“Broken things have been on my mind lately because so much has broken in my life this year and in the lives of the people I love – hearts, health, confidence. Our wonderful friend Ken Nelson died of AIDS just the other day, and that was terribly painful. Then not long after, my old friend Mimi, the mother of my junior doubles partner Bee, began to die after a long struggle with a rare blood disease. Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken – those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward….” (p. 106)

Mark presents us with one of those broken people hanging out in life’s waiting room outside the ER, a man with leprosy. Quickly, by way of background, leprosy was much more than a skin-disfiguring medical condition, thought to be contagious by physical contact. It was also regarded as a ritual impurity, meaning that those with leprosy were banned not only from the religious life of the community, but also from employment, the home, and indeed from the community. Those with the disease sought to eke out an existence in the darkness on the edge of town, begging for handouts.

And then something happens. Prior to looking at this text again this week, I thought what happens is that Jesus heals the man – he does, of course, but that is not the first thing that happens. The first thing that happens is that the man with leprosy comes to Jesus, and asks for healing: “If you choose, you can make me clean.”

I think this asking for healing is significant, and that it says three things about this man, three things which we might reflect on as well.

First, in asking for this healing, the man shows an awareness that he is ill, that he needs healing, and, more broadly, that the community needs healing as well. We, of course, have no problem seeing that he is in need of healing, for after all, who wants to have a disfiguring skin condition that bars us from home, employment, and community? But how often do we fail to see how much we, in our own turn, are in need of healing ourselves? As Jesus would say elsewhere, how quick we are to see the speck in the eye of another but slow to see the log in our own. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, and so we go to great psychic efforts to convince ourselves that we are not one of those “broken things” that Annie Lamott writes about, that we are, in fact, completely well in body, mind and spirit, that our communities themselves are not sick or ailing. Maybe we can see how that man with leprosy is cut off from community, isolated, alone – and yet it is so much harder to admit the truth to ourselves that often we live as islands unto ourselves, privatizing our emotions, keeping up pretences so well that we manage, we think, to fool not only the neighbors next door but also ourselves as well.

Second, in asking to be healed, the man kneeling before Jesus shows that he has made a choice – the choice to be well. The first step towards healing, for individuals and for community, is to choose to be well. It is not enough to know that we are ill -- we also have to choose to take the path that might lead to wellness. Again, this sounds elementary, but we all know, both from life experiences of friends or relatives, and from our own struggles, that oftentimes people choose not to be healed. The recovering alcoholic knows that the hard road to sobriety and a life of freedom from the bottle begins anew each and every day with the choice to say “no”, and they can tell you how hard it was to make that first decision, and how hard it is again each day. Those of us who struggle with weight issues, and who love to eat, know that losing weight begins with a choice, a choice made again and again with each chance for an ice cream sundae or Whopper Deluxe. In our relationships, we can choose to enjoy the bitter but familiar cup of long-held grievances, or we can choose to practice forgiveness and seek reconciliation. Healing begins with the choice to seek healing.

Third, and finally, in asking Jesus for healing, this man, before Jesus has done anything directly for him, displays a confidence in God’s faithfulness and power. It was universally understood that only God could heal at will, and when the man asks Jesus to heal him, he is identifying Jesus with God’s power. In coming to Jesus, in asking for healing, this man already demonstrates that he is on the road to healing and wholeness, for by his action he testifies that the power of illness and death will not have the final word, someone else – God – does. This does not mean that all oppressing and depressing powers will necessarily be banished from life, but it does mean that they no longer have ultimate power over us.

I believe that it is this last thing that allows the man with leprosy to risk crying out to God for healing, and I believe that it is this faith and trust which allows us to cry out for healing as well. For the one to whom we cry out – Jesus – is one who will go to the ends of the earth to heal us, who risked all for us, who endured all for us. When Jesus reaches out to touch the untouchable – violating the ritual purity laws, risking taking into his own body the disease carried by the other – Jesus says to us that no illness, addiction, disease, affliction, can keep us from his love and salvation. When Jesus heals the man of his leprosy, he also restores him to family, to employment, to synagogue, to community, thereby healing each of these as well – and in do doing, Jesus says to us that his healing is not only for us, but for our communities as well.

Ten days ago I attended a workshop on the topic of ministry during the current fiscal and economic crisis. At one point one participant wondered aloud, with a sardonic chuckle, why the pastor of a church from Lexington had come to the workshop – implying, of course, that only rich people served by wealthy churches lived in that tony suburb. Turns out, of course, that people in Lexington are losing their jobs, have faced devastating financial setbacks, are unable to make mortgage payments, are facing having to move out of town. Who knew?, the embarrassed questioner murmured.

Friends, I believe that these days find many of us ill and in need of healing, particularly with respect to our finances. We are ill from fear and shame and anxiety and worry and embarrassment. We fear losing our jobs; we worry about how to make retirement work when our retirement plans have taken a drubbing and interest rates are in the basement; we wonder if we are going to be able to make the mortgage payments, if our grown kids are going to be moving back in with us; some of us are so embarrassed that we can no longer meet a pledge of financial commitment to the church or give as we used to that we don’t even come to worship anymore. We blame ourselves for what has happened, saying if only I had gotten out of the market, if only we had sold our house earlier, if only we had not taken the bank up on that ridiculously low refinancing deal. And the worst of it is, that we don’t talk about this with anyone, except maybe a spouse, and so circumstances forced upon us by wider societal and economic forces are seen as individual problems, but problems far too big for any person or family to possibly take on. We add together fear and shame and embarrassment and self-recrimination and a sense of powerlessness and what you get is the ER waiting room feeling of pain and hopelessness and despair and isolation.

It is my hope that we might take the man with leprosy’s three-step program towards healing, and that we find ways to do it together, possibly beginning by coming to a sermon talk-back in the Guild Room after worship. There we might meet to talk together to define whether we really are, in fact, in need of healing as a result of the current economic crisis; there we might together make the choice to be healed, to move out of our privatized fear, shame and embarrassment; there we might do so in the confidence of our God’s power and faithfulness to give us the healing we ask for. For if we ask, w shall surely be given the response that came as glad tiding to the ears of the man on his knees long ago: “I do choose. Be made clean!”

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