Who Are Our Lepers?

Who Are Our Lepers?

Luke 5:12-16

One of the inescapable truths about Jesus is that he cared deeply about people who were marginalized, people who were the victims of injustice, people whom everyone was convinced were worthless.  As we think together for the next few weeks, I want us to challenge ourselves to hear the stories of Jesus caring for such people.  I also want us to close the loop with the present by asking who those people are in our own world and how we, as followers of
Christ, are being called to care for them.

Here’s the best way to work our way into our text this morning.  Imagine for a moment that you are a man in ancient Israel.  You have work that matters to you.  You have a wife you love and a home that is filled with children whom you love.  You love your life.

Then, one day you notice a sore on your hand.  It’s not much of a sore to begin with but not long after you showed it to your wife, it seemed to grow.  Then, it began to spread.  Medical care wasn’t much of an option then, but you consulted with what passed for a physician in your world who told you to spread some concoction on it.  You complied but things only got worse.  You hoped that maybe it would just get better on its own.  A lot of illnesses just ran their course, right?  That wasn’t your fate.

Instead, you went to the temple.  You showed your hands and your legs to the priests. They involuntarily stepped back in fear.  They rallied, though, and consulted with each other on what the proper sacrifice might be.  After all, in their world, illnesses like this were God’s way of punishing the unrighteousness.  They looked at you and knew that healing was going to require a combination of animal sacrifice and repentant prayer.   

Here’s the thing, though:  none of that worked.  You paid for the animals to be sacrificed, tossing money that you really didn’t have into the temple’s coffers.  You followed the priest’s instructions on how and what to pray.  You even looped back and tried that ointment from the doctor again.  Still, the sores just grew.

That’s when the real pain set in.  No doctor loves the patient they couldn’t heal.  What does that do to your reputation?  No priest loves having a living, breathing example of their failure on display in the temple.  Really, people who had no professional stake in your healing didn’t want you nearby either.  After all, the idea that you could get that sick, that fast, was terrifying.   

There was only one resolution that was acceptable.  At first, the priest came to you with a bit of wisdom to share: “You know…what’s happened to you is terrible and I am sorry that we weren’t able to help you.  Whatever it is that you’ve done to make God this angry is not mine to say.  However, I can’t imagine that you want to bring this plague down on your family.  I know how you love them!  You need to leave.  You need to never see them or touch them or breathe on them again.

This was utterly unfathomable.  In a matter of months, you have gone from having a life and a wife and children and work that you love to being a threat to all that matters to you.  You don’t believe that you’ve done a thing to deserve this.  However, you can’t argue with the priests thinking about those you love.  “If I love them, I have to go. If I love them, I have to never see them in person again.  If I love them, I need to never have them have to see the horror that I will become as this disease disfigures me.”

This is all so overwhelming that you hardly notice as the priests exchange your clothing for the sackcloth of repentance, as they place a bell around your neck that will let any healthy person within earshot know that you are nearby and that it is time for them to run.  You answer mechanically when the priests ask what your work is. Reflexively, thy tell you that you cannot do that work anymore.  And as they lead you out of the town, their words of warning, “Leper!  Leper!  Leper…” become your own words spoken in your own voice:  “Leper!”

Your illness has totally marginalized you.  You are as isolated as a human being can be.  You are alone and only feel lonelier when you see the people who have heard your approach running hard in the other direction.  The hardest thing, though, is getting used to hiding behind a broken down wall near the rock where your family places food for you every evening.  Your wife looks like she’s been hollowed out to the core.  Your children just keep growing.  You see them but you make sure that they can’t see you.  You are the walkinig dead.

Who are the “lepers” in our world?  These are the people who we force out of our field of vision because they frighten us.  They are the chronically mentally ill who say strange things or do things that make us uncomfortable.  They are the unwashed homeless folks who presence we smell long before they appear, a smell that would be our scent, too, if we did not have a means for washing our clothes and a shower for our own hygiene.  They are the person with dementia, who a few months before was an old friend.  Now, though, they are a living warning about how frail life can be and we really don’t like being reminded of such things.  

These are the kind of people whom we want to go somewhere else, somewhere other than my backyard.  We put up gates and fences and hire security to keep them out of eyesite.  We may donate items for them and actually care about them but the truth is that this care works better with a healthy distance between us.  This is the person who’s loss of a memory leads us to forget to connect to them.

I remember when Ginny Moore moved into a retirement community, having come to accept her dementia and also accepted her need for help.  At this particular care facility, the “premium priority” among the residents was dressing and speaking and caring for and about things in ways that displayed just how sharp they still were.  Ginny was the living emodiment of their fears.  If this could happen to her, then it could happen to them.  Because her presence made people uncomfortable, people shunned her.

This happens all the time. People are faced with a choice.  There are the people who are like me, who make me feel good about myself, who help me to believe that everything is just fine.  Then, there are the people who, the vast majority of the time, through no fault of their own, make us squirm, if not want to run.  So, maybe we offer up our excuses or maybe we find a way to run… just slowly enough that it seems like we’re hardly running at all, or perhaps we develop the kind of selective vision and hearing that the other person’s presence no longer registers for us at all.  In the choice between the comfortable and the uncomfortable, we almost always choose the comfortable.  As soon as we do that, we are no longer following Christ.  We’re just on auto pilot, allowing our worst instincts and worst fears to take over.

The most famous example of this for me was the true story of a seminary where a speaker was assigned to tell the parable of the good Samartan.  The word is that they did a bang-up job, inspiring all the budding pastors to be.  It was like the world’s greatest pregame, locker room speech:  “Now…on three…let’s go be good Samaritans, too.  One…two…three…let’s go!”

Unbeknownst to the seminarians, an actor had been hired to hang out outside the auditorium and play someone in need.  At first, he just hung a bit of a distance away.  No one noticed him.  So, he moved closer to the sidewalk where all the students were walking.  They looked at their phones and talked to each other and drifted along to their next class, but still, no one noticed him.  Eventually, the actor took to lying prone on the ground and apparently writhing in pain.  Literally, some of the students stepped right over him.  Having just heard the parable of the good Samaritan and been thoroughly inspired, they displayed no compassion for a person in need.

Back to our leper.  The clock has been rolled forward.  Time has passed and the illness has progresed.  He has been disfigured phsyically but, even worse, his whole world has been severely distorted.  He can barely remember what it was like to feel whole, to be touched by another human being, to feel like he was loved.  There are people around him but he might as well be lost on a deserted island.  He is utterly alone.  

Then, because he is sick but not deaf, he hears the commotion passing through the village.  Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples are coming.  He hears talk about Jesus’ amazing teaching and preaching, of his vision of the kingdom of God.  What really catches his ear, though, is that this Jesus is said to be a powerful healer, too.  Maybe this is his last chance.  Maybe he still has a little hope left in him.  Is there a chance that he could live—really live—again?

The man finds just the right spot where he can hide in the shadows and wait for Jesus to approach.  He’s good at hiding and the folks in town are real pros at ignoring him.  When Jesus approaches, though, and the leper steps out into the light, Luke makes it clear that no one could ignore the horror of that sight.  He doesn’t just have leprosy.  He is covered in leprosy.  His body screams, “Stay away!”  And what screamed inside of the crowd around him was not only horror at his condition but shame at some deep down level, knowing that they had done this suffering man no favors by judging him.  It’s hard, after all, to hear a great teaching about loving your neighbor and not realize at some level that you have really, truly hated that leper or a long time.  I bet they stood there and hoped that Jesus wouldn’t notice that man.

He did notice, though.  The leper gave him no choice.  He spoke up in the voice that for years had only said one thing, “Leper,” but now said something else.  He threw himself on the ground in front of Jesus and said these words, instead:  “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” I have no doubt that the crowd staggered backwards to keep their distance.  Jesus, though, does no such thing.  

Instead, Jesus does the one thing that had to be etched in the mind of every witness.  Jesus stretches out his hand to the man and touches him.  At which point, the groans of the crowd had to be audible.  Then, Jesus does something else that no one had done for years:  he looks the leper in the eye and acknowledges a fellow human being.  Finally, he says to the man, “I am willing!”  He cares.  He wants to help.  He wants this man to be whole.  Luke tells us that immediately, the man is healed.  Then, Jesus tells the man, “You remember those priests at the temple who judged you and shunned you?  It’s time for a little ‘show and tell.’  Surely, they must have some ritual way to celebrate your newfound health!”

Who are our lepers?  Is it the immigrant who appears in the night or the person with bipolar disorder on the train or the homeless guy who is heading straight for you?  It’s anyone who makes you uncomfortable enough to forget they are human and leads you to run in the other direction.  It is the person whom Christ is calling you to touch and acknowledge and care for.  If we are going to follow Christ, we have no choice.