The Path To Healing
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Stories
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Contents
"The Path to Healing" by Peter Andrew Smith
"Leprosy, Love, and Crossing Legal Boundaries" by Lamar Massingill
* * * * * * * *
The Path to Healing
by Peter Andrew Smith
2 Kings 5:1-14
Chuck slammed the door and threw his knap sack beside the desk. "That was a waste of time."
"Visit with the chaplain not go well?" Sam asked looking up from his homework.
"I don't want to talk about it." Chuck flopped into a chair. Sam waited patiently for a few moments while Chuck fiddled with a pen on the desk. "I went to a man of God to try and get some help."
"He couldn't see you?" Sam said.
"Oh, he saw me all right. Took me into his office and sat across from me pretty much like we are sitting now." Chuck gestured at the space between them. "We talked about nothing important for a while and then he asked me what was up."
"So you told him about your problem with Charlene?"
"I did," Chuck said. "I told him that we were having trouble connecting and it was like there was something blocking us."
"Did you tell him that it hadn't always been that way?"
"Of course I did. In fact he asked me all sorts of questions about our relationship. You know how long we had known each other, how serious we were, and how often we talked during the day."
"That sounds like you had a good conversation."
"We did," Chuck said. "Right up until the part where he started to ask me lots of questions that had nothing to do with Charlene."
"What do you mean?" Sam asked.
"He asked me what had changed in my life recently."
"You mean like moving into the dorm?" Sam asked.
"Yeah things like that. Which have nothing to do with Charlene at all," Chuck rolled his eyes. "I mean it is not like I have been seeing other girls or anything."
"You certainly haven't."
"I told him that Charlene and I are serious and as soon as I finish this degree we're going to get married." Chuck started tapping the pen on the desk. "But this so called chaplain kept pushing about what was different between living here and being at home with my parents."
"And?"
"I told him my Mom's cooking is better than the cafeteria."
"That's for sure." Sam nodded. "She makes killer brownies."
"I told him that was the only thing that was really different. I mean my parents treated me like an adult because I am."
"They are pretty cool."
"But he kept asking me and asking me." Chuck put the pen down. "So I told him about the new laptop I got to keep in touch with Charlene."
"Yeah, you told me that you only had the computer in the living room to work on at home."
Chuck nodded. "That is when things got weird."
Sam put a bookmark on his page. "How so?"
"He asked me if I have been looking at porn on my laptop," Chuck said. "How dare he? I came there looking to sort some things out about the woman I love and he wants to know how I spend my time on the web. Didn't I send her flowers on her birthday?"
"You certainly did."
"Don't I call her on voice or video every single day?"
"Sometimes more," Sam said. "There are times I think she should be paying rent here."
"So how does he get off asking me such a stupid question when I go to him for relationship help?" Chuck shook his head.
Sam said nothing for a few moments. "So do you?"
"What?"
"Do you use your laptop to look at pictures of naked women?"
"What difference does it make?" Chuck said leaning forward. "Everyone does."
"So what did the chaplain say about it?"
"He said if I wanted a chance to make things better with Charlene I had to stop." Chuck threw up his hands. "Come on, have you ever heard anything stupider? I went looking for some advice and direction on how to make my relationship better and he tells me that."
Sam shrugged. "Well, are you going to?"
"Going to what?"
"Stop looking at women on the internet," Sam said.
"It won't make any difference because it is not important."
Sam closed his book and set it next to him. "So what does she think about you doing that?"
"Who?"
"Charlene. What does she think about you looking at those pictures?"
Chuck blushed.
"So you are doing something you are ashamed to tell your girl about and you get upset when the chaplain tells you to stop."
"That's not the point."
Sam let out a loud sigh. "Why did you go and see the chaplain in the first place?"
"Because his sermons make a lot of sense and he is a reasonable guy," Chuck said. "He does a lot of counselling with students and couples so I thought he could help me. But what he said was stupid."
Sam counted to ten under his breath. "If he had told you to do something complicated, like take the bus home every week to see her, would you do it?"
"Sure, you know Charlene means everything to me."
"So, why aren't you willing to do this?"
"I guess I could try."
"If you care about Charlene you should do more than try." Sam picked up his book. "Make it happen."
Chuck looked at his roommate for a few moments, opened his laptop, and began to delete images and links.
Peter Andrew Smith is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada who currently serves at St. James United Church in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He is the author of All Things Are Ready (CSS), a book of lectionary-based communion prayers, as well as many stories and articles, which can be found listed at www.peterandrewsmith.com.
Leprosy, Love, and Crossing Legal Boundaries
by Lamar Massingill
Mark 1:40-45
I saw him at the interchange of I-59 and Hardy Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with a pillow case thrown over his shoulder, containing all the possessions he had, holding a piece of cardboard ripped from the side of some used up box, perhaps trying to say to people that he was used up. All he managed was to write "New Orleans" on the cardboard. The "N" was written backward. He didn't have the pride to even look up to face those who may help.
By the time I arrived at the intersection, he was ten feet to my right. A knot developed in my stomach. I started exaggerating the movements of my head as I was looking left and right for oncoming traffic, being the good driver that Joyce says I'm not. Then, playing like I didn't see him, drove away, rationalizing the whole time that I wasn't going to New Orleans. I remember seeing similar scenes a hundred times: some hungry, some broke, all hopeless. Well, not all.
I saw on the news this week a man who was obviously jobless in this exhausted economy, who had written his credentials on a sandwich board as he walked the sidewalks of the city. He was a PhD in history, about my age, obviously feeling, as I do and many of you with a liberal arts education, that the arts are becoming a thing of the past, and that we are no longer needed in this technological wonderland. This man was stopped and hired off the street, which is good, but most stories don't end that well.
Some people of the corners and streets are true victims, no doubt. Some could do something about their situation, but won't. Some may even be cons. We don't know, but I wonder sometimes why I just can't stop and talk and find out what I can. But I say I'm too busy, running late, or some such other excuse. And I don't know why. It disturbs me. So I just look dead straight, drive away with my dark friend denial, and say, "Why doesn't he just get a job?"
We don't like the outcast do we? Nothing's changed. In the day of Jesus lepers stayed in colonies, so as to not spread their disease. It would be much like our fear of AIDS in this day in time. That this leper was not separated from the rest of the population was indeed a bizarre thing. Jesus had every right to say "You are breaking Jewish law by being in the open, please go back to your colony and stay there." But Jesus knew that, like our world, legal does not necessarily mean moral. So Jesus, full of sight beyond sight, seeing things beyond things, saw something in this man that had probably disappeared in the seething resentment of the other lepers in the colony from which he came: the reality of trust that things would get better for him. He honestly believed Jesus could heal him. "You can make me clean..." (1:40).
Perhaps this particular leper was tired of listening to the resentment of the others and didn't want to get pulled into it. So, protecting the gift of trust he had, he found a way out of the colony. We need to understand that this was a dangerous move on the part of this leper. His action was illegal. It went all the way back to the Levitical law: "The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, 'Unclean, unclean.' he shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp" (Leviticus 13:45-46). This was a dangerous crossing of the ritual boundaries of Jewish law. "This story is presented in a fashion which intimates that we are to think of this man as having an apparently incurable disease who is driven by desperation to violate the social codes in order to find a cure" (Morna D. Hooker).
We may understand it better by thinking about the desperate ones of our own society who are terminally ill. Should people with terminal illness be allowed to step outside the boundaries of normal health care to try and find a cure for their illness by using drugs that are not yet approved by the FDA? Good question. The answers are always tinted with grey, not black and white. Sometimes, like this leper, we just have to, as Rilke suggested, live the questions. But there is no doubt about the trust of this man that gave birth to his hope. His trust and hope were so strong that he actually invited Jesus to dare to heal him (1:40).
This brings us to the actions of Jesus in this episode, which grow out of love, not law. Jesus was moved with pity or better put: compassion. He took unto himself the disease that had afflicted this poor and lonely man. We need to know that this was a risk as well. It is probably why Jesus directed him back to the priests and admonished him to say nothing about this healing. Why? Because in touching the leper and healing him, Jesus would be considered unclean as well, and banned from the cities and constrained to stay out of the cities.
Also, Jesus was not a priest, and only the priests, according to the Levitical code of law, were allowed to heal and pronounce people clean. Jesus, of course had a marked contempt for the law of the Jews, as they had so abused it.
Both Jesus and the leper he healed were transgressors of the boundaries. They crossed the Levitical fence in the name of courage and love. In all times, if we fail in love that gives birth to courage, we fail in all things else.
A good question and a good quest would be to ask ourselves as the church: Where are we in all of this?
I wonder, does the church try to control Jesus? Which of our church "rules" might Jesus break if he were walking around today? Which of our church "rules" might we need to break in order to get close to Jesus? Who are like lepers in our communities? What is our congregation's relationship to such people? Are there people whom we wouldn't want to touch? Would Jesus touch them? Do we ever feel like this leper? Have we ever experienced Jesus like this leper? How has Jesus healed and restored us to wholeness?
Yes I should have broken the traffic law by holding up traffic to help the outsider in need standing at the interchange of I-59 and Hardy Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Allow me to extend an invitation: next time you are on your way to church, you indeed might miss, and most probably will, the homeless man on the corner who is in real need. Try stopping next time -- church can wait -- and offering him what he needs. If you do that, you will not be going to church, you will become church!
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 12, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"The Path to Healing" by Peter Andrew Smith
"Leprosy, Love, and Crossing Legal Boundaries" by Lamar Massingill
* * * * * * * *
The Path to Healing
by Peter Andrew Smith
2 Kings 5:1-14
Chuck slammed the door and threw his knap sack beside the desk. "That was a waste of time."
"Visit with the chaplain not go well?" Sam asked looking up from his homework.
"I don't want to talk about it." Chuck flopped into a chair. Sam waited patiently for a few moments while Chuck fiddled with a pen on the desk. "I went to a man of God to try and get some help."
"He couldn't see you?" Sam said.
"Oh, he saw me all right. Took me into his office and sat across from me pretty much like we are sitting now." Chuck gestured at the space between them. "We talked about nothing important for a while and then he asked me what was up."
"So you told him about your problem with Charlene?"
"I did," Chuck said. "I told him that we were having trouble connecting and it was like there was something blocking us."
"Did you tell him that it hadn't always been that way?"
"Of course I did. In fact he asked me all sorts of questions about our relationship. You know how long we had known each other, how serious we were, and how often we talked during the day."
"That sounds like you had a good conversation."
"We did," Chuck said. "Right up until the part where he started to ask me lots of questions that had nothing to do with Charlene."
"What do you mean?" Sam asked.
"He asked me what had changed in my life recently."
"You mean like moving into the dorm?" Sam asked.
"Yeah things like that. Which have nothing to do with Charlene at all," Chuck rolled his eyes. "I mean it is not like I have been seeing other girls or anything."
"You certainly haven't."
"I told him that Charlene and I are serious and as soon as I finish this degree we're going to get married." Chuck started tapping the pen on the desk. "But this so called chaplain kept pushing about what was different between living here and being at home with my parents."
"And?"
"I told him my Mom's cooking is better than the cafeteria."
"That's for sure." Sam nodded. "She makes killer brownies."
"I told him that was the only thing that was really different. I mean my parents treated me like an adult because I am."
"They are pretty cool."
"But he kept asking me and asking me." Chuck put the pen down. "So I told him about the new laptop I got to keep in touch with Charlene."
"Yeah, you told me that you only had the computer in the living room to work on at home."
Chuck nodded. "That is when things got weird."
Sam put a bookmark on his page. "How so?"
"He asked me if I have been looking at porn on my laptop," Chuck said. "How dare he? I came there looking to sort some things out about the woman I love and he wants to know how I spend my time on the web. Didn't I send her flowers on her birthday?"
"You certainly did."
"Don't I call her on voice or video every single day?"
"Sometimes more," Sam said. "There are times I think she should be paying rent here."
"So how does he get off asking me such a stupid question when I go to him for relationship help?" Chuck shook his head.
Sam said nothing for a few moments. "So do you?"
"What?"
"Do you use your laptop to look at pictures of naked women?"
"What difference does it make?" Chuck said leaning forward. "Everyone does."
"So what did the chaplain say about it?"
"He said if I wanted a chance to make things better with Charlene I had to stop." Chuck threw up his hands. "Come on, have you ever heard anything stupider? I went looking for some advice and direction on how to make my relationship better and he tells me that."
Sam shrugged. "Well, are you going to?"
"Going to what?"
"Stop looking at women on the internet," Sam said.
"It won't make any difference because it is not important."
Sam closed his book and set it next to him. "So what does she think about you doing that?"
"Who?"
"Charlene. What does she think about you looking at those pictures?"
Chuck blushed.
"So you are doing something you are ashamed to tell your girl about and you get upset when the chaplain tells you to stop."
"That's not the point."
Sam let out a loud sigh. "Why did you go and see the chaplain in the first place?"
"Because his sermons make a lot of sense and he is a reasonable guy," Chuck said. "He does a lot of counselling with students and couples so I thought he could help me. But what he said was stupid."
Sam counted to ten under his breath. "If he had told you to do something complicated, like take the bus home every week to see her, would you do it?"
"Sure, you know Charlene means everything to me."
"So, why aren't you willing to do this?"
"I guess I could try."
"If you care about Charlene you should do more than try." Sam picked up his book. "Make it happen."
Chuck looked at his roommate for a few moments, opened his laptop, and began to delete images and links.
Peter Andrew Smith is an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada who currently serves at St. James United Church in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He is the author of All Things Are Ready (CSS), a book of lectionary-based communion prayers, as well as many stories and articles, which can be found listed at www.peterandrewsmith.com.
Leprosy, Love, and Crossing Legal Boundaries
by Lamar Massingill
Mark 1:40-45
I saw him at the interchange of I-59 and Hardy Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with a pillow case thrown over his shoulder, containing all the possessions he had, holding a piece of cardboard ripped from the side of some used up box, perhaps trying to say to people that he was used up. All he managed was to write "New Orleans" on the cardboard. The "N" was written backward. He didn't have the pride to even look up to face those who may help.
By the time I arrived at the intersection, he was ten feet to my right. A knot developed in my stomach. I started exaggerating the movements of my head as I was looking left and right for oncoming traffic, being the good driver that Joyce says I'm not. Then, playing like I didn't see him, drove away, rationalizing the whole time that I wasn't going to New Orleans. I remember seeing similar scenes a hundred times: some hungry, some broke, all hopeless. Well, not all.
I saw on the news this week a man who was obviously jobless in this exhausted economy, who had written his credentials on a sandwich board as he walked the sidewalks of the city. He was a PhD in history, about my age, obviously feeling, as I do and many of you with a liberal arts education, that the arts are becoming a thing of the past, and that we are no longer needed in this technological wonderland. This man was stopped and hired off the street, which is good, but most stories don't end that well.
Some people of the corners and streets are true victims, no doubt. Some could do something about their situation, but won't. Some may even be cons. We don't know, but I wonder sometimes why I just can't stop and talk and find out what I can. But I say I'm too busy, running late, or some such other excuse. And I don't know why. It disturbs me. So I just look dead straight, drive away with my dark friend denial, and say, "Why doesn't he just get a job?"
We don't like the outcast do we? Nothing's changed. In the day of Jesus lepers stayed in colonies, so as to not spread their disease. It would be much like our fear of AIDS in this day in time. That this leper was not separated from the rest of the population was indeed a bizarre thing. Jesus had every right to say "You are breaking Jewish law by being in the open, please go back to your colony and stay there." But Jesus knew that, like our world, legal does not necessarily mean moral. So Jesus, full of sight beyond sight, seeing things beyond things, saw something in this man that had probably disappeared in the seething resentment of the other lepers in the colony from which he came: the reality of trust that things would get better for him. He honestly believed Jesus could heal him. "You can make me clean..." (1:40).
Perhaps this particular leper was tired of listening to the resentment of the others and didn't want to get pulled into it. So, protecting the gift of trust he had, he found a way out of the colony. We need to understand that this was a dangerous move on the part of this leper. His action was illegal. It went all the way back to the Levitical law: "The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, 'Unclean, unclean.' he shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp" (Leviticus 13:45-46). This was a dangerous crossing of the ritual boundaries of Jewish law. "This story is presented in a fashion which intimates that we are to think of this man as having an apparently incurable disease who is driven by desperation to violate the social codes in order to find a cure" (Morna D. Hooker).
We may understand it better by thinking about the desperate ones of our own society who are terminally ill. Should people with terminal illness be allowed to step outside the boundaries of normal health care to try and find a cure for their illness by using drugs that are not yet approved by the FDA? Good question. The answers are always tinted with grey, not black and white. Sometimes, like this leper, we just have to, as Rilke suggested, live the questions. But there is no doubt about the trust of this man that gave birth to his hope. His trust and hope were so strong that he actually invited Jesus to dare to heal him (1:40).
This brings us to the actions of Jesus in this episode, which grow out of love, not law. Jesus was moved with pity or better put: compassion. He took unto himself the disease that had afflicted this poor and lonely man. We need to know that this was a risk as well. It is probably why Jesus directed him back to the priests and admonished him to say nothing about this healing. Why? Because in touching the leper and healing him, Jesus would be considered unclean as well, and banned from the cities and constrained to stay out of the cities.
Also, Jesus was not a priest, and only the priests, according to the Levitical code of law, were allowed to heal and pronounce people clean. Jesus, of course had a marked contempt for the law of the Jews, as they had so abused it.
Both Jesus and the leper he healed were transgressors of the boundaries. They crossed the Levitical fence in the name of courage and love. In all times, if we fail in love that gives birth to courage, we fail in all things else.
A good question and a good quest would be to ask ourselves as the church: Where are we in all of this?
I wonder, does the church try to control Jesus? Which of our church "rules" might Jesus break if he were walking around today? Which of our church "rules" might we need to break in order to get close to Jesus? Who are like lepers in our communities? What is our congregation's relationship to such people? Are there people whom we wouldn't want to touch? Would Jesus touch them? Do we ever feel like this leper? Have we ever experienced Jesus like this leper? How has Jesus healed and restored us to wholeness?
Yes I should have broken the traffic law by holding up traffic to help the outsider in need standing at the interchange of I-59 and Hardy Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Allow me to extend an invitation: next time you are on your way to church, you indeed might miss, and most probably will, the homeless man on the corner who is in real need. Try stopping next time -- church can wait -- and offering him what he needs. If you do that, you will not be going to church, you will become church!
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 12, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
