When Does the Healing Start?

WHEN DOES THE HEALING START?

The Leper, Jesus, and US
(A Responsive Meditation Based on Mark 1. 40-43)

Leader:
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 to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. (NRSV)

Millions of people today experience the plight of the leper in the Markan passage every single day. We call them People Living with HIV and AIDS. The healthy stays away from them. The healthy have stopped talking with them. The healthy have stopped interacting with them. They do not touch them anymore. They stand from afar and watch them die.

People:
What is the difference between illness and disease? Disease is physical. Illness is social. We, the un-sick, create and name the illnesses that keep us safely distanced from the sick. We, the un-sick, create the borders that keep the sick away from us. We, the un-sick, have access to the funds and the medicines that can help the sick live longer lives. We, the un-sick, decide who is ill and who is not.

All:
Many times, we, the un-sick, create the rules, the fences, the sanctions, the systems that make the sick sicker, the weak weaker, and the dying dead.

Leader:
In the Markan passage, we find the story of a leper. A person very much like a person with HIV or AIDS. He is considered unclean. People are told to keep away from him. People are told not to speak to him. People are told not to touch him. Though alive, society considers him dead.

People:
What is life without companionship? What is life without conversation? What is life without the warmth of a human touch?

All:
God did not create people to be alone. In life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not supposed to be alone.

Leader:
To celebrate Immanuel is to celebrate God-with-us. We are not alone. We shall never, ever, be alone. No one deserves to be alone. Yet, many among us, the leper of ages gone, the person with HIV or AIDS today, are alone.

People:
To celebrate Immanuel is to follow Jesus, Love Incarnate.

All:
In the Markan passage, we find the story of a leper. A person very much like a person with HIV or AIDS. He is considered unclean. People are told to keep away from him. People are told not to speak to him. People are told not to touch him. Though alive, society considers him dead.

Leader:
Yet Jesus, Love Incarnate, came near him, spoke to him, and touched him. Jesus did what society told him not to do. In the companionship, in the conversation, in the warmth of a human touch, the walls the un-sick created to separate and to isolate the sick were torn down.

People:
When does the healing start? Does it start with medicines or with technology? Does it start in hospitals or in churches? Does it start with prayer or with the much-needed deposit or all-important HMO card? When does the healing start?

All:
Or do all healings start when we realize that we are each other's keepers, that we are all God's children and thus sister and brother to each other, and that one's pain is everybody's pain, and that one's struggle is everybody's struggle, and that one’s sickness is everybody’s sickness, and that one's healing is everybody's healing, and that one's resurrection is everybody's resurrection.

HOMILY:

Leader: Going outside boxes is hard. Leaving our comfort zones; likewise. The magi took over two years, border-crossing, in search of a child, a complete stranger; a stranger they believed would liberate his people from oppression.  The Ancient Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years in their collective quest for land and liberty.


Crossing boundaries, discarding prejudices, tearing down walls, very, very hard. And very, very scary...

Who among us have ridden airplanes? Who among us have looked out the windows of those airplanes and seen the land masses below? What did you see? Did you see the lines, the borders that separated one nation from another? Did you see the markers that identified each country's territory apart from another? Did you see the colors that differentiated one area from another, like in our maps?

The boxes we make, our comfort zones, our prejudices, the thick and high walls around us, our accurate maps, even that Apartheid Wall in Palestine, and the borders that separate us are all man-made. We put them up, which means we can tear them down!

In Mark 1, a leper and Jesus meet, the sick and the un-sick, the impure and the pure, the dead and the living, the un-Jew and the Jew. Society, culture, ideology, and religion put up three invisible walls that separated them: no one is supposed to go near lepers, no one is supposed to talk with them, more importantly, no one is supposed to touch them.

It is a sin to approach lepers. It is a sin to talk with them. More importantly, it is a grave sin to touch a leper.

In three short verses, Jesus and the leper defy those rules. Together, they sin big.

Complete strangers they come near. They talk. They touch. Complete strangers, they break down three walls of separation and create three circles of contact. And the healing of both begins.

And we are invited to do likewise, to be active participants in the quest for a just and lasting peace, to be agents of love and faith and hope in the healing of our world.

Most of us have much to be thankful for. Many just celebrated Thanksgiving.  God has been good to us through the communities that welcomes and cares for us. But thanksgiving unless shared and celebrated with those whose only hope is God is not really thanksgiving, it's investing, waiting for returns.

To be thankful is to share, to take risks, to cross borders, to tear down walls and thus encounter the stranger. Scary? Yes. Hard? Yes. Dangerous? Yes.

But this is what the incarnation is all about. God crossing borders. God leaving heaven to be with us. God choosing to be one of us. God taking sides...

Thus, we are never, ever, alone. No one deserves to be alone.  NO ONE.  My friends, every moment of our lives we are challenged to cross borders, to tear down walls...one brick at a time... And beyond the walls...like the leper and Jesus, creating and nurturing circles that provide safe spaces where we can come together, where we can talk, where we can touch. Let us participate in the healing of the world and in our own healing. Let us, together, create circles of care.

People:
When does our healing start? Does it start with medicines or with technology? Does it start in hospitals or in churches? Does it start with prayer or with the much-needed deposit or all-important HMO card? When does our healing start?

All:
Our healing starts when we realize that we are each other's keepers, that we are all God's children and thus sister and brother to each other, and that each one's pain is everybody's pain, and that each one's struggle is everybody's struggle, and that each one’s sickness is everybody’s sickness, that each one's healing is everybody's healing, and that each one's resurrection is everybody's resurrection.


Women:
Like the leper and Jesus, today with People Living with HIV and AIDS, we are challenged to cross borders, to tear down walls, one brick at a time.

Men:
And beyond the walls, with People Living with HIV and AIDS we are called to create and nurture safe spaces where we can come together, where we can talk, where we can touch.

All:
With open arms, open hearts, open minds, open doors—in our homes, in our places of worship, in our institutions, whenever and wherever—let us participate in the healing of the world and in our own healing. Let us, like the leper and Jesus, create circles of care.

AMEN

Master and Slave

Every day over 6,000 Filipinos leave the country to work overseas. Every day 10 come back in a box. Millions are domestic helpers. Millions more are caregivers. Countless survive in sub-human conditions. People are most Third World nations' biggest exports. If we think that slavery in its most dehumanizing forms does not exist in the 21st century society, then we are deluding ourselves.

Slaves, in Jesus's parable in Luke 17. 7-10, should never expect to rest from their labors. Slaves should never expect thanks. Slaves should know their place, should stay there, should accept that they are worthless, and should never, ever, expect otherwise.

My friends, God did not create masters. God did not create slaves. God did not create the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. God did not create any of the systems and structures that commodify, degrade, and emasculate people.

We did all these. Which means we can undo them all. And we must.

Now.

Binding the Strong Man

If parables can get one dead, then this parable is one of Jesus's most subversive.

If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first binding the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

One word.Insurrection. Scholars say the kingdom refers to the State. More specifically, Rome and its puppet government in Palestine. The house refers to the Temple. More specifically, the religious elite beholden to empire. Satan, of course, refers to Rome. As a side note: Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea, and Joseph Caiphas, the High Priest, the two people directly responsible for Jesus's execution, were close friends. Both were removed from power in 36 CE.

Historians agree that the "cleansing of the temple" was Jesus and his followers' attempt to "bind the strong man and plunder his house."

Lest we forget, Jesus was crucified as an enemy of the State, as an insurrectionist. The charge, "King of the Jews," supports that. He was crucified with two other insurrectionists or rebels, not thieves or robbers.

We do not like this Jesus.

This Jesus is so unlike the one we grew up with; so unlike the one our colonial masters taught us to obey without question; so unlike the one whose portraits and paintings, usually blond and blue-eyed, adorn our places of worship.

The Rich Fool

I read somewhere that Rockefeller was asked how much money would satisfy him. His answer? More. In the part of the Philippines where I reside, there are vast tracts of land, thousands of hectares, owned by one family. In the past three years, according to Ibon Foundation, the net worth of the richest Filipinos almost doubled.

Historians tell us that in First Century Palestine practically all the land was either owned or controlled by the ruling elite. And, yes, this group included the religious leaders.

In the parable, the rich man had a problem. His harvest was so plentiful his barns were not enough to contain them. The solution? Bring down his old barns and build bigger ones. Half of the population then was slowly starving to death. Sharing? Never crossed his mind.

He died that night.

Scientists tell us that 666 billion dollars can address the world's biggest problems: poverty, hunger, illiteracy, health and sanitation... But the world's richest actually spends more and more and more each year on weapons of mass destruction. Last year, 1.7 trillion dollars!

Sharing? Tragically, like yesterday and tomorrow, 25,000 children from the poorest countries, aged 5 and younger, would be dead from starvation tonight.

The Fig Tree

For three years the owner of the Fig tree has waited. For three years he was patient. For three years he longed for one thing, fruit from his tree. Three years pass and there were none. So he orders his gardener to chop it down. Waste of good soil. His gardener pleads, "Give it another year. I will dig around it and put manure." Give it another year.

We call them people with "green thumbs." People who love plants. People who sing and talk to them like they were people. People like the gardener who pleads, "Give it another year." People who celebrate the inter-connectedness of all life. People who believe in second chances for everyone.

Then there are people who treat everything as property. As commodity. As disposable. And a handful of them just acquired over 600,000 square kilometers of prime agricultural land. For development. For profit.

And I am sure, they will chop down not just Fig trees.

The Two Sons

The Gospel of Matthew used this Jesus parable to address the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his time (about 60 years after Jesus's ministry). For Matthew's Jesus the tax collectors and the prostitutes were the older son. The religious elite was the younger.

Tatay had two sons, my older brother and I. I have two sons. Thus, the parable of the two sons is quite a personal one for me.

The father asks both his sons to help out in the vineyard. The older said no but afterward changed his mind and went. The younger said yes but afterward changed his mind and did not go.

During Jesus’s time,  the family, the basic unit of Roman society, was run and owned by the father. Augustus, Roman Emperor, was Father of All Fathers. Fathers had the power of life and death over everyone in his family. Everyone was the father's property.

The two sons in the parable both disobey their father. The older by word. The younger by deed. We know that fathers then killed children who disobeyed them. Tragically, there are still fathers today who kill their children for disobeying them. Fathers who treat their children as property.

But not the father in the parable. No one is thrown into places where there is darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. No one is banished. No one is punished.

The father is probably like Joseph, Jesus's father.  Like Tatay. Like your father. I don't remember the number of times Kuya and I have disobeyed Tatay. Growing up, I'm sure Jesus and his siblings did too. I don't remember how many times my two sons have disobeyed me and their mother.

And I think that's the point of the parable. Parents do not remember their children's disobedience because they do not count them. Children are people, not property. And people change. I'm sure there were more times the sons disobeyed their father if we continued the story. But I want to believe that eventually they got to the point where they did not have to be told what to do.

The Parable of the Seed

Most of us had to do this science project early in grade school. Bring soil in see-through pots or containers. And some seeds. In many cases in the Philippines, we brought mongo beans. We called this project, the life cycle of a plant.

Many times our next science project was the life cycle of a frog. But this is topic for another time.

Back to the mongo beans. We waited patiently for the seeds to change. For six-year olds, waiting for hours takes forever. Then we see the surprise. Slowly but surely the tiny seeds become plants. And we watch in awe and wonder.

People whose hearts beat with the heart beat of Mother Earth know this parable. Not as a story but as the reality of life. Life begets life. Each seed bears a promise.

Many times we forget that God's creation helps God create. The waters bring forth fish of all kinds. The earth brings forth plants and animals. Many times we forget that we, you and I, are latecomers to the cycles and dances of life.

Maybe it's time we just step back and watch in awe and wonder. Like we did when we were six years old.