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Phil Blackwell

“A Culture of Healing”
Mark 1:40-45

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We welcome the Willie B. Clay Inspirational Choir representing Gorham United Methodist Church located at 56th and Indiana, pastored by the Rev. Audrea Fumbanks, a colleague of mine and actually one whom I mentored early in her ministry, one whom the group encouraged to continue her education to equip her for an even more complete ministry. I am delighted to hear that she is about to complete another advanced degree.

It was a gift for me to know Willie B. Clay, one of the heroes of the 1960’s and 1970’s as the United Methodist Church struggled to tear down the barriers of racism and become a truly inclusive church. There was a whole generation of African-American clergy and laity; the clergy I knew – Edsel Ammons, Charles Jordan, John Porter, H. Bernard King – who with great gracefulness reached out across the boundaries to begin the healing. So, it is with great appreciation for your namesake as well as your current ministry on behalf of Jesus Christ that I personally welcome you to the Chicago Temple.

Jim Neuman made a distinction between two words years ago. Jim was a United Methodist minister in Evanston who had terminal cancer. We all knew it because he was public about it, and we all watched as he came to terms with his illness. Near the end of his time he declared, “I am not cured, but I am healed.” I am not cured, but I am healed. What he meant was that, no matter how fervently he prayed and how much he wanted to live, his cancer was not going away. There was no cure. But, as he reached out to his family and friends, as he included all of us in his experience of facing death, he made peace with it. He was accepting of his condition, he was in love with his family and friends, and he was satisfied with his life. That is what he meant by being “healed.” The cancer had taken over his body but not his soul. He was able to move beyond it to next things.

In the gospel text for today there is a cure; that seems obvious. A leper rushes up to Jesus, kneels down before him, and pleads, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” And Jesus chooses to do so. He touches the man, and immediately his skin condition clears up. Jesus pronounces him as “clean” and instructs him to go to the priest to make an offering, as the law requires. Here Jesus honors the ancient law, acknowledges the rules of the culture.

There is a cure, but what else is going on here? Our translation says that Jesus was moved with “pity,” which is a noble and godly reaction. But other translations say that he was moved by “anger.” Why anger?

He was not angry at the leper; his skin condition was not his fault. We do not even know what the condition was. “Leprosy” was a generic term for any skin rash, flaking, or scaling. It all was thought to be contagious, so the man had been banished from society, perhaps having to ring a bell as he moved down the street, and cry out, “Leper, leper!” The humiliation that he had to endure and the ostracizing that the culture imposed on him might well have been enough to make Jesus furious. The prejudice, the ignorance, the stereotyping, the fear that led a culture to erect boundaries of segregation, those were the villains Jesus battled.

Let us be clear: Jesus was executed for a reason. He transgressed the boundaries that the society had drawn, the boundaries that excommunicated not only lepers, but also tax collectors, Samaritans, prostitutes, the poor, widows, foreigners, and children. Most of his ministry was conducted out-of-bounds. And while people vilified him for his spirit of inclusion, Jesus continued to make the boundaries of the playing field more generous.

So, when the leper was cured, he also was healed. He was brought into the society that had shunned him. So then, using Jim Neuman’s insight, we can see that Jesus was not just curing individuals but also healing an entire culture.

And so, I raise an issue for us to consider this morning that is not about leprosy but another condition, racism. And if any of us think that it is only skin deep, we need to see David Mamet’s current play at the Goodman Theater entitled “Race.” It is a rough play; thank goodness it lasts only about 90 minutes. A middle-aged white man is accused of raping a young black woman. He goes to a law firm consisting two middle-aged male attorneys, one black and one white, who have worked together for years, and a newly-hired black female associate in her 20’s. The whole play, with its terse and impolite dialogue, takes place in the law office.

I will not give away the twists and turns of the plot, but to quote the program notes, “Though the characters attempt to put aside their biases, none is able to refrain from making judgments based on race and gender . . . (thereby) creating a situation in which prejudice and assumptions can mean the difference between a guilty or innocent verdict.” Everyone is capable of exploiting others. In an interview some years ago Mamet said, “My plays are about people trying to become connected. People who are confused . . . trying to do good . . . but no one knows how. No one ever quite makes it” (notes by Neena Arndt, Associate Dramaturg).

If anyone thinks that in America we are living in a post-racial society, “Think again,” insists Mamet. If we, the Church, are to foster a culture of healing in the nation we must not pretend that we are cured and all in the past has been wiped away, but rather be honest with ourselves and acknowledge the barriers that still divide us from one another.

The barriers sometimes are implied, not stated. Most of us saw the photograph of the Governor of Arizona confronting the President, wagging her finger in his face. She said that she was not trying to demean him but just to make a point. He said that it was not big deal and being blown out of proportion

We do not know her thoughts or her motives, and I have learned, and so have you, that ascribing motives to others is a dangerous thing to do. We so often have it wrong. But when she said later that she “felt a little bit threatened” by the President, even though standing just out of the frame of the photo were two local mayors, Secret Service agents, and several journalists, it recalled for those preserving the collective memory for our nation other such moments. A white woman feeling intimidated by a black man . . .1951, Willa Jean Boswell, a 17-year old white woman, complained that a 44-year old black farmer looked at her in a threatening way. This was true, she testified, even though he never said a word to her or came within 75 feet of her. He was found guilty of rape by leering by an all-white jury (DeWayne Wickham, USA Today, 1/31/12).

We are not cured as a culture when those memories are still part of our common history, but there is hope of healing if we can find ways to move beyond the barriers now in order to create new memories for the next generations.

Sometimes the examples of just how far we still have to go are more blatant. Mike O’Neal, Speaker of the House in Kansas, sent an e-mail gleefully encouraging his supporters to offer Psalm 109 as a prayer for the nation. In this he joins others who have marketed coffee cups and bumper stickers urging people to employ this scripture as opposition to our current President. The heart of his citation consists of the verses in which there is a call for the days of the ruler to be short and that his children be left fatherless and his wife made a widow. It is, though he denies it, a call for the death of a leader.

Racist? When we look at another e-mail he sent denigrating the First Lady and making stereotypical remarks, yes, it is racist. And it also proves Shakespeare’s point in “The Merchant of Venice,” “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (I, iii, 99).

It also shows how carelessly people read scripture. The first five verses of Psalm 109 are the words of a righteous man who feels that he is being falsely accused in public. He cries out to God for redemption. And then there follows a long quotation of what his enemies are saying about him. It is from these verses that Speaker O’Neal quotes. The psalm ends in the first person singular voice again, renewing the call for vindication.

So, I e-mailed the Speaker, saying, “You got it wrong. You claimed as your own the false accusations made by the evil detractors against the faithful man of God. You sided with the enemies of God and against the devout believer’s cry for justice. That is not a smart move, siding with lying and injustice. And it also is an embarrassment to any Christian who wants the faith to be taken seriously and a barrier for any American who is trying to heal the nation of racism. It is probably best for you to send out another e-mail simply confessing your mistake. When you do, please include me on your mailing list. P.S. I know some United Methodists in Kansas who would be willing to help you read the Bible intelligently. I’ll be happy to give you some references.” I have not yet heard from Mr. O’Neal.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, a big day for us living in “The Land of Lincoln.” Go to his library in Springfield, and after a gentle introduction to his life in New Salem and his law practice in Springfield, walk through a long corridor lined with posters and epitaphs vilifying Lincoln as President and depicting him as subhuman. Listen to the taunts and insults emitting from speakers overhead, the cruelty, the savagery directed at him. Why? Because he reached across the boundaries to draw other people in, because he was willing to touch the untouchables, because he lived for, and died for, dismantling the barriers that separate us, never forgetting the past, offering no cure that would wipe the slate clean, but offering a vision that would lead us beyond the past into a future of hope. He saw a culture of healing that even today seems only partially visible.

I asked for us to have this sculpture before us today as we worship God. I know that we Protestants do not have crucifixes in our churches. I grew up as a well-instructed boy in a Methodist congregation downstate where it was made clear that Roman Catholics have crucifixes because they focus on Good Friday, a dead Jesus hanging on the cross. We Protestants are Easter people, and we revere the empty cross. The teaching was offered with a clear sense of the superiority of the Protestants.

But, we cannot get to Easter without going through Good Friday. We cannot have the resurrection of we do not have the crucifixion. In that same Protestant church of the 1950’s we went straight from singing “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday to “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” on Easter morning. There was no Maundy Thursday in the Upper Room where Jesus commanded his disciples to show honor by washing one another’s feet and instructed them constantly to gather at the Lord’s Table for the Holy Meal. There was no Good Friday – no betrayal, no arrest, no charade of a trial, no execution of an innocent man; there was no waiting, no wondering on Holy Saturday. It was just going from one celebration to another, without any meaning, because we were settling for a cure, not for healing.

This sculpture is not a crucifix. We do not venerate it in the midst of our worship services. Rather, it serves as a “gut check.” It is a reminder of our story, from whence we have started, how far we have come, and how much farther we have to go. It is a call for healing.

The story: in October of 1963 the Rev. Ed King, the campus minister at Tugaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, a white man, takes students, all of them black, to Galloway Methodist Church downtown, much like this church at the heart of the city. The minister and students are turned away at the door. They try again the next Sunday and the next Sunday, and still are prohibited from entering to worship. This cross is then burned in front of the college chapel in an attempt to intimidate the minister and the students. Clergy from the north, primarily from Chicago, black and white, go to Jackson and join the effort. Many of them are thrown into jail. No one in the group is allowed into the church.

In the spring of 1964 at the Methodist General Conference in Pittsburgh this cross becomes the symbol for the desegregation of the denomination. It is carried around the outside of the convention center; the march is featured on the front page of the New York Times. The delegates vote to desegregate, with a four-year transition period declared. Enter Willie B. Clay, Edsel Ammons, Charles Jordan, John Porter, and H. Bernard King, who lead the way for this conference.

The charred cross is given to a pastor from Chicago, Jerry Forshey, who takes it to an artist, Jack Kearney, who clads the cross in metal so that it will not deteriorate, and places a distinctly distressed, truncated, African-American Jesus on it. Jerry keeps it in his home for 40 years, and as he is dying from cancer (there was no cure), as part of his healing process he gives it to us at the Temple. “Make it public and tell the story.”

A cross of hatred redeemed, transformed into a cross of healing. Last year the members of Galloway United Methodist Church, Jackson, Mississippi, ask for us to lend them this cross with the distressed, truncated, African-American Jesus hanging on it so that it could be placed in their sanctuary and be the impetus for reflection on the role of the Church, past, present, and future. And so it happened.

We cannot restore the hands and feet to this Jesus. There is no cure for what has happened. But together we can become the hands and feet of Christ in the world so that we might be instrumental in inaugurating a culture of healing. Amen.

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
February 12, 2012