“I Do Choose!!!”
Mark 1:40-45
Have you ever felt like an outcast?
Have you ever felt like you didn’t fit in?
Many of us go through times in our lives when we feel like social piranhas.
A month or so ago, Clair and I went to the mall.
This is something we don’t do very often, but it was a cold day—too cold for Owen to play outside and we all needed to get out of the house.
Once we were back in our car and about to head home Clair made an off-hand comment: “Boy there sure were a lot of awkward teenagers in the mall today.”
I asked her what she meant.
She meant kids who were obviously going through a time of rebellion.
You know what I’m talking about.
The teen years can be some of the worst.
It’s easy to feel like an outcast when you are a kid, trying to figure out who you are and where you stand in the so-called “pecking order” of life.
I wonder if young people feel welcome in churches, if they feel loved and accepted no matter who they are, no matter what their peers tell them, no matter what they look like or are struggling with?
I once met a preacher who bragged about kicking a young person out of his church--a young person who was gay.
He told him not to come back unless he changed.
No wonder the suicide rate is especially high for kids who are LGBTQ.
If, even the church condemns persons and won’t accept them, won’t love them unconditionally—who will?
Our culture tends to stigmatize the “different” among us: the diseased and disfigured, the immigrant, the very poor, the slow to learn--the social misfits.
As a result these folks are left feeling as if they are “less than,” “not as good as,” “not as important as” other people.
No one should have to feel this way.
In our Gospel Lesson for this morning, Jesus has been traveling through towns and synagogues proclaiming the good news and casting out demons.
And now He has arrived in an open field where the impure people wander, those who aren’t allowed to be part of society.
He has sought out and found the people who are treated as though they are the bottom of the barrel.
They are the lepers.
They are the ones who have been separated by the very communities that might have brought healing and compassion into their lives.
They have all sorts of skin diseases.
And these skin diseases aren’t necessarily physically contagious.
People didn’t really think in those terms in Jesus’ day.
These skin diseases were thought to be socially contagious and spiritually contagious.
And so, when a person had leprosy they were labeled as “unclean” by the priest—in accordance with the Law which is laid out in Leviticus 13 and 14.
And anyone who comes in contact with them, anyone who even so much as touches them becomes “unclean” as well.
Such is the state of the man who comes running up to Jesus in our Gospel Lesson for this morning.
We aren’t told his name.
All we are told is that he is a leper.
And that’s all we need to know, I suppose.
He is kind of like a man with no name or no apparent need for a name.
So he came to Jesus “begging him, and kneeling” in front of Him.
“If you choose, you can make me clean” he said.
And we are told that at that moment Jesus was “moved with pity.”
And Jesus stretched out His hand and actually touched this man, saying to him “I do choose.”
And “immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.”
Jesus’ touch freed the man from the curse of the Law.
But by touching the man, Jesus made Himself “ritually unclean.”
In Galatians 3:13 we are told that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…”
There is no greater love.
In a very real sense, Jesus made the decision to trade places with the man who had leprosy.
And so we have a “Leper Messiah.”
We are told that “Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country.”
Still, the outcastes, the marginalized, the stigmatized, the losers and loners—they came to Him.
When the compassionate Jesus stretches out his hand, touching the unclean man and saying to him: “I do choose. Be made clean!” this is the beginning of the real church—the church of the sick and outcast.
The church where people come to be healed by God.
To be loved by the people of God.
To live in community and fellowship with other sufferers.
And to commit their lives to the journey toward wholeness and healing which is marked by following Jesus Christ and proclaiming His compassion—His love by serving and thus healing others.
This is what we are to be about.
As the old saying goes, “The Church is not a museum for saints. It is a hospital for sinners.”
And all are welcome.
No one is to be cast out!!!
If a person is made to feel marginalized or “less than” in the church, then the church is not being the church!!!
The church is to be the beacon of hope for a world of lepers.
And we are all lepers, are we not?
We are all “unclean.”
We all stand in need of the mercy and compassion of Christ.
In 12 days I will turn 50 years old.
I’m excited about it.
I am extremely blessed to have made it this far.
And I have a good life.
I have not made a million dollars, not even close.
I don’t drive a new car.
I’m not part of the “in crowd”—whatever that might mean.
But I don’t need all that.
I have a job that I love.
I have an amazing wife and beautiful children whom I absolutely adore.
And God has graced me with the gift of faith.
As an English friend of mine would say: “I don’t want for much.”
While the version of the Bible I read from this morning suggests that Jesus’ motivation to reach across the boundary of religious Law and touch an untouchable was that He was “moved with pity” other interpretations suggest that Jesus was also moved by anger—anger at a religious establishment and a culture that interprets the Law in such a way as to demonize and exclude entire groups of human beings who are guilty of nothing more than being “different.”
And that is why Jesus instructs the former leper to “go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
In other words, the leper’s task is not to publicize the miracle, but to help confront an ideological system that victimizes people.
He is to make the offering for the purpose of “witnessing against those” who cast him out—declaring him to be “unclean.”
But the leper is too free, too excited to return to the old oppressive religious authorities.
Instead, he becomes a preacher—proclaiming freely what Christ has done for him!!!
Jesus has overturned the old order of things.
He is forming a new community of faith with the outcasts, the lepers, the widows, the impure, the marginalized and the sinners overcoming an exclusive religious system based on rules rather than love.
Turning back to Galatians Chapter 3, listen to what Paul says about this: “all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.
Now it is evident that no one is justified by God by the law; for ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith.’”
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”
This is our hope.
This is what we are invited to believe.
This is where we are to rest our weary heads.
This is the good news that changes our lives and frees us from the bonds of slavery to sin and death!!!
God loves us.
Jesus died for us.
And because He lives, we too can live as well.
Do you believe this?
Have you been set free?
