“I am the Lord who heals you.” --Exodus 15
One of the most dangerous forms of infection today is something called sepsis. Sepsis is caused by bacteria which invade the body through an open wound, then cause an inflammatory response within which quickly attacks the body, shuts down organs, and can even cause death.
It’s a frightening and debilitating experience. It literally binds up one’s bodily systems and breaks down the body from the inside out. And it can all start from one small wound.
But physical wounds are not the most insidious ones we face in our lives. Despite the havoc our physical maladies can cause, they often don’t come close to the mental, emotional, and spiritual ills that plague us.
The most debilitating and insidious of these are guilt and shame. Can I get an amen?
Past abuse, childhood trauma, a difficult marriage, mistakes we’ve made. The memories and experiences of those times and places get inside of us and grow and fester until they can entirely debilitate our spirit. Anger and pain last for a time. But shame and guilt are the true destroyers of the soul. Like a flesh-eating virus, they eat away at our self-image, our self-worth, and our self-confidence until we no longer can see in ourselves the image that God created. We only see the broken ugliness of that shame and guilt masquerading as our identity.
Guilt and shame are like bandits that hold our soul hostage without ransom. They are the silent killers. The silent sins. I like to call them the “sin under your skin.”
Once inside, once under your skin, that insidious guilt and shame will go about destroying every relationship you try to have, every encounter you try to make, and will discourage you from every step you try to take to recover your life.
Sin is sepsis of the soul. And the worst sins we embody are those of guilt and shame.
In our scripture for today, instead of our word sepsis, Isaiah and others use a different metaphor for sin. They call sin a condition of “leprosy.” Sin is leprosy of the soul. Why?
Cause in Jesus’ day,….leprosy was the worst condition you could have. Leprosy, that is, true leprosy, was and is a terrible disease. Once you see a leprous spot appear, you can be sure, it will spread, and when it does, it literally eats and rots the skin from the body little by little. And it was terribly contagious. For this reason, lepers were banned from community, unless or until they could be declared “clean” or cured of the disease. Eventually leprosy could also kill you.
To call “sin” a leprosy of the soul in the Jewish tradition often indicated that you may have engaged in a “sin of the tongue” called lashon hara –which meant you either slandered someone or gossiped about them or unjustly accused them. The sin of the tongue, they believed, was a kind of “leprous” condition, so insidious that it would rot your spirit when you engaged in it. This kind of rotten spirit was not something you wanted to spread.
But sometimes you may not have been the one who gave the tongue lashing. You may have been the one who received that lashing of the tongue, in which case, you could have received your “leprous” condition second-hand. You could have “inherited it” from an abusive parent. You could have gotten it from bullying classmates. You could have gotten it from an argumentative husband or wife.
So, it was possible to live with a soul-eating syndrome of insidious guilt and shame, having done no harm of your own in the matter!
It’s not a matter of fault. It’s only a matter of sin.
So let’s talk about that word “sin” for a moment. Cause when we usually think of sin, we often think of “fault.” But “sin” and “fault” are not the same. Let me say that again. Sin and fault are not the same.
Some sins may be your fault. Some may be someone else’s fault! Fault is an act. Sin is a condition. This is what scripture explains to us today with the metaphor of leprosy.
While the Pharisees were banning people right and left, they were also taking the leprosy metaphor in scripture literally, and they were assuming that everyone who had some kind of skin condition had it because somewhere along the line, they were at fault; they were guilty of having caused harm or pain. And even if they weren’t. Even if they inherited the disease, they still assumed, it was because of some “fault,” some act of wrong done by a parent or kin.
The biggest misunderstandings made by the Pharisees that Jesus tried to correct was the Pharisees and Priests equation of sin with fault.
And fault with contagion.
Jesus knew differently. This is the amazing thing about Jesus, especially in His own time. You look at his interaction with lepers and all those who were ostracized and penalized for their assumed “faults,” and Jesus only sees a hurting soul, steeped and bound in “sins” often not of their own making.
Sin is a condition of the soul that breaks down our spirit and debilitates our relationships with God, ourselves, the world, and each other.
Sin is a leprosy not a fault of the soul.
Do some people in this world cause harm? They sure do! Some of the people Jesus healed and redeemed had done so also. But others had done nothing but live with increasing amounts of guilt and shame, misplaced and misunderstood.
In our culture today, we feel guilty about our guilt. And we try too often to take care of ourselves, hide our ills, because we are ashamed of our shame!
The priests may do their rituals and rites. They may give good Levitical medical advice and make judgment calls on contagious skin diseases. But only Jesus heals the true ailings of the soul.
Only Jesus can clear your soul of the guilt and shame that are eating at you from inside.
Sin is a sepsis of the soul. The sin that gets in. The sin under your skin that binds up your heart and debilitates your spirit and keeps you from being the beautiful and free person you were created by God to be.
Turn to Jesus. He will heal.
When Jesus met the leprous man that day in our scriptures as told in the gospel stories, He didn’t just give him advice, didn’t just grant him access, He healed His broken and wounded spirit from the inside out. He restored him into community. He sent him back to the very priests who had banned him from that community, so he could save face and be ritually accepted again into his family and his friends. He took away his guilt. He took away his shame. He restored for him his identity as a beloved child of God. Cause Jesus has the power to save!
Even from guilt and shame!
We can try to fix ourselves all we want. We can visit doctors, priests, and therapists, but the true power belongs to Jesus.
Turn to Jesus. He will heal.
Today, I invite you forward. Bring not just your illness, your aging, your grief. Bring all of those with you. But also bring those deeply embedded feelings that are crippling to your spirit –your guilt and your shame. Bring them to the feet of Jesus and ask Him to heal you.
Dig deep inside. What kinds of guilt or shame is binding you down today? Jesus wants to release the hold of that kind of “sin” that’s binding you. Jesus is the great healer. And he will free you from whatever is keeping you from being the beautiful child of God that He created you to be.
You want to reach your best potential? Jesus has the power.
Only Jesus has the power.
May the Holy Spirit come upon you. May you be cleansed of all that plagues your spirit.
May you look to Jesus and open your heart to Him!
Turn to Jesus. Jesus will heal.
Come forward in faith. Redeemed and unfettered.
Only come.
Based on the Story Lectionary
Major Text
Jesus Heals a Leper (Matthew 8:1-4; Luke 5:12-16; Mark 1:35-45)
I Am the Lord Who Heals You (Exodus 15)
Minor Text
God Gives Moses Signs to Prove God’s Power Including Healing of Leprosy (Exodus 4)
Priestly Rituals for Examining and Pronouncing Diseases of the Skin (Leviticus 13 and 14)
Miriam and Aaron Speak Against Moses (Numbers 12)
Naaman is Cured of Leprosy by Elisha and the Deceit of Gehazi Brings Leprosy Upon Him (2 Kings 5)
Psalm 12: The Perils of the Tongue
Psalm 15: Those Who Utter Truth and Not Slander
Psalm 34: May Your Tongue Praise the Lord and Not Speak Deceit
Psalm 39: I Will Keep My Tongue from Sin
Psalm 52: Those Who Speak Evil as Opposed to Those Who Speak of the Lord
Psalm 73: The Wicked Speak with Malice
Psalm 109: The Wicked and Deceitful Speak Evil
The Evil Tongue of Haman (The Book of Esther)
God’s People Deceive and Slander Each Other and God (Jeremiah 9)
The “Leprosy” of the Deeds of Sodom and Gomorrah (Isaiah 1)
Your Tongue is a Rudder and Do Not Slander Your Brothers and Sisters (James 3 and 4)
The Evil of False Teaching (2 Timothy 2)
Jesus Heals a Leper
When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”
Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, “See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
Image Exegesis: The Sin Under Your Skin
Two major themes dominate these scriptures. One is power. Who has the power to heal? Who is wielding power in the story and how? The other has to do with sin.
The metaphors of leprosy, skin, and the hidden metaphor of the tongue (used in evil as lashon hara) see us taking “sin” upon ourselves and holding it within ourselves in the form of guilt, shame, ostracizing, and embarrassment.
In the scriptures, the sin of gossip or slander (or even what we call tattle tale-ing) is known as a sin of the tongue in the Jewish tradition (lashon hara). We can be “tongue tied” in a different kind of context! The tongue can cause us to sin when we harm someone with our words, which unlike the saying “words can never hurt me,” DO harm people, sometimes tremendously.
We can in that way also be the cause of someone else’s fettering due to our sins of the tongue.
Sin can bind the sinner and the victim! Because no matter how you look at it, “sin gets under your skin” and dwells there in a harmful kind of way. We all know that.
We carry tremendous burdens of shame, guilt, hurts, anger, jealousy, envy, and all sorts of other seething emotions underneath our skin. And it literally eats us from the inside out.
What is sin? The Hebrew scriptures use the metaphor of “leprosy” to describe it. Leprosy, while a real physical condition in Jesus’ day was also frequently used to mean sin, frequently a sin of the tongue. An example lies in the scriptures in which Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses. Miriam is struck with leprosy and must take “time out” before her restoration with the others. Isaiah also speaks of the “leprosy” of the deeds of Sodom and Gomorrah. What does this mean, this metaphorization? To understand, we need to think about leprosy, the disease.
While leprosy was a generic term often for any skin condition, or any physically visible blemish, not always the deadly form, still, this “blemish” on the outside represented a kind of “sin” on the inside.
While in the Jewish priestly tradition, this would lead to unfair labeling, ostracizement, and removal from community, we know today from our health care providers and psychologists that the metaphor itself doesn’t fall far from the tree so to speak.
We know today that stress takes physical forms! Trauma can seep out in the form of hives, allergic reactions, acne, and can trigger other autoimmune disorders. Stress can cause the heart to skip beats literally, and can lead to lethargy, depression, eating disorders, and other maladies.
Stress inside manifests in signs outside. This is what a metaphor represents –a “sign” of something hard to see or describe.
Leprosy as something like acne or hives may indicate stress or anxiety. But the more deadly form of leprosy was thought to represent a much deeper embedded sin. While we know this to be hogwash in the literal sense, we can look at what the metaphor itself represented in the ways that Isaiah and the Torah used it.
Leprosy was a skin destroying disease. It would rot so to speak and eat away at the body. To describe sin in this way visually is often the way we describe the long-term effects of shame and guilt upon our person and our spirit. It is a slow-developing disease and eats us up from the inside out and gradually destroys our spiritual and emotional health, literally causing us to separate from those we love and the community we share. Shame and guilt, anger and envy all serve to remove our “clothing/skin” of holiness granted us by God. It eats it away until we no longer see ourselves as beautiful people of God, but as partial persons, lonely and burdened. This can also be the case when we do something wrong. Our guilty conscience can literally eat us up inside. Some sins are placed upon us. If you were abused as a child, you bear shame and guilt that are not yours (but sins of the father or mother). Yet you bear that shame upon yourself.
The reality then of sin is that it can be with or without actual fault! Sin is a condition, and like the condition of leprosy, can be healed (made clean).
That begs the question then of how. In the story, we see the priestly rituals carried out (much like our folk tradition medicine) in order to ward off these diseases or declare them onset or not. We also see a good deal of power being wielded by the priests in these transactions as they declare people acceptable or not! Then we see the true power of Jesus, the power of God, which does not ostracize but encourages community, heals and restores, blesses and cleanses from inside out.
Jesus is a doctor of heart and mind and spirit, because He restores God’s original gift of the “skin/clothing of righteousness.”
In the scripture for today, Jesus knows He is going up against the lovers of tradition and the power structures that be in Jerusalem. And yet he grants the power of God in healing many. And word about it spread…faster than leprosy itself!
For God’s blessings are far more abundant than any disease. God’s mercy and forgiveness and cleansing and redeeming are far more potent than any declaration, ritual, rite, or deed.
This may be a short scripture, but it’s a powerful one! Jesus power.