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Mark 1:40-45 · A Man With Leprosy
How Can I Keep From Singing?
Mark 1:40-45
Sermon
by Leonard Sweet
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There is a story of a Vermont farmer who was sitting with his wife one evening on the porch, looking at the beautiful valley laid out before them. Everything about the moment was filled with peace. At last the farmer spoke quietly, as if reluctant to break the spell. “Sarah,” he said, “we’ve had a lot of ups and downs together during these forty years, and when I’ve thought of all you’ve meant to me, sometimes it’s been almost more than I could do to keep from telling you.”

Sometimes things just “leak” out of us, no matter how hard we try to plug them up.

Sometimes we spring a “leak” that should have sprung long ago. Other times leaks spring that never should have sprung.

You might call “leaks” one of the strangest political strategies of our day – the calculated flow of clandestine information that is “leaked” for public consumption.

In “real life” leaks are never a good thing. A leaky water line or toilet valve can pour money down the drain without ever giving away its presence. A leaky gas vent can put whole buildings in danger of blowing up. Leaky seals around doors and windows allow our climate-controlled inside air to escape out and outside air to seep in. Leaking brake lines, transmission fluids, or battery acid can all spell disaster for our safety while driving.

Yet when what is being “leaked” isn’t water or gas or air, but snippets of information. Such “leaks” are most often greeted as helpful and healthy, providing insider knowledge to those outside the loop.

Still, the definition of a “leak” is a small, localized escape of whatever is supposed to be contained. As the creators of such now infamous sites such as “Wikileaks” have learned, there really is such a thing as “TMK,” “too much knowledge” or “TMI,” “too much information.”

Small, controlled, contained leaks are often used by government agencies and private institutions to start a trickle of information that might soon become a river of revelations. It’s never difficult to find a source to provide such leaks. Most of us are pretty terrible at keeping secrets. After all what is the point of having “secret knowledge” if you cannot share the fact that you have it?

The lure of “secret knowledge” that is, conversely, known and controlled by a select few, is what has kept all sorts of organizations going — such as modern day fraternities and sororities, the mysterious Masons, the secretive Knight’s Templar, the ancient Gnostics. They all have wanted to keep their secrets. But also, selectively, to share them.

Biblical scholars have long noted the apparent theme of a “messianic secret” in Mark’s gospel. Of course, by the time Mark was actually written down, the “secret” was long out-of-the-bag. Yet even in the earliest chapters of Mark’s text this “secret” the true identity of Jesus as Messiah and Lord was contained in a very leaky pipeline of relationships and encounters.

The first time Jesus appears on the scene — at his baptism — the very heavens open up and spill the beans.

When Jesus makes his first public appearance to preach and teach, an unclean spirit pipes up in the synagogue crowd and identifies him as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24).

While Jesus successfully shushes that spirit and squashes a host of other demons into quietness, his attempt to stay under the radar is lost when he responds to the needs of one man with leprosy.

When the demons Jesus cast out were ordered into silence, their inhuman spirits were quashed into obedient quietness. But when the human spirit of the man with leprosy is released from its hearse, from its prison of isolation and expulsion, through the power of Jesus’ touch and word, that human spirit soars. The same encounter that puts evil spirits in chains gives human spirits wings. It’s almost as if we can hear the leper singing the popular praise song “How Can I Keep From Singing.”

Despite Jesus’ command to keep quiet, the man healed of his leprosy cannot help but to proclaim his miraculous transformation, to “broadcast” far and wide the good news of his wholeness and to reveal who had made that wholeness possible.

Primed and juiced by joy, this man’s exuberant exclamations acted as a kind of controlled “leak” about the person and power of Jesus the Christ. Mark’s text declares that it was because of the proclamations of this cleansed leper that Jesus’ popularity grew so great, forcing him to stay outside the synagogues and cities, sending him ever further out into the countryside. There his work and words became even more widespread and well known. Instead of staying within the safe circle of the synagogue circuit, the joyous witness of this one man ushered Jesus into the next phase of his mission and journey.

While the healed leper in this week’s text may have been the first to act as a leaky source of the messianic secret, he was by no means the last. Again and again when Jesus cautions the crowds to be quiet, they respond by spreading the news of his healing powers, his authoritative words, his depth of knowledge, his good news of the kingdom. The volume of the crowds continues to increase throughout Jesus’ ministry.

The greatest theologian America has produced pastor, scholar, shepherd of the First Great Awakening, Princeton president Jonathan Edwards should be remembered for more than a sermon about sinners dangling over the flames of hell (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”). Edwards conceived a theological notion he called “remanations” — the human response to an encounter with a divine “emanation,” the presence of the divine in our midst.

According to Edwards, when a human encounters the emanation of the divine, the human spirit responds with its own reflection, its own kind of bounce-back echo, of that divinity. Of course, the emanation Edwards meant was the person and presence of Jesus Christ. Each human being who encounters the Christ, who is transformed in the presence of that divine emanation, becomes a “remanation” — a reflection of that glory.

When the leper in today’s gospel text encountered the emanation of the divine in Jesus, he could not help but “bounce back” that light, that love, that energy. The cleansed leper became a “remanation,” a reflection of Christ’s transforming, healing wholeness. He reflected God’s power and glory with his cleansed skin and his clear voice.

What does it mean for us to be a “remanation” of the divine emanation? What does it mean for us to be an echo, a reflection of Christ in this twenty-first century?

Like the first century leper, it means giving up some control, letting the personal experience of a Christ-encounter take hold and take you away. Once you add leavening to a mixture of flour, water, and sugar, things are going to happen. You cannot tell the infused dough not to rise. Once we experience the power and presence of Jesus, we cannot help but be fundamentally altered. We are changed. We are charged. We are challenged. [This might be developed here into a more traditional-type sermon on how in Christ we are 1) Changed, 2) Charged, 3) Challenged).

But the best explanation I can come up with of the relationship between a “remanation” and an “emanation” is this story from Robert Fulghum. Fulghum is most known for his first book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1988), which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. But his second book is my favorite: It was On Fire When I Lay Down On It (1989).

It’s a chapter called “Are There Any Questions?” which details Fulghum’s penchant for asking “What is the Meaning of Life?” at the end of lectures which end with “Are There Any Questions?” It’s a story about a lecture that was given by Alexander Papaderos on the Greek isle of Crete, where Fulghum today lives when he’s not at home in Seattle. Papaderos is a scholar, politician, gardener, and resident of Athens. He created an institute to heal the memories between the Greeks and the Germans, even after the Germans were guilty of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable against the Greek people.

“By the time I came to the institute for a summer session, Alexander Papaderos had become a living legend. One look at him and you saw his strength and intensity ‑‑ energy, physical power, courage, intelligence, passion, and vivacity radiated from this person. And to speak to him, to shake his hand, to be in a room with him when he spoke, was to experience his extraordinary electric humanity. Few men live up to their reputations when you get close. Alexander Papaderos was an exception.

At the last session on the last morning of a two‑week seminar on Greek culture, led by intellectuals and experts in their fields who were recruited by Papaderos from across Greece, Papaderos rose from his chair at the back of the room and walked to the front, where he stood in the bright Greek sunlight of an open window and looked out. We followed his gaze across the bay to the iron cross marking the German cemetery.

He turned. And made the ritual gesture: "Are there any questions?"

Quiet quilted the room. These two weeks had generated enough questions for a lifetime, but for now there was only silence.

"No questions?" Papaderos swept the room with his eyes.

So. I asked.

"Dr. Papaderos, what is the meaning of life?"

The usual laughter followed, and people stirred to go.

Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was.

"I will answer your question."

Taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into a leather billfold and brought out a very small round mirror, about the size of a quarter.

And what he said went like this:

"When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.

"I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine ‑‑ in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

"I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child's game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of light. But light ‑‑ truth, understanding, knowledge ‑‑ is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

"I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world ‑‑ into the black places in the hearts of men ‑‑ and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life."

And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk.”

This week I charge you with the challenge of carrying around with you in the wallet of your mind a small round mirror as a reminder that you are a remanation of an emanation . . .

So don’t hide your light under a bushel.

ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., Leonard Sweet Sermons, by Leonard Sweet