Who were the Lepers in Biblical times?

Who is the Leper in the story described in Mark’s Gospel?

Or, more to the point, what is the disease described as Leprosy in Mark’s Gospel heard moment ago?

The kind of leprosy we know today came to the West after biblical times.

In the days of Jesus, “leprosy” literally meant something like “scaly or rough,” and could refer to any skin disease like psoriasis, acne, or boils. Given the poverty afflicting most persons in Ancient times, “leprosy” could also simply mean the rough skin associated with hardship, age, sun, and skin-infecting labor.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Caposis’ Sarcoma, the skin cancer associated with the latter stages of AIDS; it was in the mid-1980s during an internship during seminary at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I was required to wear gloves to visit; the patient looked at me and spoke the words, “if you have to wear those, I really wish you were not hear; I feel like a Leper.” The gentleman’s friend looked at me and said, “this disease makes me enraged. So does your God for doing nothing about it.” We will deal with this anger in a minute.

But let us move back to the Gospel of Mark.

In a pre-scientific time, the fear of contagion would have made people reluctant to have contact with anything which may have caused them to suffer or-and especially this—be excluded from society.

Thus, “rough and scaly” or “leper” is more a metaphor for those cast out from Ancient Near Eastern circles of acceptance and those they avoid contact with.

Such explains several well-known and inexplicable stories of avoidance: The beaten and robbed man in the story of the Good Samaritan; the woman with the flow of blood; the woman who crashed the dinner party in the home of Simon the Pharisee; those originally note invited to the great banquet given by the King; the Samaritan woman at the well, alone.

They were all—well—Lepers. They were all rough and scaly. They were all outcast.

Jesus was moved when the Leper called out to him.

The original meaning of the phrase here “moved with pity” is poignant.

It best be translated “The Anger of Compassion.”

The word, compassion means, “to suffer with.”

Jesus identified with the man in heart; he did not “pity” as feel sorry for him. He “suffered with him” to the point of anger on his behalf.

Anger at what? His condition? His illness?

Or, is the Anger of Jesus directed at his own society and his own religion that was betraying the God of Israel—the God of the Exodus, the God of the Outcast, the God of Welcome and Hospitality.

Was his anger that of the Prophets?

That is one of the titles for Jesus and Christian tradition; Prophet.

Prophets get angry. The great Old Testament scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that God is always “raging” in the words of a genuine prophet.

Jesus got angry; He took a bullwhip to those in the temple who were turning it into the 30 pieces of silver that would eventually betray him.

He got angry with the disciples when they did not get his message.

But he especially got angry with those who used their power to exclude and abuse others—especially in the name of religion. I return to this in a second.

And Jesus demonstrates genuine anger—here After he heals the inflicted man. He sternly told the Leper to “go show himself to the Priests, do what Moses commanded—as a testimony to them.”

“As a testimony to them.” “Yes,” says Jesus to the Leper—“go and do the prescribed thing for purity and cleaning in Ancient Israel…and take your healed body—get in the face of the clergy and leaders of religion— and demand that you be restored.”

The origin of a church I served, an African-American congregation, came from a demand that the white church of which they were a part set aside a specific graveyard for burial. They did this because their own dead were not welcomed in the white church graveyard but thrown into unmarked potters graves.

The Bishop of the Diocese at that time grew angry with that church. He not only demanded that they build the graveyard. He demanded that this church build a mission congregation for the Black Church which eventually became St. Philip’s Church. He did this not out of pity for the black Episcopalian Christians.. He did this for justice and accountability. He did this for the sake of restoration of a people to full inclusion in the Christian Community.

But does not Jesus call Anger a sin?

He does not.

He terms behaviors, resulting from anger and uncontrolled rage directed at our equals, the vulnerable, our families, or member of the Christian community, which diminish and exclude—sin.

Yes, uncontrolled and inappropriately expressed Anger kills body and soul.

He says that to NURSE Anger—the original phrase in Matthew’s Gospel Sermon on the Mount—whoever is angry with a brother or sister—is a sin.

Yes, the puss and poison of unexpressed, repressed anger and rage, the pillage of passive-aggression, the power of resentment and cold shoulder of hate kills body and soul.

But, throughout the New Testament, the incarnate God, Jesus the Christ is akin to the God speaking through the prophets of old, including the Prophet Elisha—who identifies with all beaten down by illness, beaten down by life—and especially beaten down by those who use religion in the service of injustice, abuse of power and exclusion.

In a few minutes, Peter Travers will speak of a prophetic President, on this, the anniversary of his birthday; this President was moved with the Anger of Compassion against the spread of slavery, moved with the Anger of Compassion when he first saw the slave markets of the Mississippi, and moved with the Anger of Compassion by laws seeking to spread the contagion of slavery into the new territories of our nation.

Abraham Lincoln spoke eloquently of a God, in the spirit of Jesus, who desired human freedom, prosperity and equality.

Let us never forget that one of the principal preserving elements of the evil of slavery was religion.

Then again—let us never forget that religion reinforced the second class treatment of women, the degradation of those with AIDS, the child sweatshops of the early 20the century, and the segregation of churches which is still a reality today.

It continues to reinforce some of the darker aspect of our soul today, whether it be bigotry and hostility directed against those with a different religion, race, sexual orientation or definition of what it means to be male, female or even a family.

Tomorrow, we celebrate the Feast Day of Absalom Jones, the first African-American Priest of the Episcopal Church. This afternoon there is a service to commemorate one of the truly great saints of the American church at Trinity Cathedral in Trenton at 3PM; I hope you will join me there.

His Priesthood and the one might say the very beginning of one of the great traditions of historic Christianity, the American Black Church—stems from an act of The Anger of Compassion.

On a fateful Sunday of in November of 1787, while Absalom Jones and Richard Allen knelt in prayer in the gallery of St. George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia, some of the white congregation decided that blacks should be confined to the Balcony. Pulled to their feet by a church official during opening prayers, an appalled Jones and Allen—walked out of the church.

They not only walked out; they demanded “restoration” into American Christianity; they demanded that the leper treatment must end.

Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church or AME; Absalom Jones founded the black Episcopal church—and one of the great historic churches of American Christianity—St. Thomas’ Church in Philadelphia, PA.

Our Youth Group took a mission trip there my first year at All Saint’s; perhaps one day we will return.

Jesus went to a lonely place after healing the leper in Mark’s Gospel— and suffered much for taking a stand on behalf of the abuse, the excluded, the diminished.

Yes, the Anger of Compassion will not make us popular or safe.

But, as Jesus eventually discovered—-for living such compassion—and living such risk, cost and pain… the depth of Compassion-(and its anger!)—is the ONLY thing that will eventually lead us to—Resurrection—and to Life’s wholeness.

A sermon preached on the 6th Sunday after the Epiphany, February 12, 2012, in All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Princeton, New Jersey, Year B, on Mark 1:40-45, by the Rev. Hugh E. Brown, III, D. Min., Rector

Tuesday , January 17

7:00 AM - Men’s Bible Study on the Gospel of Luke at Panera Bread on Nassau Street

8:30 PM - Princeton Book Study on Pilgrim’s Progress at Panera Bread on Nassau   Street

Wednesday, January 18

9:30 AM - Holy Eucharist in the Chapel

10:15 AM - Rector’s Wednesday Morning Study on the Books of Chronicles in the Old Testament

Sunday, January 22

8:00 AM - Holy Eucharist (Rite I)

9:00 AM - Choral Eucharist (Rite II)

Anthems:

Claudio Monteverdi: Cantate Domino

Sir Edward Elgar: Ave Verum Corpus

11: 30 AM - Adult Forum, Part II of the Theological and Spiritual Foundations of the Book of Common Prayer, “The Principles of the English Reformation and the 1979  Book of Common Prayer” by the Rev. Hugh E. Brown, III, D. Min., Rector

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