Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

February 15, 2009

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 1:40‑45)

A leper came to [Jesus] begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Please join me in prayer.

Our loving and gracious God, in this Epiphany season, your word invites us to see the world in new and unexpected ways. Help us to follow in the radical and sometimes unexpected way of the cross, to befriend the stranger, to bring the margins to the center, to welcome the outcasts in our midst, and to trust that your light and your wisdom will guide us and lead us in the way of discipleship and your love.

Amen.

If you have never seen the award‑winning film, The Elephant Man, you can now check it out at your local library on DVD or VHF. The movie’s story depicts a Nineteenth Century physician, who wanders through an urban carnival looking for freak characters as subjects for a paper that he wishes to present to the London Pathological Society as a way to advance his reputation and his career.

As the doctor wanders through the carnival, he comes upon a hideous creature, so deformed that he is hardly recognizable as a human being. He is featured at the carnival as “The Elephant Man,” because of a monstrous, misshapen head and scaly appearance, so horrible in appearance that his booth is not recommended for children. Whenever the Elephant Man ventured outside the safety of the circus, he would cover his ugly appearance with a giant covering over his head, for fear of anyone seeing the ugly, misshapen head underneath.

Because of injuries and a serious case of bronchitis, the doctor, whose name was Dr. Treves, succeeds in having him admitted to his hospital, and there, through a series of interviews, Dr. Treves discovers that the creature has a name. His name is John Merrick. He also discovers that beneath the hideous exterior there is revealed a soul of rare intellect and sensitivity, with a keen interest in literature and the theater. What began as a subject of curiosity and ambition for this young doctor became a humanitarian interest in restoring this isolated human being on the periphery of society to the center of society.

By careful listening, he learned that John Merrick had been born a normal child with a mother who loved him very much, but who felt helpless to do anything about the disease that struck his body at age 14, leaving him incapable of even lying down like a normal human being. He was forced to wander from circus to circus and sleep sitting up every night or he would be suffocated from the deformity that weighed his heavy head down.

Dr. Treves abandons his ambition as a physician and instead becomes the friend to the poor Elephant Man, introducing him to London society, including the world of the theater, which John Merrick so loved. In the final scene we see the Elephant Man honored at the theater by a famous actress who dedicates her performance to him.

That evening, back at the hospital, John Merrick, feeling like a real human being for the first time, discards all of the pillows that prop him up and enabled him to sleep upright, determined to lie down just once like every other human being. John Merrick, the Elephant Man, lies down and sleeps one last time before quietly slipping away, where we see his deceased mother welcome him with open arms and into the glory of heaven.

When our leper in our story from the Gospel of Mark comes to Jesus, it is no doubt a bold step, taken after years of hovering on the edges of public life. In ancient times, leprosy was a skin ailment that left its victims isolated and completely outside the boundaries of normal society. No doubt, he had been surviving in one way or another literally outside the village and outside the comings and goings of normal civil society for a long time. Perhaps he, too, had cowered and covered himself in order to avoid the reactions of the passersby on the street or in the marketplace, if he ventured there at all.

And Jesus’ reaction is equally remarkable, given the rabbinical codes that would have forbidden anyone to come near a leper. To touch a skin ailment, in ancient cultures, such as leprosy would have identified Jesus with that person, thus making him an outcast as well. The leper knows this. Thus, the question in his approach to Jesus is more than polite. He knows that many a physician would not come near him, even if they could.

Yet, the story tells us that this Jesus—that we honor in the Epiphany season as the one who brings light and wisdom into the world—was moved with pity, a word in the Greek that connotes not just compassion, but anger; literally a churning in the stomach, that is not only concern for this person’s suffering but anger at the cruelty of a society that could treat a fellow human being in such a way.

The feeling described is more than superficial. Jesus is deeply moved. And so Jesus reaches out, literally across the boundaries of social custom and regulation, abandoning all protocol for a learned rabbi of his day, and restores the leper, not only to wholeness and health, but to the center of society as well.

The one excluded is now included. The one on the margins has been brought into the center. The one who was ignored is now acknowledged. The one scorned can now know friendship. The one who was rejected has known acceptance and love.

Lynnette Zika, a week ago, gave me the first chapter of a book that has been chosen for this year’s WELCA book-discussion series. The book is by Stephanie Spellers, and it is called Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation.

The author says that she herself was born on the margins. But one day she experienced a welcome so radical in an Episcopal church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that she decided to write a whole book on her transformation, on how it felt to move from the margins to the center, and what can happen when just a few people still drawn from the painful margins of society to what she calls “a welcoming center.” It is the difference, she says, between feeling like an outcast and feeling like a part of the whole. It is the difference between feeling that you are on the periphery to feeling like you are an acceptable part of human society. It is the difference between being shut out and being included as someone worthy of being loved by a God of unconditional grace and acceptance.

Well, I have only read the first chapter, and I am anxious to see where this author will take the idea of transformation through radical welcome. But I know that the topic itself is a wonderful study for this season of Epiphany, as in the church, we move through these stories of radical healing, transformation and inclusion, in each of our texts from the Gospel of Mark written centuries ago. To see the light is to see the world and those on the margins in new ways. And to follow in the way of the cross, as the Gospel writer Mark tells it, is to be transformed by a love so divine in a way that enables us to be more welcoming toward others.

I noticed in the Variety section of the newspaper this last week that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is coming to the Ordway in St. Paul. But long before she wrote that wonderful story of transformation and inclusion, Alice Walker first wrote that touching account of her own healing and transformation from self-hatred to self-acceptance, from feeling like she was on the margins to being loved literally into the center. And the agent of this transformation, as but you who know the story so well, was none other than her little daughter Rebecca.

Long before her little girl was born, Walker had suffered from a childhood accident with a toy gun that left her scarred and blinded in one eye. As a teenager, Alice Walker had suffered humiliation and cruelty from kids at school, from those who made fun of her disability. Throughout her young adult and even later adult life she tells us that she hid herself behind feelings of inadequacy, and lived in constant fear of people noticing that white, cloudy fragment of scar tissue that had settled in streaks across the bluish background of her blinded eye. But most of all, she feared the day when her little girl would first notice that her mother’s eyes were different from other people.

But then one day, Walker tells us, she has just put little Rebecca down for her nap, just after the little girl has watched her favorite movie that shows a blue and white globe of the world whirling through space. “Rebecca studied my face intently,” Walker writes, “as we stood, her inside and me outside her crib. She even held my face maternally between her dimpled little hands. Then looking every bit as serious and lawyer‑like as her father, she said, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention, ‘Mommy, there’s a world in your eye! Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?’“

With one simple gesture, with one simple word, Rebecca had cut through all of the years of humiliation and condemnation. The scar tissue, the blindness, the fear and humiliation, what was once an ugly scar through the eyes of a child became a world. And it was from that moment that Walker marks the beginning of her journey out of self-hatred and into the place that makes her the writer and the poet that she became for all of us today.

If this season of Epiphany is about light, it is also about seeing, seeing the world and others in new and redeeming ways. It is seeing with new eyes of faith. It is seeing others in light of the cross, bringing those on the margins to the center, with new opportunities for mercy, welcome, and love.

Amen.