Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church - New Paltz

Mark 1: 40-45; I Corinthians 9: 24-27; Psalm 30; 2 Kings 5: 1-14

What will our legacy be? Who will remember us and what will they remember when we are gone? Will they remember we worked hard? Will they remembered we played well with others? Will they remember that no matter how stressful our lives became we always stopped to listen when someone needed us? Will they remember a smile given without expectation of return? Will they remember that we spoke the truth in love even when it hurt to hear? Will they remember that they heard and witnessed Christ through us? Will we be remembered for Christ working through us in our words, but even more so, through our actions?

The leper healed by Jesus in today’s story is asked by him to tell no one of what Jesus has done for him. So naturally he runs out and begins telling everyone he can find how Jesus has healed him. He does such a good job spreading the news that pretty soon Jesus can’t go anywhere without being followed by the paparazzi, without ending up on the evening news. Yet how could the leper do otherwise? How could he possibly be quiet when the Christ had been revealed? How could anyone stay silent when they have seen the living God?

I am so thankful that as Christian Lutherans we know that we do not need to do anything to earn God’s saving grace in Christ, freedom in salvation and healing in love for eternity. There is nothing we can do to earn this grace. We are standing at the check-out counter of salvation and the cash register says we owe “$0.00” This, this incredible realization of abundant grace given for free should motivate us to tell the story of what God has done even more! We should spring into action to shout the good news from the street corners and do good things on God’s behalf precisely because we do not have to do anything to earn God’s favor. The living Christ has been revealed to us just as to the leper, now let’s get busy! Busy talking up the news, writing blogs about the work of the Spirit, busy with service projects, clean-up of the earth, and developing more good will towards our neighbors in everyday charity. Get busy preaching through our actions that God in Christ is a God of healing, a God of resurrection.

One of the ways to share the good news of God in Christ is certainly through service. We as Lutheran Christians have a stellar record of service - 1 in 20 people in the USA is served each year by a Lutheran social service agency, not to mention the countless ways our local congregations, our regional Synods, our national Church and international Lutheran bodies work to help make an everyday difference in people’s lives. Countless Lutherans have served the poor, the needy, and downtrodden, providing living, breathing proof of God’s love for those in need.

But we are supposed to speak about this Gospel as well as live it. The leper ran out and started telling everyone what had happened. That was his chief vocation after witnessing Christ revealed. And Christian Lutherans do not have an especially stellar record of vocally telling the news. We stay silent much of the time, don’t we? My gosh, we tell people more personal information about our visits to the doctor’s office and our sex lives than we do about what we have seen and come to believe about God in Christ! No wonder the doctors and tabloids are getting richer while congregations close their doors and turn off their lights for good.

How can we stay quiet? Why do we stay quiet? Maybe it’s some strange notion of humility we got growing up – that to say what we believe might infringe on another’s belief if they don’t believe the same thing as us? There was a great article written by a Jewish man a few Christmases back where he said he’d like to be wished “Merry Christmas” and he’d wish a “Happy Chanukah” right back. He agreed that being sensitive to other’s beliefs was essential to forming an appropriately tolerant and just society. Yet he pointed out that by watering down what we say so as to avoid possibly offending anyone (mind you just possibly, not definitely) we are perhaps collectively watering down our respective beliefs. This may leave us more sensitive, but maybe just mostly watered down and without much in which to believe.

The healed leper cannot contain himself because God has shown up in his life. There is nothing watered down about his response to what he has seen. Christ has been revealed and the leper is compelled to tell the story. And God has shown up, has been and is being revealed in our lives, too. If we can’t see this yet, or at least can’t see it today, it is not because God is not there, but rather because of our human finitude. Like looking through binoculars the wrong way - everything that should seem bigger instead seems smaller.

Maybe in your life relationships have been restored or experienced physical healing. Maybe you are physically ailing, but are mentally and emotionally healing. Maybe you’ve been healed of fear and greed and put your pocketbook in the care of God’s army for the betterment of the world. I learned yesterday that even in her last months when her memory began to fail, my grandmother always asked on Sunday morning as she got into the car “do we have the checkbook? Do we have our offering?” She lived the knowledge that every ounce of who she was belonged to God and that her life was to be lived in response to Christ who is revealed in love to the world.

Sometimes in this world the light of Christ breaks in and performs miracles we can see. Like the pastor I knew who had his cancer disappear the day of his scheduled surgery. Like the family who lost their home in a fire but was surrounded by a community that helped them get completely back on their feet. Other times Christ’s light-filled presence is harder to perceive, and we spend days, weeks, even years longing for a clear map and picture of what God is seeking to work out. It is hard to sit in such times of tension, even if we are blessed with great faith. My dear friend who was in a serious car accident and initially paralyzed from the waist down has spent years trying to prayerfully understand why this happened and why her body has not been able to be fully healed. Grace has made it possible for her to see God’s work of healing in other ways in her life, but because that healing was not what she hoped for or expected, it was harder and took longer to perceive.

In today’s Old Testament lesson Naaman longs for healing, but when the means for healing is offered, he initially cannot accept them because they seem beneath him. “Wash in the Jordon River?” he says, seeing in his mind’s eye the mud hole he drove across to get to the prophet Elisha’s house. “Are not the rivers of my own country better than these?” Don’t you think my healing should come as I pictured it? Shouldn’t it be as grand as the man I imagine myself to be?

No doubt about it! We long for a world where Christ’s miraculous healing power would make every leper clean and cure our every ill. We, like Namaan, long for a world in which healing would come when and how we think it should. We do not know why it is not so. Yet we are assured that every temporary suffering will end in Christ’s triumphant glory. We are assured that we will at the last stand in the light of the resurrection, free and whole and fully alive. And we are assured that even as we suffer now we do not suffer alone! Christ suffers with us, cries our tears, longs our longings and bears our burdens as God’s own pain. Christ’s tender care is like no other, carrying all burdens and hoping all hopes on our behalf.

You know, institutions such as congregations have the chance to heal and be reborn like the leper as well. If, of course, we can learn with God’s help to listen to what God needs of us. Learn to discover the blessings offered at whichever part of the lifecycle we may be in: growth, decline, rebirth, growth, decline, rebirth. That cycle is fairly endless, and we can be sure God is at work in every stage of it! Why some cancers miraculously disappear while others do not we cannot understand. Why some congregations die while others flourish has a degree of logic, but we must not think we can “figure it out” all on our own. Why fear? Why not run to the streets and declare what is certainly true - God’s healing is at hand, Christ has been revealed. Let the celebrations begin!

As people of God we are at our best when we humbly remember the mystery of God’s creation and God’s working. We are at our best when we remember that our chief occupation is faith-filled listening. To be built up in faith through Christ and to learn daily how to listen for what healing God is offering, what resurrection and restoration God in Christ is seeking to make possible, one day at a time. As people of God we are at our best when we remember that the response to Christ being revealed is to run to the streets and tell everyone about it. This is breaking news, to be told in actions but also in words! Not telling of God’s grace or doing good things because we have to, but because, in response to God’s saving mercy, how can we do otherwise?

Our legacy to the world is to demonstrate in small and large ways that God is love and God is offering healing and restoration. Our legacy is to respond to God’s saving grace with incredible heaps of telling the front page news, heaps of good works, not because we have to, but because over time we should want to ever more, as we dwell and pray and meditate on the incredible grace of God on the cross. It is a blessing to serve, to give, to live in the light of Christ who has given us everything for free. For free. How lucky, how blessed are we? This is the most important thing we can spend out time doing, telling the story of God’s love and mercy given for us.