I’ve been on the road the last couple of weeks. I wrapped thing up at Vassar College and with First Congregational in Poughkeepsie, and last Thursday appeared before the Ecclesiastical Council, where I was approved for ordination. So now it’s search time!
On Sunday I lead worship at First Church in Needham, the second time they’ve been kind enough to invite me. Below is the sermons and some of the liturgy.
This summer I won’t be at camp, so I’ll be posting of the material from the last year…
Blessings
Gary
Contagious Cleanliness: Mark 5:21 ff
The last few days have been absolutely lovely. I’ve been out and about, Inman Square where I live, Harvard Square where I meet friends and where my Ecclesiastical Council was held on Thursday night. Everyone getting out, the sun shining, dozens of languages, and a mix of the well-to-do, the vastly over-educated, and the just-hanging on. I suspect this is a bit what it was like in the scenes recounted in today’s gospel. Galilee was in some sense a rural backwater, reclaimed by the Judeans only a century before Jesus. But in other ways it was a thriving cosmopolitan region. The Roman cities of the Decapolis, trade routes, Greek culture… and of course the various sects of the Judean religion.
There’s a lot going on in this particular reading just as there was probably a lot going on in the streets on Galilee’s shores. Jesus already has a band of disciples and already has a reputation as a healer. A leader of the local synagogue asks Jesus to heal his daughter, making us question what we think we know about “the Jews.” The scare quotes were on purpose, because there was no such thing as Rabbinic Judaism, and the Judean religion was complex and far from unified. And a woman who is well-to-do enough to have consulted many physicians without relief, who is willing to grasp at any straw, any cloak, for relief. And notice that Jesus doesn’t say “I know who touched me” as those who over-emphasize his divine nature would have him. No, he has to ask, and the disciples don’t wither before their master. “Please, look around you. How are we supposed to know?” And the little girl, did she die because Jesus was delayed or would she have died anyways? Does he leave most of the disciples behind so he can move faster? And of course, there’s the whole secret thing Jesus does. Shhh, don’t tell anyone.
We have here stories that are interwoven, a pretty good sign in my book. You see, tradition recorded in the earliest texts about the gospels tells us that the author of Mark wrote down stories as Peter told them, and was never quite sure about the chronology. The author of Matthew is desperately re-ordering the contents of the gospel message and story to cast Jesus as the new Moses, complete with five sermons representing the new Torah. And Luke is very consciously a historian, trying to tell the story accurately. But the author of Mark, well he’s just telling it like he heard it. He doesn’t re-arrange, doesn’t make it into a nice story, its not literature. So for my money, this is a pretty reliable re-telling of an actual event. Jesus was asked by a local Judean leader to heal his daughter. And on his way there, he was touched by a woman and she was healed.
But this isn’t just any woman, she was an unclean woman. Hemorrhaging is code for menstrual problems and this woman is as unclean as you can get short of leprosy. So before we talk about what Christ did, let’s think about the purity code.
The purity code is part of the very complex six-hundred plus rule system referred to as the Law. The Judean myth was that it was given to Moses by God and that it reflects God’s will. The truth is that the Law was composed over five centuries, combining the customs of the Tribes with the needs of the Kingdom, and with the needs of the conquered remnant. Many things went into the code. There was the need for a complex system of sacrifices to support the Temple economy and its many priests. There was the need to regulate disease and contagion. And during the Exile there was the need to create complex rules to insure the Exiles were not assimilated, to mark them as distinct. After the Exile there was the need to justify marginalizing and dispossessing the non-Elite Judeans who had been left behind. There was a whole lot of human strategy that went into the lines and rules and categories of the code. And the biggest weapon in the Law’s arsenal was uncleanliness.
Now, here’s the thing about the state of being unclean, about uncleanliness: it was contagious. If I have become unclean, maybe I’ve touched a corpse or a leper or a hemorrhaging woman, and then I touch you, then you are also unclean. It is a bit like the cooties, but without the circle-circle dot-dot shot that makes it all better.
When the woman touched Jesus’ cloak, she made him unclean. Simple as that. I mean, you might argue that the cloak was unclean, but then we’d be missing the point and besides, the purity code is pretty OCD. So when she came into contact with Jesus, certainly enough for healing to move from him into her, he became unclean. But not really, because that’s not what happened. Jesus did not become unclean, she became clean.
Here is this complex system of rules that takes as its basic premise that the bad, uncleanliness, idolatry, sin, is contagious, and Jesus flips it on its head. It is not uncleanliness that is contagious, it is cleanliness. The cleanliness flows out of Jesus and into her, for she is not just healed, her illness carries moral freight. We miss this message when we flatten the story to Jesus’ magical mystical Messiah powers, or when we focus on just her faith, though faith certainly comes into play. We often miss a major theme throughout the gospels. Jesus encounters the unclean and makes it clean. He orders the disciples to do the same. Corpses, tax collectors, adulterers, all unclean, all cleansed by Jesus. The man-made system that controls and taxes and protects and oppresses is divinely reversed.
Just to drive home the point, Jesus dies in the most ritually unclean manner. Yes, he is severely beaten by Gentiles, by the conquering Romans, but that’s not enough. And yes, he’s in a killing field where hundreds of other Jews have been executed. But the real uncleanliness comes from what, from the Roman point of view, was a happy coincidence. See, the Romans used crucifixion throughout their empire. It was a brutal form of torture execution that was quite effective at quelling political dissent. The victim slowly and painfully died, then the corpse was left there, rotting, a sign to any others that might challenge Rome. There were dozens if not hundreds of crosses visible in every major town controlled by Rome. And as it happens, the Law says that it is unclean to die on a tree.
Jesus took the unclean symbol of brutal Roman oppression, the most unclean way to die according to the Law, and defeated it, made it a symbol of triumph over all of the oppressive systems of humankind.
Now let me be clear, this is not just about Jesus and magical mystical Messiah-power. “Oh, well Jesus is God, but that’s just him.” Nope, wrong, absolutely wrong. The disciples are meant to do the same, they do the same. And then there are the Gentiles who decide to follow Christ, there’s Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, well, you get the idea. I’ll let you decide whether Jesus simply reverses the old purity code or whether he informs us that it was bogus all along, though you can probably guess where I land in that debate. But when it is all said and done, contagious uncleanliness is no more, what is contagious is cleanliness.
Thanks, Gary, you might be thinking, thanks for the historical-critical-theological lesson, but what does it have to do with me? After all, we know all about disease and contagion these days, and we’ve long abandoned the idea that women and childbirth are inherently unclean. Okay, dead bodies and IRS agents still give us the willies, but it’s not about contagious uncleanliness. So why do we care about a divine reversal of a system we’ve long since abandoned?
Well, here’s my question: Have we really abandoned the idea that the bad is contagious? Okay, you don’t want your child hanging out with the bad kids. I get it. And while you were friends with both of them, only one of them cheated, so you were happy with how the friends were divided in the divorce… But really, you don’t worry that the bad is catching… well, but your partner shouldn’t be socializing with philanderers.
Nope, you don’t belief badness is contagious… or do you? I know I do. I am sometimes amazed at what a prude I am. I don’t think we should buy products from bad companies, watch exploitive television shows, idolize scoundrels. I see everything as connected and am constantly thinking about how I am contributing to systems of oppression, injustice, evil. Okay, at least I’m not obsessed about my own salvation, at least I’m not a complete Pharisee. But, and it’s a pretty big but, I also don’t act as if cleanliness is contagious. I don’t carry Jesus with me into sinful places. I’m a good post-colonial post-modern progressive liberal kind of guy, so I don’t want to interfere with other people’s beliefs or lifestyle, even if I believe that lifestyle is self-destructive, even if I believe that people can find liberation and joy in a life shaped by Christ.
I am too polite to share the good news of Christ, too post-whatever to carry contagious cleanliness, contagious salvation, into the world.
Todays’ gospel is really a kick in the pants if you think about it. It’s a little more subtle than the Great Commission, you need to actually study the text to get the meaning, but the meaning is still there. Goodness is contagious, cleanliness is contagious. We are supposed to be the leaven in the loaf, which means getting out of our little jar in the refrigerator and getting in the loaf. Mixing with the unholy, the dirty, the immoral. Touching them. It gives me the willies just thinking about it.
I have my own purity code, its very convenient, keeps me out of uncomfortable situations, insures that I am socially acceptable. Ouch! I’m okay with the fact that Sunday morning and Monday morning don’t always seem to connect. Yikes!
Does Jesus reprimand the woman who touches him? Does he avoid the unclean dead little girl? Talitha cum! Get up and walk. Carry God’s cleanliness into the world. I have no idea how we do that, but I’m sure willing to try. With God’s grace and the power of the Spirit we have all we need to go out and change lives, to change the world. May it always be so! Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Loving God, we praise and thank you for this amazing creation, for this living, beautiful, growing and shaking and terrifying earth. We ask for the wisdom to care for it, to love it, as you love it, as you love us.
Creator God, we thank you for these bodies, healing and growing and thriving and failing, we are truly fearfully and wonderfully made. We ask for comfort for those who suffer, in body and spirit, for those who have lost and those who provide comfort. May we all find our way home to you.
Saving God, we thank you for the Kingdom proclaimed by your Son, for the challenge and example of his life, death and resurrection. We ask for courage to step out into the world as witnesses, charged with the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
Calling God, we thank you for bringing us together in this church. Grant, we pray, your wisdom in the deliberations of this congregation and of our sisters and brothers at Synod.
God, you are very real and know that we live in a world that is very real, with destruction and conflict. We pray for our sisters and brothers threatened by war, for all who long for justice and liberty. We pray that the power of the your Spirit will touch the hearts of leaders, leading us on a path of wisdom, a path of love.
We offer these words of praise and of petition in humility, in love, living into the dream that is your kingdom. Amen.
Call to Offering
Our Savior asks for nothing less than our whole hearts, bound in love of our God, of one another, and of this church. Our monetary gifts are but a small part of what we give, but they are a necessary part, one whether it is the widow’s mite or the riches at the Needle Gate. The offering will now be collected and received.
Prayer of Dedication
Let us pray. Divine Source, Loving God, these gifts represent our time, our talent, our tithes, represent our whole hearts given over to you. Bless the gifts and the givers, strengthening the missions of this church and of this denomination, helping us to spread this good news, that life in Christ is life in full, that death is defeated, and that our God is great, amazing, agapè. Amen.
Benediction
Our God asks much of us. Go out into the world and change it. But God offers us in return life in full, the power of the Holy Spirit, our companions in Christ. Go forth, blessed by God, reconciling Sunday morning with Monday morning and being as contagious as you can… cleanliness and love spreading across our world. Amen.