Choosing

After a six year season in which the Peace, Unity, and Purity Administrative Commission of the Presbytery of Tropical Florida studied and prayed together, but was unable to engage the presbytery in transforming dialogue, the AC was asked to craft a "Gracious Separation" plan in the event some churches felt compelled to disaffiliate from the PCUSA.  Following the deletion of G-6.0106b and the adoption of the new Form of Government, the presbytery voted to adopt the GSA, hoping that the provision of generous separation would quiet the anxieties of conservative congregations and provide space to live into this new era in the church. However, in fairly short order, 15 congregations initiated the process of separation.  At a painful but respectful May meeting, the first nine of those congregations were dismissed with their property, one to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and eight to ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.  This sermon was given at the May meeting of the presbytery.  The preacher serves as co-chair of the PUP commission and is a director with the Covenant Network.  She pastors Riviera Presbyterian Church in Miami, a founding congregation of the Covenant Network.

ChoosingA Sermon on Mark 1:35-45The Rev. Dr. Laurie Ann KrausMay 15, 2012 - Eastertide

When I chose for today’s worship to preach this story in Mark’s gospel, the chair of Riviera’s board of deacons was helping out in the church office.  Bonnie is a retired high school guidance counselor, brought up in the mountains of the Appalachian South, and one of the most generous, wise and hospitable people I know. I asked her what she thought about my choice of story and theme for this important, difficult presbytery meeting.  She pulled out her bible and looked at my notes and was quiet…..for a really long time.  Bonnie? I prompted from my desk in the next room, thinking that her list of volunteer tasks had distracted her from my question.  But nooo.   Welllll, she began.  It’s a real powerful story, and I know you will do a fine job with it….But her voice trailed off, and Bonnie looked uncharacteristically doubtful. And….? I prompted.  Wellllll, didn’t you say this was the meeting where all those churches will be requesting dismissal to another denomination?  Right! I said, so?  Weellllll, I’m just wonderin’…….   Yes? I said, I confess, a little impatiently.  I’m just wonderin’, she repeated, at this meetin’, who gets to be Jesus, and who’s the leper?And that is an excellent question, isn’t it?  A question we have all been wrestling with, in a way, all these long years of shared ministry in the Presbytery of Tropical Florida, good ministry punctuated by seasons of profound, and in this moment, seemingly irreconcilable theological disagreement. Who has the mind of Christ?  Who is the one who needs healing? Who is Jesus?  Who is the leper? The various ways the Holy Spirit has led us, down through the years, to answer these important questions has shaped our ministries, our congregations, and the life of this presbytery, and brought us to this day of choosing.At the outset, the nature and direction of Jesus’ ministry seems clear.  When the disciples find him praying, alone and in the dark, and tell him that everyone is looking for him (and aren’t we all looking for him?) Jesus declares his missional purpose clearly:  let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do. How was he to know, how could the disciples predict, that fulfilling that simple mission would become so complicated, so quickly?  How could any of them have anticipated that stopping to respond to one simple request for healing would change everything, for all of them, forever?If you choose, you can make me clean.The man making this tender, tentative, arrogant-humble demand is a leper.  In the bible, it doesn’t get much worse than that. In the bible, to speak of disease—of such a disease! —is not merely to speak of physical illness, but  more, of the potent reality of social contagion.As it was understood, “leprosy” was a judgment from God visible to humankind, dangerous, necessitating separation.  Then, as now, well meaning, faithful people established practices and policies to guide the community in such circumstances; to protect the community’s well being and its future in the face of threat.  These rules were established as a way of gracious separation, we could say:  a way of acknowledging differences so profound and so potentially disruptive to the well being of the body that there was, quite simply, no way to keep everyone in the same room.  It was a way of acknowledging publicly what most everyone practiced privately:  the feeling of trust and safety we have inside with some people; the knowing, sometimes with regret, that some others will therefore have to be a little bit further outside our boundaries in order for all of us to do “what we came out to do.”This is not a judgment, but only an observation about the way things are, the way we are, this side of the kingdom of God . . . and remember, we’ve yet to answer Bonnie’s very important questions: who gets to be Jesus? Who’s the leper?   If you choose, you can make me clean. What a blessing it has been, for all of us through the years of the life of this presbytery, as we have come and gone, doing what we came out to do for the gospel—what a blessing it still is that we have had such confrontations as this one with one another. That despite all our differences, we have had the opportunity and the privilege of being a community of healing and renewal for each other, and for South Florida. God has put people before us who need healing and transformation, and has allowed us to choose how and when and where we will be agents of that healing.If you choose, you can make me clean. What we choose, even today, even in this difficult and painful moment for our presbytery family, will be used by God to make someone clean, to help our communities of faith become “clean,” that is, clean as in our one baptism, buried with Christ in the likeness of death AND raised to walk in newness of life.  If we choose—whatever we choose this day—we can make one another clean, with God’s help.And that is an overwhelming, gut-wrenching responsibility and privilege.Indeed, the Greek word usually translated “pity” or “anger” in verse 41, where Jesus considers his response to the leper’s request, reveals that Jesus’ own emotions in this moment of choice were very much like ours. The translation of this next bit in the story gives scholars a problem, and I am coming to believe it is the heart of this little story. The word for what Jesus felt when the leper spoke to him has been translated variously; no one knows quite how it ought to be rendered.  Some translations say pity or compassion, others, anger. To try to get at the deeper sense of it, we might put it something like this:Jesus, moved with pity/compassion/rage/wrenching/gut-twisting deep feeling, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean.”Splanchnizomai is the verb used here, a rare word in the gospels.  It doesn’t mean pity, or compassion alone.  It isn’t just anger, or rage.  It is also not only a feeling, but more of a compulsion rooted in deepest emotion; that urges movement, involvement, transformation. And it is that unsettling feeling that this choice changes everything that comes after.In this story there is another important moment for Jesus…and for us, his followers.For while Jesus does not hesitate in following the deep urging of his spirit to step outside the boundaries of “clean/unclean” to heal this man and become himself “unclean,” there is in Jesus, as in all of us, after an action, an immediate gut-wrenching reaction toward . . . let’s say, maintaining the status quo.We want everyone to be well, and we ALSO want everything to remain the same.  So Jesus tells the man –go, show yourself to the priests, and don’t tell anyone.  And so we ask the text, why?It would be simple to say: unless the priests, the symbols of religious and cultural authority, also declare this man “clean,” he cannot be restored to polite society.  But isn’t there something more at work here? That is, neither the man nor Jesus himself can be “clean” unless the leper chooses to take this final step.  And he may not so choose. So Jesus, in choosing freedom and healing for the leper, puts at risk his own freedom.  Genuine healing, genuine engagement, puts our identity and ideas at risk by freeing the one we have touched to do whatever he or she wants . . . regardless of the consequences to us and our way of faith or life.Jesus had begun his work within a particular faith community, bound by that community’s rules and structures.  He belongs there; there is evidence in the book of Mark that he never imagined his mission would require him to leave that home-place for another, or to exchange the order of that body for another.  Yet here he is, barely out of the starting gate in Galilee, and already his choice to respond to a certain man’s desire to be clean has challenged, uncomfortably, the tradition Jesus’ faith was shaped by.  It would be fair to say that Jesus needs this man to go show himself to the priests more for his own continuity of mission than for the man’s well being—as the man himself said, if YOU choose, YOU can make me clean.  He understands, maybe even more than Jesus does in that moment, how Jesus’ act of radical generosity changes everything for everybody.  He knows Jesus has healed him, and he doesn’t need the priests or anyone to tell him what he already knows in his heart and feels in his body.Yet if he does not choose . . . then, Jesus’ whole strategy for the kingdom is blown to smithereens.  Jesus’ place in his own tradition is shattered, his mission strategy, kaput. And that is precisely what did happen: the man did not do what Jesus said—he did not go back to the priests and he did not keep silence.  So the story tells us, Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but (had to) stay out in the country. . . .Who gets to be Jesus?  Who is the leper?  If we recognize the Christ when good news is preached and freedom and salvation are experienced . . . then, surprise!  It is the leper who is Christ, who gets to be Jesus in this story.  And if the definition of a “leper” is one for whom it becomes necessary to live and work outside the boundaries that once were home to him. . . then Jesus, having chosen, is a leper, too.Today we have important discernments to make together. Our churches have struggled and prayed, most of us for long years, to know, with Jesus, what it is we have come to do, and where we will need to be in order to do it most faithfully. For some of us today, that discernment has led to a request for gracious separation, for departure to another body of believers, “outside” the boundaries of the PCUSA. For others of us, the request for departure and the freedom to choose is a gut-wrenching moment to pray for clarity and courage; for we know that, once we choose (and whatever we choose), the boundaries of our body and the shape of our mission will be changed forever.  All of us are lepers.All of us are Jesus.  If we choose, we can make each other clean.   Let us pray.Come, Lord: do not smile and say you are already with us.Millions do not know you,and to us who do, what is the difference?What is the point of your presence if our lives do not alter?Change our lives, shatter our complacency.Make your word flesh of our flesh and our life’s purpose.Take away the quietness of a clear conscience.Press us uncomfortably.For only thus that other peace is made, your peace.      Amen.