Texts: 2 Kings 5: 1-14; Mark 1: 40-45

Back in the late 70's and early 80's people used to think that Dr. Siegal was a little strange. He would spend time with his cancer patients asking them about their faith in God and how it affected their trust in him as a doctor. But Bernie Siegel was onto something. As a noted oncologist practicing at Yale New Haven Hospital, he became increasingly convinced that faith – which is ultimately trust – played a central role in healing. Since then Bernie has written extensively on this subject, including books and articles for what some of his hoity-toity colleagues at the Med School call "the popular market." Bernie, a practicing Jew who worshiped at Temple Mishkan Israel in Hamden, only commented that his colleagues just didn't want to face their own limitations. The doctor offered knowledge and skill, but the patient offered faith and trust. Without the latter, the former were useless. His colleagues didn't like that. He also believed in patient education because he believed that people know their own bodies and minds better than doctors ever could. The docs at Yale didn't like that either.

Over the last several years, a number of studies have shown the importance of faith in the prognosis of patients. Those persons with religious beliefs usually get better than those without any religious framework. There are several reasons for this. Western medicine has traditionally looked at illness as a malfunctioning of the body, to be corrected by appropriate medical and surgical intervention. Even mental illness is often treated as a purely medical condition in the use of certain psychotropic drugs and anti-depressants.

However, this approach has had the serious limitation, as Bernie Siegel has shown of failing to acknowledge how bodily and psychological processes affect each other. The interplay may include the sick person and the family, social conditions, such as poverty, and deep psychological trauma as well. Chronic illnesses cause demoralization and can often destroy a person's will not only to live but to actually get better. Constant misery combined with a lack of self-esteem or personal worth often contribute to the factors that prolong illnesses. Sometimes, as a person stays ill for a longer period of time, the family sees the person more as a burden than a benefit and unconsiciously makes the sick person aware of how much of a burden he or she is. In fact, don't we often hear older people say, "I don't want to be a burden to..." Choose your ending.

This feeling of being a burden is exacerbated by a societal attitude that there is a bottom line of money, or worth, to every activity. There's even a magazine called Worth, which is only about money and the monetary value of things. How sad. How awful! When we think of something – or someone – only in monetary terms.

Unfortunately, medicine and its practitioners normally consider people only in monetary terms or in terms of their so-called "presenting conditions." Modern medicine with its increased specialization almost required because it seems impossible for a General Practitioner – remember that term? – to know everything. Specialization, which has led to a greater in-depth approach to illnesses, has also led to looking at patients not as patients but as "cases" or illnesses. I remember talking to Dr. Stilson, my children's pediatrician in New Haven about a medical problem my mother was having and how doctors did not seem to diagnose it properly. He looked at me and said, "That's because they don't see the forest for the trees." Trained in general practice, he suggested my mother talk to her doctor about a certain type of infection and, lo, he was correct.

Specialization obviously has not just affected medicine. It affects law as well. There are types of cases I would not even dare think of taking, even in immigration law, because the area of specialized knowledge required is beyond what I know. I know enough to know that I don't know it, but I also know enough to listen to someone and suggest someone who does. That is the key, of course: listening. It's a skill that few of us seem to have anymore. That's because it takes time to listen. And,time, as the poet has noted is something we all seem to see slip by us. Listening is, as a book title notes, an act of love because we are giving something to someone else we can never recover: time.

Remember that old Norman Rockwell painting of the doctor caring for a sick child in his bed? The worried mother is standing by. The doctor is listening, not just to the child's heartbeat, but to the child. How often do we feel that doctors – or anyone else, for that matter – listened, really listened to what we had to say?

Listening, of course, works both ways as our morning's readings show. In the story from the Book of Kings, Naaman, a commander, "a great man," as the text calls him, suffered from leprosy. Hearing from a servant girl, a captured servant girl, someone who should have had no love for her captors, that there was a man in Israel who could cure him, Naaman's first instinct is to write the King of Israel and send him money. The servant girl, captive and away from her people, feels pity for this man who suffers. The man responds as many do in power. He offers money. He wants to buy the cure. This sounds so familiar. We hear the words of truth from those we oppress and our solution is to offer money. Didn't work then. Doesn't work now.

Elisha, the "man of God" in the text, sees an opportunity to show God's power over that of mere money and earthly power. And we cannot forget the response of the King in this story who is terrified that this is a ruse to pick a quarrel. Tearing his clothes, he shouts, "Does this man think that I am God that I can cure leprosy?" When confronted with seemingly impossible situations, that is often our first response. Who does the requester think I am? God? That I can cure? But the question here is not just curing – God cures through Elisha's command in the story – a symbol for subjecting oneself to God's demands. The real hero of the story is not Elisha but the servant girl. She doesn't cure. She cares. Caring is the real miracle of this story. Just as it is in the sotry of Jesus and the leper. Caring is always the real miracle.

Caring is like doing what Elisha tells Naaman to do. Wash in the Jordan seven times. So easy but yet so difficult. This, too, is difficult for us. Like having faith, trusting in God. Like listening, really listening, to the world aruund us and caring enough to act. Just like money couldn't buy Naaman his cure, so our pitiful attempts to buy the cures for the ills of society will fail. When Naaman listens and obeys, he is cured. So, too, are we.

In the Gospel, it is Jesus who listens and responds. "Moved with pity," the text says. Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him. There are hidden messages in this text. Lepers were unclean. To touch a leper made a person unclean, ritually unclean so that purification was required before the one who touched the leper could go to temple or synagogue. To touch a leper might make a peson physically unclean as well. The causes of leprosy, or Hansen's disease as we now call it, were unknown. Lepers were feared. Remember that scene in Ben-Hur where lepers live in a pit-like cave, not even cared for like animals. That came from fear – raw fear. Those of you who are old enough may remember the polio epidemics of the early 50s. The rank fear of infection propelled by images of the iron lung separated people from each other. Stay out of the water. Don't go near strangers, don't even go near friends.

The early 80s and AIDS created the same fears. Before we knew its causes, children with AIDS were not permitted to go to school. I was told that to even touch a child with AIDS would bring death to my own children. Raw fear prevents us from listening, from seeing the human in the other, from caring. We fear the other, the unknown other. But trusting in God means we move beyond such fears and care for others – even those we do not know or understand. The servant girl could have let her captor die. Why not? He had captured her, enslaved her. But her faith and trust moved her beyond the so-called natural feelings she should have had into the same kind of love without borders Jesus had when he was moved with pity for the leper. We don't have to be a Jesus to love across borders. The captured servant girl wasn't. We, too, can have the same kind of caring if we only have faith, which is ultimately, trust, real trust, in God.

Let us pray: Holy Creator who made us all, move us beyond our fears to have trust in you and to care for those we do not know so we may all be healed. Amen.