Mark 1:40-45

Epiphany 6- Year B

Speaking of lepers, generically, the Community Christian Bible reflects: "The Good News does not remain mere words but it effects a change. From now on, they will no longer be marginalized people."

When given the choice between battling words and effecting a change, choose change. When given a choice between effecting a change for those already privileged and those still marginalized, choose the marginalized.

Such choices in life are seldom either easy or clear. None-the-less, we are called to choose.

So, make your list of those you can identify as the marginalized (it will probably contain people you are not comfortable with and even an enemy or two). However, be bold and choose their healing even if it causes you to become, in your turn, marginalized by being pushed to the hedges and byways.

Bob Herbert's column in the 2/10/03 NYTimes points in one important direction where better choices need to be made. After false rumors brought out 2,000 applicants for assembly work, causing a traffic jam, he writes:

"A front-page headline in The New York Times last Thursday said, "Hiring in Nation Hits Worst Slump in Nearly 20 Years." Two million jobs have vanished in the last two years.

"Joblessness is right up there with war and terror as an ingredient contributing to the high national anxiety. If you want to see desperation close up, look at the eyes of the increasing numbers of breadwinners who can't find work....

"As Tuesday's fiasco in Chicago demonstrated, the situation is much worse than official unemployment statistics would indicate. The government reported on Friday that the jobless rate had slipped to 5.7 percent in January, but few economists believed that was the beginning of any substantial improvement.

"The official jobless figures are deceptive because they don't count people who have stopped looking for work. The ranks of these so-called discouraged workers have grown by more than a million since last summer.

"Another enormously difficult problem is the hard core of jobless, undereducated young people, ages 16 to 24, who are roaming the streets with nothing constructive to do. There are 5.5 million of these out-of-school, out-of-work youngsters, and that number is growing.

"If the Bush administration has any real plans for dealing with the nation's employment problems, it is keeping them very carefully concealed. The president insists he's concerned and said again on Friday, "We will not be satisfied until this economy grows fast enough to employ every man and woman who seeks a job."

"He's got a long way to go, and his only proposed remedy [choice, ww] - ever more tax cuts for the wealthy - is not likely to get him there."

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/february2003.html

"If you want to...."

This is a wonderful way to put someone in a bind. In regard to the issue of homosexuality in the United Methodist Church, how would it be for a g/l/b or t to say to a Good News or Confessing Movement creedalist, "If you want to, you can include me." Can you imagine them responding, "I want to. Welcome."

Herein lies part of the issue between Christ and his Church.

A question here is how healing will take place between Christ and Church when Christ would include in and heal beyond the boundaries and Church would exclude and widen the boundaries?

[note: it would be easy to confuse healing issues with boundary issues as we might see a creedalist require what they would describe as a "healing" before welcoming - that poor word "healing" needs better clarification in this particular setting. Let's not limit the bounds of healing but find ways to take this story into the rest of our lives.]

How we deal with the boundary issues of life is indicative of our place of freedom or constraint. May you keep reaching beyond to touch the untouchable, to turn the community back to them, and to invite them back into community.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/february2003.html

Translators have to choose which ancient manuscript they will translate from. Does Jesus respond in "pity" or in "anger"? As you know from your own experience there is sometimes only a knife-edge of difference between the two.

Rather than trying to justify a strict constructionist position for one or the other, one way to cut such a Gordian knot is simply to look at Jesus' response. Whether out of pity or anger, Jesus affirms his choice to heal brokenness.

I suppose motivation does makes a difference to the one doing the healing, but the one being healed doesn't seem to care a whit about such.

In turn-about fashion. It doesn't seem to make much difference to Jesus what motivation the healed man had for blabbing about this healing, in direct contravention of his instructions. Whatever the healed one had in mind (presume something good here) the result was Jesus spent more time in the wilderness, beyond town boundaries.

So where do we find intentions being of less consequence than responses? Whether for consistently good reasons or lousy ones, I'd be glad to get the U.S. out of Iraq, we don't need a permanent military base in that region. Again, regardless of where folks would find their justification, I'd be glad to have the U.M.C. and other denominations recant their over-generalized response to human sexuality of homosexual/bad, heterosexual/good. And, whatever the rationale folks need to use, I'd be glad for an unlinking of power with money and violence with redemption.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2006/february2006.html

"When it gets too dangerous inside the religious establishment, Jesus stays out in the country. John Wesley did the same thing! Maybe that is where some of us will need to go."

Naaman begins with the imagery of the Psalmist and Paul, that one can make their own way in relationship to G*D. Naaman seeks to punish himself to free himself. He looks for some quick fix answer that G*D will bestow upon him, as Jesus did the leper.

After all, he is important enough to receive. In fact, things shouldn't have gone awry in the first place.

There is anger here in Elisha's willingness to display his prophetic power, in Naaman's response to Elisha's directions, in the leper calling Jesus to him instead of calling out "Unclean", and in Jesus' response of healing in anger and casting a healed one away (if you have a Bible that only talks of Jesus' pity or compassion and his sending a healed person to the priests, you need to read some footnotes or other translations).

Anger and discipline often go together. They can urge one another onward. These passages are not helpfully dealt with at face value.

The conscience in these passages is portrayed by an unnamed slave girl. It would be interesting to imagine her comment on each of the subsequent scenes. As a slave, what would she think of the Psalmist desire for extraverted thanks? of Paul's bootstrap pulling? of the leper's trick and Jesus' anger? To look at these passages through her eyes might bear some good fruit.

- - -

a Red Queen and Paul
run twice as fast to stay in place
run twice as often to stay fit
run twice as far to find a shortcut

this running demands results
Naaman ran twice
to Elisha and away
walked twice
to a river and from

this running presumes rights
a leper putting a burden on Jesus
Jesus casting out leprosy
and casting out a healed leper

this running calls for questions
is twice really enough today
is the end result the result we seek
is anything but power used in healings
is thanksgiving ever humbly done

this running eventually runs out
our historic restlessness is calmed
we are grateful to not prove our power
to not demand curing
to breathe and breathe again

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

How hard it is to choose to keep a good to oneself.

L. If you choose, you can heal.
J. I choose.

J. If you choose, you can keep this to yourself.
L. I don't choose

Choice is a key issue in life. To what will we choose to be true? What will we choose to bring into being or help on the way out? How do we choose between just these two when they are in conflict?

Do you choose to follow the tradition wherein Jesus shows pity or that which has Jesus being angry about the request and not just sending the former leper away, but casting him forth as a demon would be cast out? Whichever choice you generally make, this is a good year to go the other way.

Here our preferred approach is through a translation that honors Jesus' anger. So, looked at through a lens of pity with an underlying tension of anger, Jesus sees the pitiful state of humankind. We have been run out of a garden, been raised up and let down, violence qua violence and retributive violence abound, we are caught without hope and an imagination too small. We don't even know how to claim a birthright of relationship and healing. We are left begging for these rights.

In responding to pitiful with pity, Jesus heals - knowing all-the-while that good-telling will eventually lead to bad-telling and put Jesus in the pitiful position of saying in another garden, "If you choose, you can let me off the hook. All I will have to do is keep you to myself. . . . Oh, I see, neither of us can do other than pity the circumstances and choose to be whole regardless of circumstances around us. I take it back."

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html

Should someone come to you, having seen great things in you, how would you respond to them?

If the great thing was something you could do for them, would that be different than if were a great thing they saw you doing for someone else or for yourself?

Presuming you both saw the same possibility, would you do what was asked? If you didn’t see the possibility, would you refrain from even trying?

In this case both the leper and Jesus were gazing in the same direction and a healing eventuated.

Hooray for the moment. Now what? Was this just between the two or did it have a larger context? Obviously, while the two had a similar vision about a healing they did not have the same agreement on what was next. Do you think, in hindsight, that Jesus would have done better to have gotten a written confidentiality statement to constrain any reporting forthcoming from a priestly confirmation ritual? Or, just claimed the healing and told the former leper to spread the news.

What about your moments this week. Are they just your moments or might they give evidence to a larger context and the gifts you need to recognize and enact on a more regular basis? You haven’t really signed a confidentiality statement about your life, have you? Surely not. So, be not afraid to let the news out about your experiences.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/02/mark-140-45.html