Author: KPB Stevens

Blessed Voyagers

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Mark’s story of Jesus’s baptism is like a storm front.  The brightness of the baptism and the descent of the dove is met, almost immediately, by the darkness of the temptation in the wilderness, and the whole story seems to exist in that liminal space where warm air meets cold air and a storm begins to brew.  It’s unsettling to have baptism and temptation so close together.  It seems to bring the very nature of baptism into question.  If baptism is meant to make us into new people, to free us from our sins and fill us with Christ, then what is it doing in such close proximity to temptation and emptiness?  It’s as if Mark is telling us to be wary of any pleasant theology of baptism, any belief that after baptism everything in life will be good and easy.

In Mark, baptism doesn’t automatically make the world anew.  And this is more true, I think, than any hope that we can become new people in one moment, through the completion of one act.  In the past week I’ve heard two people describe churches that seem to be happiness-centered.  These churches seem to believe that becoming a Christian should free one of all doubts and that baptism is a way out of sorrow.  Because of this, they get impatient with doubt, but more than that, they refuse to admit to their own occasional sorrows.  They believe that admitting to sorrow is the same thing as not trusting in God.

But in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus trusts God and is brought immediately into a wilderness of sorrow and temptation, as if the true sign of trusting God is a willingness to be sent anywhere, into any domain of loss or joy.  If that’s true, then what is God up to in baptism?  What is baptism supposed to be, or do?  How is it supposed to help us?  Again, it was my friend Laurie who provided the answer.  She suggested that baptism is a blessing – that God prepares us for life as a Christian, not by transforming us utterly, but by blessing us so that we can experience that full transformation in the minutiae of every day, in spiritual quests that can take years, if not lifetimes.  Baptism prepares us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, to paraphrase Saint Paul.  It affirms that the wildernesses are navigable with the aid of God’s blessing.

And the truth is that the wildernesses are really amazing.  The Holy Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness as a kind of pioneer.  He’ll struggle with demons and defeat them, and reclaim the wilderness for human use.  This is what the desert fathers (Saint Anthony, Saint Symeon Stylites, Saint Martin of Tours)  were doing when they went into their own wildernesses.  They were reclaiming the spiritual landscape and making it fertile.  With the blessing of God, they didn’t hesitate to venture into any combat, and found their demons in odd and surprising places, but by finding and defeating them, reclaimed those places for us.

If anything, the proximity of Jesus’ baptism to his wilderness sojourn should be a clarion call to our own pioneering spirits.  Enter the wilderness, with God’s blessings, and transform it.  I had a moment of serendipity when I was thinking about the pioneering spirit this week.  I was listening to Radiolab (a terrific podcast which you can find here), and they had a story about Voyager 1 & 2, the two exploratory spacecraft that NASA launched in 1977.  For the past thirty-five years they have been moving through the solar system, photographing the planets and taking measurements.  Much of what we now know about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune is due to the work of these two little unmanned ships.  Their cameras were turned off on Valentine’s Day, 1990, but before they were, they turned back and took one last picture of earth, which from that distance was nothing but a pale blue dot against the backdrop of a band of solar light.  To quote Carl Sagan, that dot represents: “Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, ever superstar, every corrupt politician, everyone in all of history, everyone, the sum total.  Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.”

That’s part of the wilderness that the Voyager spacecrafts have already reclaimed for us.  Against the immense backdrop of space, our petty ambitions are put in devastating perspective.  If we are to thrust ourselves into wildernesses of ambition, we will never be able to do so again in the full believe that we’re engaged in an important cosmic act.  We are small, the picture tells us.  We should act humbly.

Fourteen years after taking that picture, the two spacecraft reached the edge of the solar system.  The solar wind died away, but readings sent back to NASA revealed that the ships weren’t out of the solar system yet.  They were still caught in the magnetic fields of the sun.  So they are in a liminal place, not quite in the solar system and not quite out of it.  It’s like they are traveling through the shell of an egg.  Scientists call this place the “stagnation layer.”  Voyager 1 & 2 could move beyond it any day now.  When they do, they will be the first human made objects to leave the solar system, and move into the far greater wilderness of interstellar space.  Who knows what they will be able to reclaim from that wilderness, what they will show us and teach us as they move ever onward.

When we are in our own private wildernesses, it may feel like we’re trapped in stagnation layers.  Whatever lessons we have to learn, whatever tasks we have to complete, seem impossible, and sometimes even forgotten.  And we may feel like we’re in a storm front, buffeted about by spiritual combat, fighting our own demons and the demons of the world.  How do we live in stagnation layers and storm fronts?  That is largely up to us.  But God has given us a gift that will bring us through them.  As we sit, stagnate, waiting, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us.  As we battle, are wounded, and struggle within ourselves, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us.  We have been blessed and sent out as pioneers, reclaiming spiritual space in our souls and moral space in the world for God, and in those moments when the struggles of the wilderness might seem overwhelming, we only need to remember the descent of the dove.

Ash Wednesday

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I read T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash-Wednesday every year, right before the day itself.  I used to read it so that I’d be stimulated to deep and important thoughts, as a kind of crib sheet for writing a meaningful sermon about the day.  But lately I read it for itself.  As a poem, it sometimes feels and functions as if it were a liturgy.  It leads me into a place of prayer and readiness, a preparation for the season that’s at hand.

I’m not going to write a literary analysis here, or pretend that I can create anything as beautiful and evocative as the poem itself.  But I do want to offer some thoughts on it, informed, as always, by some supplementary reading.  But first, here’s a place where you can go and read the poem if you’d like: Ash-Wednesday.

The poem opens on a note of deep melancholy, in a mood of surrender.  All the old ambitions of our lives, the hope we had,  get worn out, and we notice their passing without the energy to mourn it, because if we still had energy we would be using it to keep those ambitions alive.  Envy dies with ambition, but there’s a loss even in this, since we don’t know who we are once we stop being envious, desiring creatures.  And often that envy was the engine of our ambitions, our hopes for ourselves and our place in the world.  But “why should I mourn the vanished power of the usual reign?”  Eliot is talking about more than just the personal, here.  The reign might be the whole secular world and it’s effects on the individual.  When our desire to succeed in that world dies, so does that world’s power.  But there’s no celebration in the desire not to mourn it’s passing.  Only resignation.  Only a long sigh.

But this melancholy extends even beyond the passing cares of the secular world.  There’s a real fear of the absence of grace: “Because I know I shall not know the one veritable transitory power.”  If that power is grace, which some of the commentaries I read suggest, than the poem’s speaker seems to be denying the possibility of grace.  Or maybe he’s just denying his power to summon it, the arrogance of believing that we can make our own grace.  But what follows make the first meaning more likely.  The speaker rejects the possibility of grace, because “time is always time/And place is always and only place.”  Only the actual world matters, but that actuality is tragically limited – “What is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place.”  If the actual is all that there is, then we can’t move beyond it to a hoped for future or any vision of a better world.

Russell Elliott Murphy, in his Critical companion to T.S. Eliot: a literary reference to his life and work, points out that Eliot was drawing from Dante and Guido Cavalcanti as he wrote the poem, and that both of these Florentine poets worked in the troubadour or courtly love tradition.  The idea of courtly love is a lost one in this day and age.  A troubadour would fall in love with a woman from a distance, and never let the woman know that he was in love with her.  In her ignorance, she would act in the way anyone would act, falling in love with other people, slighting her unknown lover unintentionally, inflicting dozens of psychic wounds in ignorance.  And the silent troubadour would bear with all of this, because it was training in love, ultimately in our love for God.  God can seem as distant and mysterious as any woman who a troubadour might choose as the object of his love.  God will act in ways that might seem indifferent to our desires, if not our needs.  Ash-Wednesday is, oddly, a poem that works obliquely in this courtly love tradition.  The Lady in Part II is akin to Dante’s Beatrice.  But I wonder if she isn’t also “the blessed face” of Part I, who the poet rejects, he’s so far sunk into despair.

Which makes the Lady’s reappearance at the beginning of Part II feel like quite a relief, even it’s accompanied by the image of “three white leopards… under a juniper-tree/In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety/On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained/In the hollow round of my skull.”  This is the motion of the poem so far, from materialistic despair to a possibility of hope in our ability to learn and practice a strange kind of love.  A love for the divine which is akin to courtly love, self-sacrificial and often flirting with the possibility that the object of our love doesn’t know of our existence.  But this is also the movement of the day itself, of Ash Wednesday.  We remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.  The full, horrible, limiting fact of our material existence is blatantly stated, and for that moment when we have the ashes put on our forehead, we may really feel it, entirely know that it’s true, that all we are is dust.

But neither the poem nor the liturgy leaves us in that state.  The speaker in the poem must go through a harrowing of the flesh, a purgation of the body, which can’t be unfamiliar to readers of the spiritual classics.  The rest of the poem, in fact, moves in a way that is oddly akin to Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle or John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul.  Particularly in the poem’s third section, where the speaker engages in movement up a staircase that resembles Teresa’s movement from room to room in her castle.  He is being drawn closer and closer to God.  And the liturgy moves in a similar fashion.  After the imposition of ashes the people read the 51st Psalm, in which they beg – “Purge me from my sin, and I shall be pure; wash me, and I shall be clean indeed.”  They then recite the Litany of Penitence, and are absolved.  The service moves from the acknowledgment of our material nothingness, to a request for purification and the spiritual struggle of penitence, to restoration.  So does Eliot’s poem, that restoration appearing so beautiful in Part IV: “restoring/One who moves in the time between sleep and waking.”

But neither the liturgy nor the poem end in restoration.  Both move into communion.  The God who has been the object of our courtly love is proven to be aware of us, and more than aware.  Dante, when he wrote The Divine Comedy, used Beatrice as his spiritual guide.  The historical Beatrice was the object of his courtly love, but she remained ignorant of it, as any object of courtly love should.  But the Beatrice in his poem is his spiritual guide.  So God is our guide, present to us in our spiritual pilgrimage in a way that may sometimes seem obscure in our physical pilgrimage on this earth.  At the end of his poem, Eliot comes back to what, for me, our the most powerful lines of Part I: “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still.”  Only now our stillness is not the result of despair, but the result of total and immersive love.  Our calm is not the indifference of hopelessness, but the revelation of a deep peace.

“The full purpose of the tadpole has been revealed in the frog.”

~ KPB Stevens ~ 6 Comments

Mike Baughman, who writes for The Hardest Question, suggests that what we call transfiguration is actually metamorphosis (metamorpho being the Greek that we translate as “transfiguration”).  If that’s so, than the story of Jesus on Mount Tabor is the same story that tadpoles and caterpillars enact in nature.  Jesus undergoes a metamorphosis.  His divinity is revealed.  But Mike wisely points out that this doesn’t mean that his nature is transformed.  The caterpillar and the butterfly share the same DNA – they are the same creature.  Metamorphosis isn’t about becoming something entirely different.  It’s about the revelation of a different form within a single being.  As Mike so eloquently puts it, “the full purpose of the tadpole has been revealed in the frog.”

I was talking to my friend Laurie about this as we planned our weekly sermons.  Transfiguration is metamorphosis, but what does that mean?  And how can one construct a sermon out of that single thought?  Laurie, of course, knew where to go with the idea.  There’s a reason we read the Transfiguration story before the beginning of Lent, she said.  Think of what’s happening on Mount Tabor.  Jesus undergoes a metamorphosis, right there before Peter, James and John.  They see his full purpose revealed.  But transfiguration isn’t a central moment in Christian life.  The revelation of purpose isn’t enough.  The fulfillment of purpose is, and that happens at the resurrection.  Peter, James and John find themselves looking at the resurrection Christ before resurrection has taken place.  He won’t look like this again until Easter morning.  In fact, despite Peter’s entreaties, he’ll return to the way he looked before, to his tadpole or caterpillar state, and walk with them down the mountain.  So transfiguration isn’t an end in itself (neither, I suppose, is metamorphosis in nature, at least not to a religious person, who believes that things have purposes beyond their material existence on earth).

Laurie came up with the best metaphor for this.  After butterflies and moths hatch from their cocoons, they need to spend time spreading their wings and allowing them to dry.  She reminded me about the passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  When Dillard was a little girl, a friend found a Polyphemus moth cocoon, and their teacher put it in a mason jar after the children had passed it around, the heat from their hands having stimulated the moth inside into thinking that spring had arrived.  The moth emerged in the mason jar, alive and powerful, but

He couldn’t spread his wings.  There was no room.  The chemical that coated his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently, dried, and hardened his wings as they were.  He was a monster in a mason jar.  Those huge wings stuck on his back in a torture of random pleats and folds, wrinkled as a dirty tissue, rigid as leather.  They made a single nightmare clump still racked with useless, frantic convulsions.

Perhaps, Laurie suggested, that is why we read about the Transfiguration right before Lent.  It reminds us of what we are eventually meant to become – creatures whose true natures are revealed in a new shape, a new purpose.  But it also reminds us that we have to let our wings dry into the proper shape.  Lent is like the lifting of the mason jar.  All the things that press about us are sent away, so that we can dry into the new shape that we, and the world, will fully assume at Easter.

But what are we going to become, eventually?  What is that new shape that we’re reaching for?  Whatever it is, the metaphor of metamorphosis tells us that it won’t be a complete break from the past.  The tadpole and the frog, the caterpillar and the moth, are the same creature.  The seed of our resurrection selves are right here, inside our present selves.  To me, this means that we can never neglect or denigrate the past.  When we think of our pasts, many of us find much to be ashamed of.  Yet it’s a mistake to think that the events of the past disappear in the moment of resurrection.  Our pasts aren’t vanquished on Easter morning.  They are redeemed.  Our scrabbly, slimy former selves are brought into a new kind of beauty.

And this, too, is part of the purpose of Lent.  As we pause, allowing ourselves to dry so that the new shape that we’re assuming can form itself without deformation, we can think about our pasts, and how they formed our spirits.  We can look at and consider those things that are most painful to us, most shameful.  When I was in seminary and struggling with my own shame over my past, my favorite professor asked me a simple question.  “Back when you were that person, did anyone love you?”  I had to answer yes.  “Were they idiots?” he asked.  “Were they fools?”  I had to answer no.  “Then they loved you because they saw something good in you,” he said, “even if you couldn’t see it yourself.”  That, for me, was the path to redemption.  Realizing that the full purpose of the tadpole is revealed in the frog, that when I was a tadpole, slimy and silent in my own misery, the spirit within me was moving inexorably towards metamorphosis, towards my own transfiguration.

Thomas Bray

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Thomas Bray was born in 1656, England was under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell.  The theaters were closed, public entertainment was severely limited, and church-going was mandatory.  Much of the public was still illiterate, and national and political news mostly came from the pulpit.  Clergy had a privileged place in society.  They were among the most educated, well-informed, and politically astute members of the British public.  However, there were very few of them on the continent of North America.

Bray was educated at All Soul’s College, Oxford, and graduated from there in 1678, eighteen years after Oliver Cromwell died and Charles II was restored to the throne of England.  This was an age of preferment, when one’s career as a priest depended on family connections and personal influence.  Bray had enough influence to become a country curate and chaplain, and eventually to obtain the rectorship of Sheldon, Warwickshire.  It was there, in 1690, that he wrote his Catechetical Lectures, a book of instructions for teaching the catechism.  It was a successful book, and brought Bray to the attention of the Bishop of London, who appointed him the Ecclesiastical Commissary for Maryland.  The colonies had no bishops of their own, and these Ecclesiastical Commissaries were the closest they would get until after the revolution.  They could do everything that a bishop could do, except perform confirmations and ordinations.

Maryland’s first settlers were English Catholics, led by Leonard Calvert, and although Protestant settlers soon followed, the colony was predominantly Roman Catholic through much of the 17th century.  A good number of Quakers settled there.  In 1649 the colony passed the Maryland Toleration Act, which protected Catholics and Quakers from Anglican discrimination, and which lent some of its language to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution more than one hundred and fifty years later.  But the law was repealed in 1692, after the Glorious Revolution pushed the Catholic James II off of the throne of England and brought in the Protestant supported William and Mary.  This is somewhat ironic, since William was a champion of toleration, but Maryland’s new governor, Francis Nicholson, was not.  In 1696, Nicholson led the colonial assembly in the passage of a law that would establish Anglicanism as the state religion of the colony.  It was the passage of this law that prompted the Bishop of London to offer Thomas Bray the appointment of Ecclesiastical Commissary.

But the law had a problem.  It was obnoxious to both Quakers and Catholics, and the Quakers could block it’s ratification in England.  The law required that every citizen of Maryland pay forty pounds of tobacco per year as a tax that would support the Anglican church.  It also required a pledge of loyalty to the church.  Quakers refused to make this pledge, and their refusal barred them from holding political office or representing themselves in court.  But since King William was a strong advocate of toleration, they were able to use their influence in England to keep the law from being enacted in Maryland.

This meant that for the first three years of his appointment, Thomas Bray had nothing to do.  However, he was one of the most dauntless men in the world.  Rather than sitting on his hands, he set about studying and predicting the challenges he would face when he reached Maryland.  The major challenge was that there were very few priests in the colony.  In 1694 there were only three, and although this number increased a little every year, it was obvious that the Anglican congregations were underserved.  Parishes were usually geographically large, and priests found themselves having to travel twenty or thirty miles to visit sick parishioners.  To do this, they had to own a horse or two, which was expensive, particularly since they didn’t get paid much and had to supplement their incomes by working plantations of their own.  They usually left their families back in England, and the hardship and loneliness must have been severe. Needless to say, not many priests were eager to go to the colonies, and those who went usually did so because they had no other choice.  Lacking a church in England, and any influence that could help them obtain a church, their options were severely limited.  The priests who did go to Maryland were sometimes men who had lost their preferment by their own fault, and they arrived in the colony with a reputation for scandalous behavior and every intention of continuing in that behavior in their new home.

Bray wanted to correct these problems, and he put his faith in education as the means of correction.  During the three years he spent waiting to finally go to Maryland, he established the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK).  His plan was to establish libraries in every parish in Maryland.  His society grew and gathered money, and was open to some criticism.  Why, people asked, were they collecting money to establish parish libraries in the colonies, when many parishes in England didn’t have libraries, and had clergy as ignorant and disreputable as any colonial parson?  Bray accepted this critique and made sure that the SPCK’s work also benefitted people at home.  His grand vision was of having at least one good library per rural deanery, where the clergy could gather to read and discuss the books, and support each other in their ministries.

In 1699, at the age of 43, Bray finally got tired of waiting and left for Maryland, where he hoped to hurry along the process of revising the Act of Establishment so that it would meet with King William’s approval.  On his way out of the country, he stopped at three seaport towns, establishing libraries as he went.  His luggage must have been comprised mostly of books, because when he arrived in Maryland he presented a library to each of the thirty-one parishes that then existed.  He found seventeen clergy waiting for him, and a Colonial Assembly that was more than willing to accept his help in revising the law.  He set to work, meeting with the governor and the assemblymen, visiting parishes, and taking his own census of the number of Anglicans, Quakers, and Catholics in the colony.  On the political front, he found speedy success.  On the parochial front, he sometimes had to be quite severe with his priests, especially one who was a known polygamist.  The political and the parochial worlds were deeply intertwined, because the Act of Establishment concerned itself with the nitty gritty of parish life, dictating how many times vestries must meet, how clergy could be chosen, and other internal matters of the parishes.  One provision of the law was for insuring the morality of clergymen by appointing committees to meet each incoming ship that carried a clergyman and interview the captain and other passengers to ascertain the appropriateness of the clergyman’s behavior while he was on board.  Bray also established the first missionary effort of the colony, but it wasn’t for the benefit of the Native Americans or African slaves.  Missionaries were supposed to go into Pennsylvania and convert the Quakers.

By the summer of 1700, Bray had the new law neatly in hand and took ship to England, where he could use his influence to get it ratified by parliament.  His experiences in the colony had convinced him that the spread of Anglicanism required people as well as books, and he established a new organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.  This group became the backbone for Anglican missionary efforts throughout the world.  The English system of engaging in missionary activity was wholly different from the French or the Spanish.  Many of the English colonies had been established as business ventures.  The people who put up the capital for these ventures saw no need to supply priests, or to worry about missionary activity.  Ferdinand and Isabella might send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but the English trading companies failed to see how it would benefit the bottom line.  If missionary activity was to succeed, it wouldn’t be because it was instigated by the crown, but by confederations of individuals like Bray and his supporters.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was tremendously successful, but the revised law to establish Anglicanism as the religion of Maryland was not.  Once again, Quaker interests blocked its ratification, and it had to be revised for a third time by the Maryland Assembly.  Finally, in 1702, a version that tolerated Quakerism was past, and was accepted by King William and his parliament.  He died that year, and his wife Mary’s younger sister, Anne, became Queen.

Bray never went back to Maryland.  Once the law was finally past, he found a worthy successor and settled down in London, accepting the living of Saint Botolph without Aldgate in 1707.  He lived there until his death in 1730, working with feverish and committed energy in his parish and in the wider church.  He continued to be interested in libraries, and in 1724 created the Dr. Bray Associates, a group dedicated to founding clerical libraries.  The Church of England remained as the established church in Maryland until 1776.

But Bray’s real legacy wasn’t the establishment of Anglicanism as a state religion in one of England’s colonies.  It was the culture that he brought to that colony, and to the seedbed of the future United States, when he went about establishing his libraries.  At a time when few people could read, it became part of the clergy’s care of souls to educate their parishioners, to make them aware of the important political and cultural issues of the time, and to bind them together into a citizenry by propagating a common culture.  It was also a way of honoring the inherent intelligence of the illiterate colonists, who could come and discuss important ideas with their clergymen, and argue points from books that they couldn’t read, but that a good, caring priest would willingly read for them.

Sources

Klingberg, Frank Joseph. Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York,. Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940. Print.

Click to access bray.pdf

Samuel Clyde McCulloch. Dr. Thomas Bray’s Trip to Maryland: A Study in Militant Anglican Humanitarianism. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1945), pp. 15–32

The Leper in Galilee

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

Lately, when I find myself getting ready to preach on a passage that I’ve preached on many times before, I’ve been asking myself one basic question to get around the dispiriting feeling that I’ve run out of things to say.  The question is this: who is the most interesting person in this story (barring Jesus, that is)?  Obviously, for Mark 1:40-45, that person is the leper.  What I usually say is something about the unfairness of the leper’s social exclusion, because he almost certainly doesn’t have Hansen’s disease (what we think of as leprosy), and probably has something no more worrisome than psoriasis.  But this is a cop-out, and lazy to boot.  It may be true, but the text gives us many more clues to the leper’s story than that.  I’m going to do something rare here, and take it line by line, commenting as I go.

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”

Let’s start by thinking about the conditions of this man’s life.  When his skin disease first became apparent, he would have gone to the priest to have it examined, as dictated by Leviticus 13.  Here were priests who also acted as physicians, or at least diagnosticians.  I imagine that this examination took place in some annex to the temple, maybe in a bare antechamber, with sunlight pouring through a high window and the priest turning the man in the light so that the whiteness of his diseased skin was totally exposed.  Maybe the priest made some sound – an intake of breath, a murmur – that told the man that the patch of flaky white skin implied a coming life of isolation and neglect.  Maybe the man felt the angel of death pass over him, since leprosy was viewed as a living death (this is detailed in Peter Bolt’s Jesus’ Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark’s Early Readers, pp. 100-101).

The man would be sent away from the priest to spend seven days in isolation, and then the priest would examine him again, to see if his skin had cleared up or if his condition had worsened.  Imagine what the man must have felt like during those seven days.  Most of us, most of the people sitting in the pews, have had that experience of having to wait for test results, of having to wake up every day worrying and knowing there was nothing they could do but wait.  This worry in itself is isolating – we wake up worrying but the world goes on in ignorance of our worry.  How much more isolating must it have been for the potential leper, who didn’t even have the casual routines of a normal life to mask his worry?

After those seven days, and a return visit to the priest, the man would know that he was a leper.  This meant that he would remain isolated from the people around him, although he would be accepted into the community of lepers.  He would spend his days with people who, like him, were all grieving over their separation from home and family. Worse, he would spend his days labeled a sinner.  The outer corruption of the body was understood to be a sign of the inner corruption of the soul.  And he probably agreed with this diagnosis – he had no reason to think of his condition as anything other than the result of sin.  So he must have spent his days going over all of his past actions, looking for the sin that led to his condition.  It would probably behoove all of us to make a fearless moral inventory from time to time, but every day, and without hope of redemption?

Moved with pity (anger), Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose.  Be made clean!

I put the “anger” in parenthesis because some of the ancient authorities read anger rather than pity.  Anger might be a more interesting possibility here, because it could be directed at several things, whereas pity probably only means pity for the man’s plight.  Jesus’ anger could be directed at the whole system of religious purity that would leave this man an outcast – but that reading is complicated by the following verses.  His anger could be a general anger at the forces of disease and illness – certainly an anger that anyone who has been ill or seen a loved one fall seriously ill can understand.  His anger could be directed at the man himself.  If I was the man, and saw Jesus angry, I would assume that the anger was directed at me.  What an odd encounter, then, to come begging on your knees and be met with anger.  In that instance, the man must have thought that he was doomed.  He must have seen himself as a worse outcast than a demonic.  Jesus was angry at him for daring to approach, for bringing his uncleanliness into the sphere of the clean.  How shocking Jesus’ next words must have sounded, then.  “I do choose.  Be made clean!”  And maybe that’s part of the point.  We go along with our little uncleanlinesses, hiding and festering within us, and we’re afraid that when we expose them to the light, we will be met by a priest who will carefully examine us and send us out into an isolated life as outcasts.  But when we realize how deeply we’re forgiven, it comes as a complete shock.  I see the man’s eyes widening, there in the dust of the road.  He realizes that the anger is aimed, not at him, but at the world around him, which has shriveled him in this way.
Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.
This, of course, is not just a story about a person being restored to religious or even existential cleanliness.  It’s a story about a man’s sores actually clearing up and disappearing.  All of this talk about isolation and being outcast can lessen the fact that this is a miracle story, with a physical healing.  It’s easier to talk about this story in an existential way – to say that we all have our hidden leprosies, our little portion of death that we carry around with us, which would make us outcast if people knew about it.  But the meat of the story isn’t existential.  It’s physical.  The man is physically made well.
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.”
In healing the man, Jesus did not act outside of the regular norms of Judaism.  This isn’t a story about Jesus sticking it to the priests.  His anger may have been directed at the system of religious purity, but if so, why would he bother engaging with that system by sending the man back to it.  Maybe he does so for the man’s sake.  The man is still a Jew, in a Jewish world, and he’ll need to follow the rules and proscriptions to be accepted back into the company of his fellow Jews.  But let me proffer another idea.  As I said, Jesus’ anger may have been directed at the world of sickness and disease in general.  If that’s the case, then the priests of the temple are his colleagues when it comes to encountering that world of sickness and disease.  The purity laws weren’t arbitrary.  If you read Leviticus 13, you see how careful it is.  The system for diagnosing leprosy gave a lot of opportunities for the leprosy to go away or start to get better.  Turning someone into an outcast was a last resort.  And it wasn’t done out of cruelty.  It may have been cruel to the individual who was made outcast, but it was meant to protect the whole community from dangerous diseases, and in some cases it probably did.  Hansen’s disease (what we know as leprosy) came from China, and it doesn’t show up in fossil records in the west until the second century B.C.  Even after that early evidence, it’s very hard to find other evidence of the disease until the fourth century A.D. (as detailed in Robert Ian Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250, p. 44).  So we can say that the priests’ system, and other ancient systems of dealing with potentially communicable diseases, worked very well.  This is why I think it makes more sense to think of Jesus’ anger as directed at disease in general, and to assume that when he wants the leprous man to go to the priest, he is in earnest.  It’s not just a favor to the man.  It’s a sign to the whole community that they can rest from their fears, that the death and disease that Jesus hates has been stopped in this one instance.
It is also a message to the priests.  Jesus tells the man to tell no one what has happened to him, because he can imagine word getting to the priests and the priests feeling threatened by Jesus’ ministry (as, in fact, happens).  But this isn’t what Jesus wants.  He wants the priests to think of him as a friend and a helper in their work.  He sends the man as a message, a way of telling the priests that they’re not alone as they struggle with death and disease and the grinding worries of a whole society.
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.

Jesus’ political gesture of goodwill towards the priests doesn’t work.  The man’s enthusiasm is such that he runs rampant.  Which brings us back to the character of this formerly leprous man.  He isn’t attuned to Jesus’ delicate negotiations with the priests.  He doesn’t understand that Jesus wants him to go the priests because this will render Jesus himself less of a threat in their eyes.  And maybe he has residual resentment and anger towards the priests, who made him an outcast in the first place.  So he goes running all over town, spreading the word.  It’s joyful, but was it right?  What did this man think when he heard that Jesus had been arrested, and then crucified?  Maybe it built further resentment towards the priests in his soul.  Maybe it angered and enraged him.  But if so, he would end up as much of an outcast as before, an outcast by choice, someone who wanted nothing to do with the priests or the whole religious system.  I doubt he would ever understand his own culpability in this process of alienation. Jesus wants him to go to the priests so this process of alienation can be nipped in the bud.

As we come to know Jesus, as we feel ourselves freed of our ills and ailments and restored to ourselves, it is easy to give in to temptation in the way that the formerly leprous man did.  Experiencing a new reality, we denigrate our pasts.  It never occurs to us that Jesus wants us to bring words of comfort to our old reality, as well.  Jesus wants us reconciled with our pasts, and the world around us.  Whatever our own priests are – those seemingly officious, cautious, careful forces that led in some way to our isolation – he wants us to start up a conversation with them, so that we can all be redeemed.