When I was first ordained, I didn’t know how to dress for gatherings of clergy. I remember that I was always wearing a suit or jacket when everyone else seemed to be in jeans and sweaters. When I thought I’d dress comfortably, everyone else was dressed in suits. It’s easier now. Our own bishops rarely dress formally, except for visitations or funerals. My past confusion about dress code reminds me how we often negotiate in our head and in our actions what we think is most appropriate for an occasion.

         I thought about this when I reflected on Naaman, and his visit to Elisha. He brings along with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of garments. What do you wear to a healing? What is the appropriate hostess gift?

         Naaman is suffering from leprosy. In his day this could have been any skin disorder, but the terrible thing about leprosy in that day was that it made people outcasts. They could no longer participate in community, but had to live outside and depend upon the charity of others. Naaman was a general of Aram. The king of Aram needed his general, so he sought a cure. A slave girl from Israel suggested he go to Elisha the prophet in Israel. Naaman goes to the king of Israel seeking a cure, and carrying a large retinue of gift bearers. The king of Israel is terrified. What can he do for this man, no matter how much gold he brings?

         Everyone thought that they were doing the appropriate thing. They all thought that they knew how everything works. Naaman thinks that all he has to do is bring enough money and the king of Israel will produce a cure. The king of Israel thinks that Naaman and the king of Aram must be looking for a fight because he knows this is an impossible request. No one knows how God works.

         Elisha sends word to the king – not to worry, I know what to do. He tells Naaman to wash in the Jordan River seven times and he’ll be cured. Naaman is appalled. That muddy river! Aren’t there better rivers in Damascus? Why did I come all this way? You’d think for the price I’m offering the holy man would at least jump up and down or wave his hands and say some magic words! A levelheaded servant suggests to Naaman that if the prophet had suggested something more difficult, he would have done it – so why not give it a try. Naaman bathes and his skin is made clean. God does not work the way we suppose. There is no need to impress God or pay God. God heals because God is merciful, and God’s mercy cannot be bought or sold.

         A leper walks right up to Jesus and declares, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” The man shows faith not only in his words but also in his actions. He crosses a lot of barriers that everyone else takes for granted. Everyone knows that lepers keep to the outskirts of town. Everyone knows that lepers aren’t supposed to approach anyone, for fear of contagion. Everyone knows that leprosy is a sign of God’s disfavor – they must have done something to deserve their illness. Everyone knows that he should not dare to approach a holy man.

         Jesus also crosses an unspoken barrier. He acknowledges the man and even touches him. I do choose. Be made clean! The man is cured instantly. No need to even bathe once in the Jordan! In touching him, Jesus himself becomes ritually unclean. Perhaps this is why he tells the man to go quietly to the priests and get declared legally clean. Perhaps Jesus wants the man to be restored to community. Maybe Jesus just doesn’t want the attention. Maybe he doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea about who he is.

         The result of the healing of the leper is that Jesus becomes famous and he has difficulty traveling because everyone wants to see him. Isn’t that a good problem to have? Doesn’t Jesus want people to come and hear his message? That’s the way it works, right? Jesus is merciful, and Jesus is proclaiming a message of freedom and new life, but not a message of miracles. Jesus hasn’t come to do miracles. He has come to offer the complete miracle we all need. Jesus has come to transform hearts and to give us all new life.

         The healing of the leper shows how far Jesus is willing to go. He crosses over all of our barriers and he rejects all of the accepted ways of doing things. It is not that Jesus is some sort of iconoclast who wants to destroy society. Jesus wants to do more than to replace the institutions and patterns that have outlived their usefulness. Jesus is offering an entirely new way of living. He is offering new life, eternal life. He is doing more than healing our bodies. He is giving us new hearts.

         The question for us is what do we have to give up that we know to be true? We assume that we know how everything works. We develop ways of working together that we know will work. We relate to the surrounding community in the way we always have. It’s time we re-examined whether or not we are following God’s way.

         I’m not saying that the old ways of doing things are wrong simply because they are old. We are blessed with many traditions that give us wisdom and sense that we are connected with generations of faithful people. Our faith is not some monolithic objective thing that we have to carry or work around. Our faith is a living relationship with God. We have to constantly work to deepen and enlarge our faith. We have to look to see the new things God is doing – in us and around us.

         Paul uses the image of a track meet. To win the race we have to work. The work is not to copy the challenges of the past. Our work is to follow God faithfully in this moment. We don’t really “win” as if we have defeated someone else. We are training to seek the path God has given us and we are training to follow to the best of our abilities.

         It’s easier to have customs and traditions that are comfortable. God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. God calls us to live. As we are ready to give up those things that no longer give us life, we are closer to following more faithfully the path that leads to real life.

          The Episcopal Church is full of tradition. This congregation, this sanctuary, our Prayer Book – are all soaked with tradition. We don’t like to mess with the things that we find comfortable. You’ve all heard versions of the joke, “How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?” “Three. One to change the light bulb, one to hold the ladder, and one to say how much they liked the old one better.” (Or, how dare you change that light bulb! My grandmother gave that light bulb to the church!) Our traditions do more than distinguish us from other Christians. Our traditions help us make sense of our world. They help us to remember connections between us and across generations. They help to define us and to describe how we belong here.

         They are also often invisible to us. We take them for granted. We think that everyone knows how to worship here. We think everyone knows how things work. If we are one of the few who don’t know, we’re embarrassed to ask.

         Jesus has a run in with the Pharisees over tradition. They wondered why Jesus did not instruct his disciples on the proper rituals of hand washing and purification. These rules had been passed down as oral tradition in order to know how to obey the written law. If a person was scrupulous in obeying the traditions, then they could be assured that they had kept the written law.

         We look on this and we are trained to reject the legalism we think we see. If we look at ourselves a little more closely, we might be able to see the legalists that are in us. We have unconscious rules for behaving in public and for raising our children. There are unspoken rules of driving on the highway (don’t drive slow in the fast lane!) We often don’t see these until we meet someone from another culture who questions what we do. Europeans wonder why Americans shower everyday. Are we dirty?

         Jesus shares his frustration with the Pharisees, and maybe his culture, in how they would fuss over the details and miss the important actions. For Jesus, it’s not how a person washes his or her hands that makes them pure. Purity is from the heart. It’s not what we eat or how we cleanse ourselves before we eat that makes us “clean”. Jesus reminds the disciples that it is what comes out of the heart that shows how pure we are.

         In the very next scene, a Canaanite woman interrupts Jesus and the disciples. She is begging, screaming for Jesus that he might heal her daughter. The disciples want her to shut up. The tell Jesus to make her go away. Jesus’ remark is very harsh. He is sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Where is the love for all the world? What’s going on here? Many scripture commentators reflect that Jesus is showing his human side. He changes his mind about something. People find comfort in this because it’s heartening to know that God is not rigid or legalistic. Jesus bends to accept the faith of another.

         Another way to reflect on this is that Jesus is testing her. He may also be testing the disciples. In other words, Jesus says something harsh. He speaks legalistic rules in order to see if anyone will challenge the status quo. In the end, it is the foreign woman who shows faith and challenges Jesus to give the crumbs to the dogs.

         I think we must be careful when we look at scripture with our concerns and assume that the original context is the same as ours. We have been wrestling for generations with church rules. We have argued about the ordination of women, the prayer book, a new hymnbook, and more recently the ordination and marriage of homosexuals. We are looking for proof texts about inclusion. We want to see Jesus being flexible so we can feel more comfortable about being flexible. I heartily agree with the perspective that we cannot know the mind of God and we should not proscribe what God must do. I believe we are more free in our faith than we let ourselves be.

         I also think that this text is not about the flexibility of Jesus. This is not a text we should use to prove a point about how God isn’t rigid. Jesus is giving us the opportunity to see our own legalism. We adopt our own set of standards around who belongs and how we should behave. Jesus reminds us to look in the heart and not at how a person dresses or how they comport themselves. Jesus gives us the opportunity to see the faith of another person before we make judgments about whom they are or what they have to offer.

         Everyone says, “We want the church to grow.” In my experience, we say that we welcome the stranger, but in practice we want to fill the church only with people who are just like us. If we honestly want to welcome the stranger, then we have to allow ourselves to be comfortable with people who are strange to us. The gift Jesus gives us is that we can receive the surprising gifts that they have to offer. They can help us grow more faithful by discovering new ways to express our faith.

         In the gospel this morning, the Pharisees are blind guides and the disciples are unwelcoming and heartless towards the stranger. Even Jesus seems to dismiss her. It is the hated foreigner who displays great faith towards Jesus. It is the Canaanite woman who is blessed and who is a blessing to others.

         We are anxious about the future. Our natural tendency is to follow patterns from the path and to surround ourselves with familiar faces and familiar plans. Maybe we should embrace the freedom that is offered to us. We don’t really know what God wants from us at any moment. We are free to discover what it is. We are also free to invite the stranger among us. Not only might we discover new ways to be faithful, we may also be blessed by their gifts.

             If we only took away the message that Jesus heals a blind man: that would be enough. We live in a world where we very much depend upon our sight. We know that there are many ways that the blind can cope and find their way, but not without difficulty. Jesus acts in a way that is compassionate and helpful. The man who is healed is thankful and believes in Jesus because of the miracle. If we could have the same reaction, we would have learned enough.

            But the long chapter we have heard begins with the complicated feelings we always have when we face illness and wonder about God’s role in our lives. We believe all sorts of absolute things about God, and the difficult problems of our lives don’t seem to fit into our neat theological categories. The man is born blind. A loving God would not create someone that way, so there must be someone who deserves it. The disciples argue (as if the man is not there or that he has no feelings), that either his parents must have sinned or he must have sinned (in the womb? – or perhaps God knew the man would sin later and punished him preemptively?) The whole argument is empty of any compassion for the suffering of the blind man. In the larger context, no one seems to upset by his lot in life until he is healed, and then they only know him as “the man who used to beg.”

             In contrast, as Jesus walks along, he sees the blind man and has compassion. He heals him. The only explanation is that the man is blind “so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” This is a mystery at first, but through the healing, this blind man professes faith in Jesus, and in the end it is the blind man who sees while everyone else is blind to the truth.

            This is a story about a healing. It also a story about true blindness and true sight. The different arguments and approaches say a lot about what the different characters believe about God and what they believe about themselves. The disciples are rather cruel and dispassionate. They walk by the blind man and begin to discuss the theological implications of his blindness. No “good morning,” or “can I get you something?” Their faith is of no use to the blind man. They show by their actions that they want nothing to do with him. They offer us a good test of our own beliefs. If what we believe about God lets us walk by and ignore a person in our midst, maybe we are lacking something. Jesus doesn’t get into the argument. He just heals the man.

            The religious authorities aren’t much better. They have a status quo to uphold. There must be a logical explanation that keeps God pure. They are troubled that Jesus performs and act of work on the Sabbath in order to heal the man. Again, they have no thought for the blind man. No “thank God!” or “good for you!” They can’t hold the thought in their heads that an obvious act of God could occur in way that breaks a law. They are not marveling at the wonderful generosity of God. They are trying to fill any loopholes in the rules.

            The man who was born blind is called in to clear everything up. He tells what he knows – which isn’t much. After all, until recently, he was blind. He never saw Jesus. He probably never studied scripture – not being able to read. The authorities expect him to have all the proper answers, and all he can say is what happened. He cannot help them with their theological puzzle.

            In the end, they declare that he is a sinner – always has been and always will be. They throw him out of the synagogue. I wonder how much of a loss this was for the man. After all – what connection did he ever have with the religious community except as a poor sinner to be pitied and shunned? He was born blind after all: someone must have sinned. When Jesus finds the man again, he is ready to believe. More than believing, he worships Jesus.

            The blind man teaches us what to look for. As we see suffering and loss all around us, we are usually quick to assign blame. We say that people are sick because they eat the wrong foods, or they smoke, or their parents didn’t raise them right. We say that people are poor because they are lazy or they make bad choices. People are sad or lonely because they do something to deserve it… It’s always easy to fix blame, especially if we don’t have to get close to that person and see them as a child of God who needs our compassion.

            In our blindness, we do not see as God sees. God loves all of us; no matter how well we’ve managed to polish up our lives or how badly we messed it up. God doesn’t wish our suffering, but God will use it bring us to a new place. If we are open to see with God’s eyes, we can see how God is reaching out and loving the world. We can see how God is healing and transforming every hurt and broken thing. We can see that it all has very little to do with us and what we deserve. All of this is the creative desire of God to make us into new people.

            As we see with new eyes, we are likely to give up all the false illusions and rules that used to make us feel good by blocking out the truth. We will not be content with easy answers that are easy to follow and cost us nothing. We will be more comfortable with the mystery of God’s love – that is offered to us when we are at our worst. And we will see that we have everything in common with sinners and losers. Our life is a gift and we can rejoice in the God who loves even us!

Greg