A tiny shaft of blinding light

Sermon by the Rev. Bret Hays, Epiphany 6, Feb. 12, 2012

   There were a few times in my childhood when sweet, well-meaning adults would try to use candy to teach me something non-candy-related. Like the deep Christian symbolism of the shape and color of a candy cane. Which is nonsense, by the way. Or how to use M&Ms to do a math problem of some kind. Obviously I’ve forgotten what the problem was, let alone how you use sweet, delicious candy to solve it. In a sense I “should” have been more concerned with the important lessons and less concerned with the sugary treats, but I can’t say I feel too guilty. Little things and keen desires can be not just distracting, but utterly captivating. It’s human nature to be distracted in this way.
    You don’t have to be a child to focus on the immediate satisfaction of a personal need in the face of something more weighty, though as I’m fond of noting, you’re never too old to be immature. Once when I was in college, a friend of mine was a potential juror in a criminal trial. The crime was so heinous that every juror had to be able to consider whether the death penalty was warranted, should they convict the defendant. My friend was automatically excused when he said he was morally opposed to the death penalty in all cases. I was proud of him, but my esteem was only enhanced by the fact that, since he had been excused from jury duty — because of his deep moral integrity — our weekend trip to his family’s lakeside cabin would go ahead as planned.
    What a burden is borne by those who are determined to convey a profound, high-level message to a world so easily distracted. While the technology that invades every corner of our lives makes it seem we invented distraction, things were at least as bad in Jesus’s day in part because the world was so primitive. For example, with no cure for most diseases, and no understanding of them except for the fact that you could catch someone’s sickness just by being close to them, people had a lot to worry about.
    Part of the charm of Mark’s Gospel is that it moves along at a brisk pace. We’re still in chapter one and already Jesus has been foretold, baptized, and tempted. Jesus has called disciples, taught in the synagogue, healed many, and begun his intended ministry of itinerant preaching. Mark boils Jesus’s message down to one sentence: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” The first part means that God is about to make a radical, decisive, permanent, and long-foretold intervention in human history; the second, that the proper way to be ready for what God is about to do is by turning from sin to good deeds and by believing the message.
    Now this is the biggest and most important message in human history, proclaimed by God’s own Son. Do you think those who heard it from Jesus’s lips didn’t get distracted by smaller things? Of course they did. That’s why we need saving — we turn away from God and God’s message and towards lesser things and other messages.
   That’s not to deny, diminish, or disrespect the leper or his condition. Jesus treated him and his stated need with compassion, and we should follow Jesus’s example. Rather, there is a different way of looking at the story. Namely, from God’s point of view, even the worst of our problems are trivial because God will elevate every person and all creation to health and wholeness in the transformation of this broken world into God’s Kingdom. From God’s point of view, the transition has already begun and will be complete in the blink of an eye. It would be like you or me standing at the counter to redeem a grand-prize-winning lottery ticket and noticing a typo in the fine print on the back. Unquestionably there’s something wrong with what’s in your hand, but you’re not going to insist they stop everything and reprint all the tickets before you cash in.
    By the same token, and as we all know only too well, God doesn’t intervene in every life and solve every problem, meet every need, and heal every sickness. God revealed in the healings Jesus did perform that God does care, deeply, for the well-being of every person, especially those who had been marginalized or abandoned by society. But God is bringing an infinitely greater reality into existence than the one we inhabit, the only one we know, and that new reality, defined not by need and want but by God’s love, is the gift Jesus is keen to bring to us.
    Jesus does bring us the greater gift of the arrival of the Kingdom of God, both by helping us understand and by personally making it happen. Jesus helps us understand what God is doing by his verbal teaching, full of memorable images and dramatic surprises, by his actions like this incident of healing the leper, showing us the way things will be and his own authority in making them so, and by sending the Holy Spirit to enlighten, inspire, encourage, and guide us. Jesus also brings the Kingdom of God into the world by his own personal mission to suffer and die for us, and by his rising again and defeating evil, death, and all the forces that mock and resist God’s Kingdom.
    It’s only natural to focus on the nearest and clearest blessings we can grasp like candy and to tell everyone what God has done with great joy. That’s all right, so long as we also see in every blessing the seed of a mighty tree, or a pinprick through the veil of sin that admits a tiny shaft of blinding light from God’s Kingdom into our broken world. Such an understanding of blessings is itself news worth sharing with anyone who will listen.