Sunday, February 15

Today's Readings:



Here's my reflection/sermon for the day:

One of the most challenging aspects of reading Scripture is getting in touch with the biases that you bring to the text. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Biblical translators who have wrestled with this week’s story have two very different approaches to describing Jesus’ emotional state at the beginning of verse 41.

There are those - like the translators of the New Revised Standard Version - who believe that when the leper approached Jesus, Jesus was “filled with compassion” or “moved with pity”. Individuals who describe Jesus this way would see his defining traits as kindness and empathy.

“No so fast!” another group of translators would counter - a group like those from Today’s New International Version. “The correct translation of that verse suggests Jesus wasn’t filled with compassion. He was filled with something else!”

“Like what?” testy members of the first group might respond.

“Anger or indignation!”

Those who believe Jesus was angry would hone in on a different side of Jesus – the side prone to challenging authority and speaking truth. These folks believe Jesus was angry for a number of reasons including the possibility that the leper had been refused healing by the religious authorities before he had sought Jesus out. Hence, their belief that Jesus was angry.

So why am I starting out my time with you this morning talking about how one’s bias can color one’s understanding of a story?

Well, I’m doing so because I want to explore a bias that we modern readers of the Bible might be bringing to this morning’s story that could cause us to completely miss an essential element of the story. That bias has to do with how we understand Jesus’ instruction to the leper immediately after Jesus facilitated his healing.

Think back to that point in the story for a moment. What did Jesus tell the leper to do immediately after he was healed?

[Pause a moment to allow individuals the opportunity to answer.]

That’s right. Jesus told the man to present himself to the priest. And why do you think Jesus told him to do that?

Our modern bias shows in how Eugene Peterson communicated that reason in the version of the text that was included in your bulletin. Peterson told us Jesus sent him there “to validate your healing to the people”. It sounds here as if the sole reason the man was sent to the priest was to gain legitimacy for the healing from the religious establishment.

But is that the sole reason Jesus instructed the leper to see the priest? Or could there have been another?

I like to believe there was – for the Jesus I know wasn’t a person preoccupied with gaining legitimacy from the establishment. There was something else going on. And that something else had to do with Jesus’ understanding of what it meant to be healed.

You see Jesus understood that the man’s healing wasn’t complete just because the man’s leprosy disappeared. No, at that point the man was simply cured. In order for the man to be healed, however, something more was needed – the man’s acceptance and re-integration back into community.

And that’s precisely where I believe we modern folks have lost our way in our reading of this morning’s healing story. You see in all of our efforts these days to shed ourselves of a variety of afflictions – physical afflictions, mental afflictions, and spiritual afflictions –our goal has been to simply shed the afflictions we carry. In other words, we modern folks have become willing to settle for simply being cured. The more we’ve lost sight community (and its ability to bring dimensions of wholeness to our lives), the more we’ve given up on the notion of healing.

Thankfully, Jesus won’t let us do that. Jesus will do with us what he did with that leper – send us back into community where we can get a taste of healing.

One of the greatest blessings I have been given in my ministry is the ability to watch people who – like the leper in this morning’s story – walk through the front doors of our Open and Affirming community in desperate need of healing. Oh sure, many of them have already had their afflictions cured. But they’re struggling to find healing because they’ve lost a sense of wholeness when their faith community rejected them on some level. In some cases that rejection stemmed from their belief systems. In other cases it was due to their social location. Whatever the reason, many of us found ourselves walking through those front doors because we were searching for the final stages of healing that can only be found in community.

As we nervously walked through those front doors, there was a piece of us that spoke the same words the leper spoke: “If you want to, you can cleanse me.”

And guess what?

The living spirit of Christ that we found within this community – spoke to us and said: “I want to. Be clean.”

On a Sunday morning when it would be easy to settle for simply re-living the leper’s experience, I want us to do more than that: I want to use the story as the jumping off point so that we can speak to our own experience of healing that we have found in this community. And as you share, I would ask that you don’t lift up any individual or individuals in the church who have helped you to this place. Rather, I ask that you lift up the ways this community as a whole has facilitated the healing touch of Christ for you…

[Time for individual sharing.]

Friends, we have heard powerful words about how this community has opened itself up to serve as Christ’s partner in the restoration of healing and wholeness in the lives of those already gathered here. As we go forth this week, my hope and prayer is that we won’t lose sight of that call. Instead, my prayer is that we will use these stories to renew our energy so that we can reach out to those in need of healing on the other side of our walls.

Amen