“Fairest Lord Jesus: The
Good Names of Welfare & Health Care”
I wonder how have we always heard
“fairest” in “Fairest Lord Jesus?” Is it something about the tone and the
texture of Jesus’ features? Such as his hair and his skin? Does it have to
do for us, consciously and not, with that bland blue-eyed and blond portrait
of the hallowed haloed Jesus that graces nearly every old Sunday School
wall? Is that the image we carry of Jesus? Who was, in fact, Semitic?
Much darker, much coarser, much more “middle-eastern” than we picture him?
Do we cling to such images? Do such
images cling to us? Is there something about our Jesus we want to hide and
protect, -- not only from unloving, unworshiping others who may not share
our pious affection for him, -- but hide and protect also, often, from
ourselves? That we may control him and he will not challenge our levels of
comfort and of complacency? Is there not another sense of “fairest” we
might add here? A Jesus of social concern? A Jesus of justice? “Fairest”
in the sense of how he sees and treats all others? With mutual dignity,
mutual respect? And of how he calls us to do the same? Just asking.
We celebrate this as a “Laity Sunday,” a
Sunday to remember the Church as the “laos” in the Greek word, as the “whole
people of God.” Clergy are part of the “laos,” the whole people. Clergy
are baptized before we are ordained. We are called to ministry in the
church and mission in the world like every Christian is. We also are set
apart for the special functions, in our United Methodist tradition, of
“word, sacrament, and order,” -- that is, the organizing of the church as
“body of Christ.” You know how they say, those that can, do; those that
can’t, preach!
William Stringfellow talks about clergy
as serving the church, so that the church may serve the world. We are to
see that every last part, every last person, is honored and included and
given opportunity to follow Jesus in ministry and in mission. Ministry and
mission happen within the usual times and places of church gatherings, to be
sure. But they happen where we live, where we work, where we study, where
we play, -- as well as where we pray. Jesus is for us not only “Lord” of the
church, or even “ruler of all nature,” but “Liberator” of the whole world as
well, very much including all cities pf the world. In just a few years, it
is said, one-third of humanity will reside in what we call “slums.”
Jeremiah this morning addresses himself
to “the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had
taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” Babylon which today is called
Iraq. That old dichotomy between Jerusalem and Babylon tempts some of us
with a more literalist theology deeply invested in dividing ourselves from
others in order to conquer them. We tend to portray the events of today in
light of some preordained and biblically cosmic struggle between the “forces
of light” and the “forces of darkness.” That brings us again to the
question of whether our traditional images of Jesus may become self-serving
of our ideological purposes for him, -- as if he is some kind of leader of
what we like to call “the free world,” our perversion of what it means to be
“Jerusalem” over against the “Babylon” of the communists, the terrorists,
etc.
Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl points
out to us, in a way that reminds us of the original spirits of “liberty” and
of “democracy” in the air at the time of the draftings of “constitutions”
for both the United States and the United Methodist Church –
“Those who are sensitive to the situation
today speak less and less about freedom and more and more about liberation.
. . . Freedom is something that people think they have. Freedom might even
be something in the name of which they go out and conquer other people. . .
. Freedom is very different from liberation. Liberation as a term is
really meaningful either when you do not have freedom or when you have just
gained it. Freedom is like manna in the wilderness. It does not keep
easily. It spoils quickly. You cannot put it in the refrigerator and call
it freedom, because freedom has to be won again and again. And that very
insight is better expressed by the word liberation.”
In that sense Jeremiah seems to be
telling us, “in Christ,” the messiah, the promised one, coming to set all
peoples free, -- “in Christ” we are already liberated, already set free
wherever we are! I mean, here we are exiled to Babylon! It even says that
God sends us to be in exile! Like the God of this psalm, the awesome
creator and liberator! Yet also the God who tests us, who tries us “as
silver is tried;” who captures us, brings us “into the net,” and lays
“burdens on our backs!” The God who lets “people ride over our heads” as we
go “through fire and through water.” Yet the God who always brings us “out
to a spacious place!” A place of belonging, a place of beginning again, --
dare we say, the church?
God sends us to be, in effect, “in exile”
wherever we are! Both citizens and disciples! Citizens of this world, with
all of its troubles, to be sure, but also of the new world that is to
come! “In Christ,” the church is meant to be a beacon, a foretaste, of
what is to come – the world in which all peoples are honored, included,
loved, respected for just who we are! In this congregation we might say,
remembering the joys of the gifts of ages just last evening, -- We respect
everyone’s “lack of talent,” equally! We are like Jews have always been,
and others are today, -- scattered all over the world, in Diaspora, far from
original homes, -- seeking the welfare of whatever city God sends us to
inhabit – even Reno/Sparks? Even Reno/Sparks! Building houses and living
in them! Planting gardens and eating what they produce! Being fruitful and
multiplying there!
Bringing children, and grandchildren, to
life in that place! As Jesse Jackson used to say of all peoples finding
themselves “in exile,” no matter how long they have lived and even slaved
where they are – “What the Indians needed were more Indians!” Just as it
was for our growing numbers that Pharaoh came to fear us when we were as yet
“no people” but slaves in Egypt. Our fruitfulness led to our freedom! And
the Indians are coming back!
My almost 92 year-old mother, whom I will
visit this week, flew to Washington for the opening of the Smithsonian’s
American Indian Museum. All over the world today indigenous peoples are
organizing! In fact, as we think twice about tomorrow, “Columbus Day,” and
all of its attending mythology, we might think as well of St. Francis of
Assisi, whose birthday just past. Read his “Canticle to Brother Sun” in our
Words of meditation this morning. Here is the truly universal Italian
explorer and discoverer! Of the whole universe as part of us, of us as part
of the whole universe! St. Francis may well have learned from indigenous
cosmologies. Indigenous peoples now “seek the welfare” of those places
where they have become as exiles in their own lands! For the bottom line
always with God is, in the welfare of others we find our own welfare! In
the welfare of others, we find our own.
So this “fairest Lord Jesus,” who cares
about the welfare of every city, and the health care of every person in
every city, calls upon us to live, as he lives, -- as exiles and outsiders,
as strangers and sojourners, wherever we are! However long we have been
there! However long we never expected to be there! Julie and I cannot tell
you the number of people who have told us in our first fifteen months here
they only meant to stay in Reno/Sparks a year or two. Now here they are
fifteen or twenty years later! And now we begin to know what they mean, how
that happens. What does it look like for us to seek what the U.S.
Constitution calls “the general welfare” of Reno and Sparks? To seek health
care, healing and wholeness, for every last person here? Whatever their
reasons for being here, whatever their circumstances or their conditions?
Let’s focus in a moment, with Jesus, on
these lepers. We can imagine these ten lepers, with diseases corrupting,
eroding the “fairest” of skins, as any number of “exiles” among us. Those
who are living as outcasts. Those who are living in transition, in
separation, in rejection, in isolation, even in detention. Those whose
banishments, whose punishments, even whose deaths are seen as the only ways
to prevent the spread of their disease. Even when, like leprosy, their
disease may be essentially one of poverty, spreading in areas of
malnutrition, general illness, overcrowding, malaise. Jesus not only
responds to the personal needs of these lepers to be healed. He also
responds to their social needs to be made whole, to find for themselves that
“spacious place” the psalmist promises, that “Jubilee” place, that “church,”
that place of belonging and of beginning again.
Like so many others in our lives and our
life together today, lepers suffer strict literalist application of the
“purity” or the “holiness codes” of such biblical places in Leviticus, for
instance. Strict interpreters may imagine every last possible and
observable detail of life as some kind of opening for God to drive a wedge
among and between us, better dividing and conquering us. These texts are
interpreted as if this same awesome creator God of the universe needs any
defending, any protecting from us! Julie and I used to wake our first kid
up in the night to be sure that he was breathing. Then one day someone
assured us, Look, he’s made to last a lifetime! Let him sleep! We may say
the same thing of this congregation and of our general church. They are
made to last a lifetime! Let them sleep! But only through sermons!
Otherwise, let them act! Seeking the welfare of all cities, the health care
of all peoples. Even, at times, no matter what the Bible says! The Bible
says most everything at least once, it seems.
Jesus is fond of saying, nothing from
outside of us can defile us. We cannot “catch” from others most of the
things we try to isolate ourselves from. The only kind of “cleanliness”
next to “godliness” is the cleanliness of full communion, of fullest
belonging to and with one another, -- through all the differences, all the
divisions, -- through all the contradictions, even all the conflicts.
Cleanliness with God is a state of grace, a state of receiving the gift of
life, the gift of faith each day, -- a state of receiving as well the gifts
of the lives and the faiths of others each day. And that is why, I think,
this one, this Samaritan leper, this doubled-jeopardized outcast, comes back
to Jesus once he is healed.
Jesus does not judge or condemn the other
nine lepers. They get their healings, too. They go on their ways. Jesus
sends them all “back to church,” so to speak. Not that they can get healed
in church. They get healed, where? “On the way” to church! The healing
happens in them, not in church. But “church” is where they can get
“certified” clean and “normalized” again. Where they can slip back into all
the usual rituals, usual routines, fitting in again with everyone else,
perhaps, in time, even forgetting where they have come from. It may be like
us coming to worship ten times just for that one time worship really works
for us, -- something happens that we may remember. But if we are not there
all ten times, we may miss that one to remember! In fact, I hope you won’t
find me complaining even about those “CEOs,” those “Christmas/Easter Only”
church-goers. I’ll gladly take whoever I can get any time I can get them!
Jesus seems to be saying, one out of ten
ain’t bad, -- for the church! Won’t keep you in the Big Leagues, but not
bad for the church! All us “sinners!” In fact, I think we call that a
“tithe!” Don’t we? So let us not deny that “one in ten” person among us,
or even that “one in ten” part of each of ourselves, -- that “creative
remnant” that is not content with things as they are, -- that senses things
can be different, that thanksgiving may become for us not just a day but a
whole way of life! That our “attitude of gratitude” shapes our lives and
life everyday! May that which is saved and set free, healed and made whole
in us always remember, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, Some folks look
at things as they are and ask, Why? I dream things that never were and ask,
what? Why not? Why not!
Amen.
Rev. John Auer
