other matters, occasioned initially by a complaint from one of the more elderly Christians among us who remembers the “good old days” when by default the secular culture observed a Christian Sabbath. You remember. Even if you didn’t go to church in the morning you couldn’t buy groceries until later in the afternoon, if at all. She suggested we storm the bastions to rail against Sunday morning sports. The Muslim was silent as the rabbi might have been had he been there, for the Jews have dealt with Saturday sports in our culture since kids started kicking balls around. I suspect Sunday sports is a battle we’ve already lost, though I must admit being saddened by the fact that our weekly church school and worship attendance is affected markedly by where we are in the community soccer season. That’s something the members of SWIM a couple of generations ago wouldn’t have had to be concerned about.

But from that we talked of even more serious matters of the world, observing that we could sit so comfortably in table fellowship while strident voices on the fringes of all our religious bodies find ways to ostracize, persecute, and, in fact, torture and kill in the name of the one God to whom we all claim allegiance and faith. How sad. Someone then observed that maybe the only hope for people of different faiths to live together might be when all belief systems have been watered down to mean so little in our lives that we don’t care to defend them. That solution, of course, seems a very poor way to win peace among one another in the world while treasuring whatever faith tradition we might value.

A much better solution -- don’t you think? – might be that we hold so fervently to the core of our respective faiths that we feel compelled to respect and uphold the lives of others. For whether we’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or other faiths not represented currently at our community table, we all hold somewhere close to the center a belief that we should respect and love one another.

Our Christian faith proclaims that truth time and again, perhaps nowhere more directly than when the Jewish religious leaders asked Jesus if he could sum up everything he was preaching in twenty-five words or less. That is, they wanted to know which commandment of those they knew from Moses was the greatest of all. All four Gospels give a similar version of Jesus’ response. Mark says it this way in chapter twelve:

One of the scribes came near and heard [Jesus and the religious leaders] disputing with one another, and seeing that [Jesus] answered them well, [the scribe] asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

There you have it. At the core of our faith as Christians is that we love God and neighbor. In fact, as Jesus frames it, loving God means loving neighbor. You can’t do one without the other. Yet in our tradition as in others that would proclaim a similar core proposition of embracing one another in respect, acceptance, and, yes, love, we have distorted love of God into hating neighbor as a way of loving God the more. In Presbyterian terminology we might say we have taken non-essentials of our faith and made them essential. We have taken secondary matters and made them central, thereby justifying prejudice, injustice, scorn, and hatred one to another.

At the SWIM table we all had to shake our heads in acknowledgment that each of our traditions shares the blame for world maladies caused or made worse by wrong practices of religious faith. And so in that basement room of the parish house of St. John’s Chrisostom we pastors and community religious leaders experienced a transcendent moment of God’s grace that bound us together in mutual need and love, binding us closer in our shared commitment to go back to our parishes and into the world in ways of speaking and doing that further the goodness of our tradition and, thus, the goodness of all.

I’m nearly finished, but I haven’t said anything yet about the texts of the morning which we as Reformed Protestants have been asked to consider in the light of God to which we are called. But, in effect, I think I have been talking about our texts because they convey a central tenet of our Judeo-Christian tradition. What they proclaim in common voice is that the God of Abraham and the God in Jesus Christ – one God – is by nature a God who wants healing and wholeness for all people, those the world deems “great” and those the world casts aside.

That wonderful story from Second Kings tells of a man great in the ways of the world – a renowned military commander – who suffers from leprosy, some form of skin disease that in the ancient world might have been serious or not but that nevertheless caused the carrier of the disease to be ostracized from social relationships. The powerful, yet afflicted, general was in a desperate state. And the brilliantly told narrative puts it all in perspective through the dramatization of the religious beliefs of the three main characters.

The servant girl who had been taken prisoner from a war with Israel yet has the compassion to wish her captor to be healed. The prophet Elisha needs to put the visiting dignitary in his proper place. The famous and powerful general of a foreign and often hostile land demands that he be treated with proper dignity. The healing proceeds only because the general is able to listen to the ego-deflating counsel of his servants. All the while we recognize that God stands ready to heal those who call out for help, be they members of the covenant community or highly placed officials in the enemy camp. In this instance, an enslaved girl’s kindness sets the healing in motion, while the wisdom and candor of the general’s servants remove the remaining obstacle. Once human pretense and posturing get out of the way, God reaches down with a healing touch.

So, too, the story of Jesus and the leper in our Gospel reading. This poor man is not marked with human position or power; he is marked only with the visible signs of a skin disease, again something that might be serious or not but is categorized broadly as leprosy which, according to tribal religious law and cultural customs, ostracizes him from ordinary and basic human contact. He meets Jesus with a poignant plea: “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Jesus’ immediate response is a caring, curative one. Our text says Jesus was “moved with pity.” Other translations render the phrase “moved with anger.” Jesus both pitied the man and reacted with anger against religious and cultural customs that kept the sick man separate, excluding him from ways toward health and wholeness. Jesus chooses to bring health and wholeness.

So, too, do all those who labor professionally or voluntarily for health and wholeness in our communities today. Medical professionals who see their calling not only as a way to treat the effects of disease but also to seek a patient’s wholeness of spirit and soul. I know several such people in our own congregation. And what about the peacemakers among us who risk denunciation for attempting to bring down barriers of hostility in the community and in the world? This morning’s Scripture readings provide an appropriate context to be installing new Stephen Ministers, a ministry thriving in this congregation for the purpose of being a caring presence to those who hurt. There are so many other examples I might give. You can think of all those who in their quiet, but persistent ways advocate for the poor and disadvantaged, the homeless and hungry, the dispossessed and victims of injustice, those who are driven by compassion toward suffering and anger toward systems and practices that perpetuate it .

At the heart of our faith is the commandment to live in the ways of Christ who told us that to love God and others is the heart of our faith. We defend our faith not by warring for supremacy of belief over someone else but by living out the ways of Christ to make another person more nearly whole. If you choose – the poor leper said to Jesus – you can make me clean. That was always Jesus’ choice. And if we choose, it can be ours as well. Amen.