Treasure

Matthew 8:1-4,16-17

A lot of the time you can keep your health issues to yourself. You don’t have to announce them to the world if you don’t want to. You can have as much privacy as you like. But it’s different with infectious diseases. And in a time of pandemic, it’s very different. People are hyper-alert to any signs of illness in themselves or the people around them. I know. Whenever I sneeze into my mask, I can feel people giving me the side eye and inching away.

It was like this, but worse, in the ancient world with leprosy. Anyone who had leprosy was shunned. Leprosy was serious business. It meant potentially disfigurement, rotting skin, and loss of limbs; something highly contagious and incurable. People believed that merely touching a leper could cause you to become infected.

And so the lepers in Biblical times were banned from community life. People were afraid of them – of their disease. The custom in Israel during the first century was to label these persons unclean, which made them subject to certain rules. They were required to live outside cities or villages, to travel alone, and to wear torn clothing, so they would be easily identified if you happened upon one. If you touched someone with leprosy, you would also be deemed unclean.

We know now that most of the people who were called lepers had some milder skin disease – maybe eczema or psoriasis. And we also know now that you don’t catch leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, from touching an infected person. It is an airborne infection, transmitted by coughing or sneezing.

But people didn’t know then and they were afraid. Untreated, Hansen’s disease can have terrible effects. People were afraid of any kind of skin disease, because it might be the worst kind of skin disease. And their fear made it a social disease. A leper was socially dead.

It was harsh. Maybe everyone was on board with that. Maybe even the lepers understood the necessity of their isolation, even while they were shattered by it.

Or maybe not. Maybe, standing outside the community, they felt a bitterness toward those on the inside.

I think I might. Definitely.

Because there have been many times in my life I have felt left out … isolated … overlooked. And I did feel bad for myself and resentful of others. This probably happens to all of us at one time or another. Many times it is due to a misunderstanding. Assumptions are made about our own and others’ motivations and desires. And sometimes our assumptions get us into trouble.

There are so many people outside the church. I don’t just mean outside the church building, as most of us have been for about a year now. But I mean, there are a lot of people – our neighbors, our co-workers, family members – who are outside the fellowship of the church. and most of the time we, who are on the inside, just assume they are out there because they choose to be. We assume that they know how friendly we are and that they would be welcomed warmly as soon as they made the decision to come in. And, so, if they remain outsiders all their lives it is only because that’s what they chose, not because of anything we did. Or anything we didn’t do.

There are so many assumptions in that.

Once, about ten years ago, I decided to explore online worshiping communities – long before I ever imagined that phrase would become a part of my working vocabulary. I was looking at a website called Second Life. It’s a virtual place where you can create whatever kind of life you can imagine. When you think of it that way, it has a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

There are churches in Second Life, and I wanted to see how they worked, so I joined. When you join Second Life you have to create an avatar that can walk around in this virtual space and interact with other people’s avatars. Some people get really creative with this. I know a young woman who designed clothes for Second Life avatars and sold them to other players in this virtual world. People paid her real money for fake clothes. They want their avatars to look good.

But I was completely clueless about how to do anything at all in this world. When I signed up, I was offered a handful of stock avatars, so I just picked one. It looked like the Michelin Man – you know, that character that’s made out of a stack of white tires? Yeah, that was my second life.

So I took my pudgy avatar over to the first church I found to see if anything was going on there. But I was confused by everything so I just stood outside, pretending like I was reading the signs or whatever. Someone approached – a woman who was going inside – and she asked if she could help me. I told her I was interested in attending the church. She said there was a daily prayer service about to start and I was welcome. But … I couldn’t figure out how to make my avatar walk through the door.

She was very nice. She tried to explain the controls, but when I still wasn’t getting it she offered to just teleport me inside. I thought, wow! You can do that? great.

She got me inside and it looked like a beautiful classic church. Familiar. There were several people already there. Everyone, obviously, had custom-made avatars. They probably purchased designer clothes like the ones my friend made. Which means, they looked like normal people.

There was a semi-circle of chairs set up, so I moved toward a chair and I thought, this will be fine. I stood there by my chair. The woman who helped me in told me I could sit down now – but I couldn’t figure out how to make my avatar do that. While I was clumsily trying to sit down, while everyone was waiting for me to sit down, this was the most excruciating moment of my short time in Second Life. Finally she said, “that’s okay. You can stand.”

So I stood through the prayer service. Totally humiliated.

I left when the service was over – that is to say I checked out of Second Life world, never to return again. It was just too embarrassing. I was sure they were talking about me: the woman who couldn’t make her silly, puffy body sit down in a chair. No one said anything mean to me. No one gave me a dirty look or laughed at me. They all just politely pretended that nothing weird was happening. It was almost unendurable.

Which was a shame, because it seemed to offer a lovely experience of community – for those who could figure out how to do it. Not me. It was just too high a hurdle for me to get over.

There are so many ways communities exclude people. There are always certain boundaries that have to be crossed over to join a community. It’s not because we are bad people – it’s just the nature of community. Some are in and some are out.

A fact that has been evident in some very painful ways this past year. Suddenly last March our church building shut down. And our community went online. And in this process, there are some who have been left behind. Not because we wanted to leave them out. Not because they wanted to be left out. Only because they could not make the shift to online, and we couldn’t do enough to help them make that shift.

And we have tried to find other ways, when possible, to keep these people in the community. We have tried to keep a positive attitude about everything, to look for the hidden gift in everything. But we know that there is really no substitute for in-person community – the incarnate fellowship that God has created us for. Second Life is great when there are reasons you cannot be together in-person. Second Life is great as a first step for someone who wants to try a new thing, like being in church. But there is nothing like First Life.

When Jesus reached out and touched the leper kneeling before him he was saying as much. He crossed a boundary that others were afraid to cross for the sake of telling this man that he, too, was treasured by God; he, too, was a beloved child of God; he, too, belonged. When Jesus touched this man he restored him to community, restoring him to life.

When we do come back together again, which will be soon, I pray, I hope we will bring back with us an awareness of all healing power our community can offer. When we come back together I hope we will not forget the ones who joined us online, but who have possibly never been inside our building – and not leave them behind. When we come back together I hope we will bring with us an awareness that we are all, every human being, treasured by God. That we are all loved and we all belong. And this we will celebrate.

This Ash Wednesday at WPC

One Piece at a Time

Isaiah 40:21-31

Mark 1:29-39     

There are many stories of creation, coming from a variety of different cultural and religious traditions. We know best the two creation stories in Genesis. And we know them in a different way than we might know others, outside our religious tradition. But they are stories, like the others. And the reason we need such stories is simply because a story can contain greater, deeper truth sometimes than a whole pile of factual statements.  There’s the old saying, a picture paints a thousand words. I think of stories as word pictures. They use words imaginatively to paint pictures that help us understand who we are and where we came from, and why we are here.

The two stories in Genesis about how the world came into being, the story in chapter one, about the seven days of creation, and the story in chapter 2, about Adam and Eve, both come from Jewish tradition. But they are not the only creation stories in Jewish tradition. There is another one I want to tell you.

You could start this story the same way such stories often start: In the beginning … When God began creating the heavens and the earth,

But here is where the story begins to differ, in that before the storytellers can tell us about the world that God created, they need to tell us something about the God who created it; the God who created everything in it, and humankind in God’s image – male and female, both, in God’s image.

Where was God before the creation of the world? God was everywhere. God was infinitely expansive, there was no place where he was not. God was so much in everyplace that there was no place for her to create. So God had to sort of withdraw himself, make a little space. God drew in her vast girth, and used that new empty space to create a world.

God created something new in the empty space she had cleared out. It was a new thing, but God put something of himself into it. A stream of the divine light poured into this new thing God made – the earth itself and the first human God made, called Adam, which means man, or human. The divine light shone through them.

But then, the storytellers say, the divine light proved to be too strong, too powerful, for these creations, and it destroyed them. A violent explosion occurred. Everything shattered apart in a million pieces, bits of the divine light, sparks, scattered everywhere. And this shattering, this separation, created an opportunity for evil to move into the world God created. It did, swarming everywhere.

But evil did not have a life-force of its own. It was a parasite. To survive, evil needed to capture some of the divine light, and so it did. With the divine light shattered into millions of tiny pieces it wasn’t that hard for evil to grab hold of a piece, borrowing its life energy. It is how evil continues to survive in the world even today, by attaching itself to good.

We might end this story the same way so many stories end, saying, “So that is how it came to be that evil co-exists in the world with good.” Or “That is how God’s good creation got spoiled, broken.” We can say that, but of course this is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning.

The story goes on to tell about the work of repairing this broken world, tikkun olam, the Hebrew phrase meaning the mending of the world. The way this world will be repaired is for all the fragments of goodness that are scattered around the world to be gathered back together. When all the God-pieces are put back together, evil will be gone, goodness and light will be restored. The world will, once again, be whole. There will be shalom.

According to the tradition, every time a human being performs a mitzvah, an act of obedience to God, a spark of divine light is restored to its place. Every good deed is like a stitch in the cosmic mending. Each act of love brings some healing to the world. Hence we seek to be obedient to God’s word not just for ourselves, but for the sake of God’s world.

It’s a story that says we are co-creators with God. We are partners with God in the repairing of this world. God depends on us to do our part to heal the creation. And, of course, we cannot do it without God. God shows us the direction to go and gives us the means with which to act.

The scriptures today are two kinds of healing stories, words of hope and encouragement to a people in exile. For all the people who have ever lived who felt like they are somehow separated from God, for everyone who ever felt like they had been abandoned by God, these stories from the prophet Isaiah and the gospel of Mark say no – that is not true. God is always with you.

As the prophet Isaiah said, “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless…those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” This powerful and awesome God is always with you; God will never leave you.

As the gospel of Mark tells us, Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out evil; bearing the message: God is always with you. God will never leave you. God is at work, even now, repairing the world.

This is what I tell the children more than anything else: God is always with you. God will never leave you. They need to hear it; you need to hear it. I people in the midst of pandemic need to know: God is always with you; God will never leave you. The whole world needs to hear it.

Because the world is broken. The goodness of God has been shattered, scattered in pieces all over, pieces of divinity so small it is sometimes hard to recognize them. But they are there, because God is there, ready to do mending and caring and healing work wherever it is needed. And God calls us to be a part of that work too.

Wait. As the prophet Isaiah says, wait. Listen. Devote yourself to prayer and good deeds, as Jesus himself did. Speak words of hope, sharing the message of Jesus Christ, about the healing of the world, wherever you are. Be a part of the work of restoring the world, one piece at a time. Tikkun Olam.

Photo: Mosaic in the entryway of the YMCA, Salisbury, Maryland.