Sermon: Outside In.

Have you every been in this chapel in the evening?  If you ever have the chance--if a free evening comes your way--I recommend spending some part of it here in this room.  During the day, of course, the room is beautiful: colorful and bright and full of joy, as we are all used to seeing it.  But as evening falls, it develops a wonderful stillness, a peace, which brings with it a different kind of beauty--perhaps a more meditative, more unusual kind.  The time passes like this: as the sun slowly tumbles through the sky, the light from the windows immolates each pew in turn, in dancing jewel tones, row by row.  And then, when the sun is low, oblique to the horizon, the ruby light of the sunset burns from the west directly through this window behind me, until it becomes so bright it seems to shine like the sun itself - "Lord, teach us to pray" (inscribed in the rose window, front and center) - and then, later still, as the daylight is submerged completely beneath the earth and the night-wind begins to whisper secrets outside, the windows fall into darkness and there is only one light left in the chapel.  It shines, brightly, on this book, on the Bible, and it is illuminated.  And the light reflects upward, off the page, throwing tiny stars onto the bright edges of the chalice beside it.  Through the dark hours of the night, that light shines, and the smooth pages of this great tome glow like the bright surface of a perfect moon.

This chapel is a place, in the evenings, where we can come to be by ourselves, but not alone... where we can come to pray, and be at peace.

It helps me to imagine that picture of Jesus up on a high mountain, praying.  Everyone is searching for him, seeking him, trying to find him, wanting to touch him--in the passage before this, we hear that the whole city gathers outside the door of his house wanting healing--but Jesus leaves the busy world behind for a moment, and he goes up onto the mountain, alone, to pray.  He makes time for prayer.  There are many things he could be doing--a million wonderful things he could be doing to help people, like healing diseases or moving mountains--but he doesn't.  He stops, and prays.  And when he is done, he returns to the people.

And immediately, we read, a leper came to him, begging him: and kneeling, he said to him: "If you choose, you can make me clean."

Jesus has just barely finished praying, when someone comes and prays to him.  And what a difference in prayer... can you imagine it?  A leper, the most disgustingly unclean, hideously dirty, totally contagious untouchable alien outsider, breaking into the inner circle and talking to Jesus, the most pure, sanctified, anointed one, the Son of God, the Holy Messiah, the Christ, perfection?


I remember when I came into this chapel one evening, back in September, late in the day.  Oh, I had to drop off some note for one of the organists, or some such errand.  It had been a busy day.  But when I entered the silence of this place, and had set the paper down on the organ, suddenly, out of the darkness, up from one of the front pews, a figure--a man--stood up from prayer.  The calm of the room dispersed in a sudden flurry of movement and words.

"Sorry, sorry--" he apologized, looking down--"I didn't mean to frighten--"
"That's okay.  It's okay," I said.
"Sorry," he muttered again, and hurried to leave.
"Do you want to talk about something," I asked him, but before I even finished my words he was past me, rushing as quickly as he could without positively running away, and he slipped out the door.

Just a flurry of feathers, as from a bird suddenly flushed out of a bush in the woods.  It was over almost before it had begun; we were in the same place at the same time, just for an instant; and then he was gone.

A leper came to him, begging him; and kneeling, he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean."  And the leper *is* cleansed; and in a few short lines, he is gone.


So I try to figure out why that experience was so important to me.  I put the scene back together again in my mind.

The leper was a pray-er, too.  Holy prayer is one thing, in which we find ourselves serenely transported to a transcendent world.  But there is also prayer that is necessary, urgent, and desperate, and that is what I think the leper is voicing.  There is prayer that is quiet, alone time, in which we give God space to grow us.  There is prayer that racks our bodies and souls and begs, on bended knee, for an answer: for finitude, for an ear, for Christ's sake.  This is what pulls a stranger to fall on his knees in a darkened chapel.  This is the prayer that comes out of our needs: to beg audience with a God who is great, holy, majestic, and yet still listens to prayer.

Our leper shows us how to beg when we need it.  He kneels down--Luke adds, "with his face to the ground"--and begs Jesus.  "If you choose, you can make me clean."  What he means is, You can make my life whole.  You can restore me to my community again.  You see, leprosy in those days was an illness like no other.  Everyone knew it was contagious: if you touched a leper, you could get leprosy.  When this leper says, "You can make me clean," what he means is: "You can reunite me with my children.  You can make it possible for my brothers and sisters to hug me.  I could go back to work again--how I long to work again.  You can make me *someone* once more...

I wonder what that man was praying about, when he came into the chapel.  It was a snowy day, as they have all been recently.  He didn't stumble here my accident, on a whim--though I wouldn't be surprised if he had hardly realized where he was going.  I imagine that he was drawn to this place as a place where he could seek some healing, where he could ask for that true gift that only God can give.  Lepers in the day of Jesus spent every day begging for things--for food, for money, for alms, or whatever might help day-to-day life--but the leper in our story, who goes to find Jesus, asks for something far beyond what can be bought or sold.  He asks for healing.  I imagine that it requests like that which draw people to this chapel, to this place.

There are so many ways in which we need healing.  I have friends who have had some lawsuit filed with their name appearing on it.  It doesn't matter where you are in that, the plaintiff or defendant--it changes your life.  Or suddenly someone in your family needs full-time, round-the-clock care: all is upturned.  Or a child, growing up, develops an illness, perhaps, or a learning disorder, or some behavioral or emotional problem, and suddenly that whole family's lives change.  Maybe we are facing someone's death beside them.  Maybe we are going through a divorce.  Maybe someone is anorexic.  Maybe someone is depressed.  Thee are a million things that can draw us into prayer.  There are so many times in our lives when we finally fall on our knees, having tried everything else, lepers at heart and begging for wholeness.

Begging him and kneeling, he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean."

Is it such a huge stretch to imagine a link between a leper and a person like you or me?  A leper is made an outcast, is forever different, forever feels untouchable and excluded from the community and made to be an outsider.  We don't do that so literally, here in the U. S. of A: we're a Christian country, after all, founded on roots of equality though we forget them from time to time, and we make sure we don't *actually* shun those who are troubled.  Lepers were forced to live in separate communities, to drink separate water, to never cross the boundaries, to stay with their own diseased kind.  No one could even touch them.  We don't do that today.

But if any of you have ever had a real trouble in your life, maybe you can still understand the kind of isolation this leper feels.  Nobody quite understands what you are going through, do they?  With preoccupation, our minds start to live in some other, sequestered world.  We'll be sitting at the dinner table, conversations taking place all around us, but our minds are somewhere else.  The old things we always used to enjoy, like sports or shopping or the new project downtown, seem suddenly shallow, miniscule, compared to what you are going through.  Silly conversations!  My mother is dying, and you want to talk about bargain prices?  I am deeply depressed, even unto death--and you are talking about television?

When I saw that man in the chapel?  Earlier that same day, one of the other ministers had been talking to a man who was considering taking his own life.  Was it the same man?  Is that what he was praying about so fervently?  ...After he left here -- did he do it?  I will never know.  He didn't talk to me, and I was not the one hearing his prayer.  But I wonder if he had people to turn to.  I wonder, sometimes, if the desperation of his prayer came from the fact that in other places, when he was not in a chapel praying to God, he felt somehow completely isolated and alone.

So the leper comes before Jesus.  The man needing prayer comes to the chapel.  And the beautiful Jesus, and the peaceful chapel, welcome them.  The truth is, brothers and sisters, that it is stories like this one, stories about how Jesus welcomed everyone, that have made Christian spaces the kind of spaces where people can come, no matter who they are, to bow and beseech God.  Had Jesus refused upon even one of the many, many lepers, soldiers, women, sick, foreigners, sinners, troubled, oppressed people that came to him, we might have a very different faith to follow.  But there is not one.  Jesus welcomes them all, and brings the outside in.  Let the children come to me, Jesus said.  For I have come to save not the righteous, but sinners.

Chapels are good places for lepers.  Chapels are good places to come when you are feeling outcast, different, unknown.  God knows.  Chapels are good places to come when you feel that you have a question to ask, or a trouble to work out, that not just anyone will have an answer for.  God is a good place to turn when you have a prayer.

It would be remiss for us to think, even for a minute, that it is any less inappropriate for us to come before God than it was for that leper.  Or for that late-night stranger in the chapel.  We have gathered here, and it is daylight, and we think generally pretty well of ourselves, and why not.  Which means that it seems as if all is right with the world that we are gathered here on a Sunday morning in this happy place and in the presence of Jesus and the Holy Spirit to worship God.  And yes, it is.  It is truly right, and our greatest joy, to give God thanks and praise.  But when we gather, we say a prayer of confession.  And what we mean, when we say that, is:  You can make me clean.  You can make me whole; you can make me fit to be a part of your community again.  For sin, in our days, is an illness like no other.  It is contagious, and everyone has it: if you are human, you have touched it.  When we confess, we are asking for restoration.  You welcome me.  You make it possible for my brothers and sisters to embrace me.  You make me someone again.  What we mean is, You call me beloved, a child of God.

And God brings the outside in.
Knowing this, we declare the assurance of pardon.  Just as Jesus spoke to that leper that he chanced to meet on the street, that leper who knelt begging before him, and put his face to the ground, he speaks to us:  I do choose.  Be made clean.

It was the mission on earth of Jesus to speak words of blessing, hope and truth to a humanity that had fallen outside of God's plan.  As far as that leper was from Jesus, so far were we from God.  We were the unclean ones!  We were that defiled, hopeless number: a people that had lied, killed, and broken promises, a people that had been in turmoil, whose first parents were exiles, whose first son was a murderer.  We were the race to whom God reached out, to whom God offered a path through the storm.  We were that humanity to whom God sent his only Son; and we were the people that could not bear his purity, and who killed him.

We were the lepers, the unclean ones.  And still, despite it all, God gives us assurance of God's mercy and of our pardon: that as far as the East is from the West, so far has the Lord removed our sin from us (Psalm 103:12). That as often as I said, 'my foot has slipped,' your love, O Lord, upheld me (Psalm 94:18).  That when we come begging before the throne of God, no matter what our uncleanness, those wonderful words will shine forth into our darkness: "I do choose.  Be made clean."

So: if you ever do get that free evening, and if you are able to make a moment for yourselves, I recommend spending some small part of it here in this place.  It is rather tucked off to one side--a little diminutive, a little dark, a little bit intimate--but it is a beautiful place here, as that eternal sun winds its way down through the heavens.  It pierces the darkness with its rays, and drapes each pew, one by one, with a myriad of colors as if God points to each one and says, This is beautiful, and That is good.  As the sunset brightens outside, low in the West, the rose window burns with a fury of light, and I cannot stand here without looking up into its fiery brightness, as it trumpets out the words, "Lord, Teach Us to Pray..."

That is what that man has given me, that lonely pray-er who came here late one night.  Because after he left, after the story was over and his tearful, begging words had been spoken into this listening silence, after the sudden arresting sight of a stranger appearing in one minute and disappearing in the next, I was struck by this place.  I was transfixed, in fact, and I could not take myself away from the presence of this wonderful, loving, inviting God who brings the outside in.  The light streamed in through the window, and another light shone down upon this Bible, lying before me not closed and forbidding but opened for me, waiting for me to come and take it in.

And on one of its pages, shining up, we read:  "A leper came to him, begging him: and kneeling, he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean."  Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, and touched him, and said, "I do choose.  Be made clean."

May it be illumined in our hearts, forever.