Texts: Isaiah 43: 18-25; Mark 2: 1-12

There are certain words we associate with certain parts of the country. The word "bodacious" is one of them. A term meaning boldly audacious, it even sounds southern. When I hear that word, it brings to mind that scene in Gone With the Wind, when Scarlett O'Hara tells Rhett Butler that his behavior was bodacious. I can still hear the voice of Vivien Leigh as she flirted with Clark Gable saying, "Why, Mr. Butler, you are so bodacious!" For a Shakespearean trained actress, she did that southern accent pretty well.

Well, Capernaum wasn't exactly southern Galilee, but Jesus' behavior was certainly bodacious. There are more than a few thing s interesting about this Gospel passage. First is, what surprised people and what did not surprise them. But to begin properly, we should note a few things about the setting of this story. The text tells us that "It was reported that he was at home." This implies that Jesus no longer made his home in Nazareth.

Originally a small Jewish fishing village about 20 miles from Nazareth, Capernaum had frown to become an important town on the route from the Tetrarchy of Philip, son of Herod the Great, to that of Herod Antipas, Ruler of Galilee, who married Herodias causing John to fume and lost his head. He ruled the Territory east of Galilee from 4 BCE to 34 CE; he married Salome, yes that Salome, daughter of Herodias. Capernaum lay on a narrow plain, its basalt hills rising barely 750 feet from the shore. Yet the stony beach at Capernaum was the site of constant activity a boats from other Jewish fishing villages stopped there because the richest fishing grounds in the lake lay between Capernaum and Bethsaida, about 2 to 3 miles to the east. Capernaum became the center of Jesus' Galieean ministry, so much so that Mark's Gospel says he "was at home" there.

Archaeological excavation indicates that ancient Capernaum was a fairly well-off city. The stones of the ancient synagogues were richly ornamented. To date, the oldest synagogue uncovered is from the third century. It contains the "seat of Moses," the place from which a rabbi would comment on the law to any who would listen.

The gospels all speak of Jesus retreating to pray – sometimes at the shore and sometimes in the wilderness – to listen for the word of God. Jesus' fame as a healer had spread far and wide, so much so that as mark says, "so many were gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door." I use that passage to hold myself together when we have a particularly difficult Saturday afternoon at my office. In our modern day parlance we would say the place was mobbed. The paralytic's friend decided to get creative and find another way in. That's what we often need to do when totally overwhelmed, when totally besides ourselves: get creative, or as we might say, think out of the box. Because everyone was jamming the door, hey! There's the roof. House roofs in Palestine were and, by the way, are in these small villages still, flat. This is the paralytic's last AND best hope.

So what does Jesus do? He says to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." Note that the narrator of the story has Jesus saying this first, before he tells him to take up his bed and walk. This truly is a bodacious statement. For, as the scribes and chief priests ask, "Who is this man to forgive sin?" Jesus, knew what they were thinking, "in his spirit," and so as a demonstration of his authority, he just tells the man to take up his bed and walk. That is, of course, what forgiveness permits us to do: to get up and walk. To walk away from our past, our failings, and to take on a new life, a new life in these times, these interesting times.

If we are bound by our sin, it acts as a form of paralysis on our lives. But if we know we are forgiven, then we are free to live new and free lives in God's kingdom which is in this world. Being held own by our sin, even our past sin, permits us to be controlled by our sin and by others. Dictators understand this very well. In the time of what Mao Tse-tung called the Cultural Revolution, he was able to use the past actions, or sins, of the perceived enemies of his vision of society as a way to control the people. People who had engaged in so-called bourgeois behavior were dragged into the streets; children were encouraged to denounce their parents, their siblings.

Jesus lived in a society where sin was also used as a form of social control. The temple and its leadership make their living off people bringing their offerings as a sacrifice to assuage God. By forgiving the sins of the paralytic, Jesus tells the Pharisees that they are no longer the mediators. In fact, there are no mediators between us and God. Jesus is proclaiming a new relationship. The poetry of the Second Isaiah puts it this way: I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? ...I have not burdened you with offerings, or wearied you with frankincense... I am God who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and I will not remember your sins.

Not to be burdened by our past frees us to live for the future. The past is more than our individual sins; it is also the way we think about how we should act towards each other. The new relationship Jesus tells us we must have with God requires a new relationship with humanity. Each generation has had its own concept of its relationship with others. For those, like the Pharisees, stuck in the mud of ritual and social control, those new ways of relating have not only been examples of boldly audacious and outrageous behavior but have seem as threatening the social fabric itself.

Some of you may remember the sixties with its breakthrough in music and style and its message of social change as inevitable. Bob Dylan, one of is prophets, even sang, “If you can't join in, then get out of the way, for the times, they are a'changing.” This is not to say that all bodacious behavior is necessarily the best behavior or the most effective method of creating orderly social change. But Jesus was not about orderly social change. He burst on the scene and offered God's forgiveness to all. Didn't matter who they were or what they were. Tax collectors, prostitutes and women who refused to obey social convention, lepers, revolutionaries, ordinary folk like you and me. The freedom from our past life of sin frees us from the constraint of what's supposed to be, from the myths that have nourished us and given us life to live now.

It's easy to soften the bodacious behavior of the revolutionaries of the past to enable them to become part of our foundation. One of our nation's founders, whose birthday we officially celebrate tomorrow, realized that the battle for American independence could cost him not only his head, but his fortune and his family's holdings. If Washington had lost, he would have been hanged, even possibly drawn and quartered, his property seized, is wife left penniless, his family ostracized. If Lincoln, whose birthday was last week, had not secured Southern surrender at Appomattox, he would have been pilloried the same way the bourgeois were in china during the Cultural Revolution. Each of them had a vision for which they were willing to die. Lincoln was martyred as have been many who have held firmly to their visions.

Jesus demands bodacious behavior in these times – our times. There is an old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. However, this is not a curse as far as I am concerned; it is a challenge. May we live in our time, faithful to the Gospel which free us from our past and allows us to envision a future – a future of the kingdom of God.

Let us pray: Eternal Spirit, God of the One we follow, Jesus of Nazareth, give us the courage to free ourselves from the constraints which hinder the full realization of your domain. Give us the courage to be truly bodacious, living as if the kingdom is indeed a reality. Amen.

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.