UCC Church of Charlotte

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Sermon for February 15, 2009
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Sunday, February 15, 2009 8:31:32 AM
From:
Phil Hobson   
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To:
Phil Hobson 


Uncontainable
I Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
How do we contain God?  I think we try to all the time.
    
We limit who can speak for God.
    
We limit who is qualified to work on behalf of God.  
    
We limit when we think God can work.
    
We limit how much God gets to interfere in our plans.  
    
We limit how much we are willing to be inspired.  
    
We limit who is acceptable to God, either out of hubris that We are and They aren't, or out of shame that They are and We aren't.  
    
We limit how far God is allowed to call us out of our comfort zone and into real mission and ministry.
    
We spend a third of our lives sleeping.  If we work a 40 hour week, then during our working years we spend between a fourth and a fifth of our time working.  
    
How much time do we spend in praise?  How much in prayer?  In devotions, or worship, or Bible Study, or service?  If it is just an hour a week on Sunday morning, that comes out to 1/168th (just over half a percent) of our lives.  It only goes up slightly if we include Christmas Eve.
    
But God is not contained by our practice of faith, or by the barriers we erect to hem God in, or by the traditions that have taken on the sanctity of being in place for so long.
    
The Gospel is all about how God is uncontainable.  The categories of social standing are disrupted when Jesus sits down with the sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors.  The ways of the world are broken open when Jesus heals without repayment, feeds multitudes without charging, offers good news to the poor, and chides the proud and the exclusive and the clinched up.  The empires of the world are disrupted by a church that welcomes all; lives out of love, not fear; praises God and serves humanity; offers Good News to the poor and the poor in spirit.
    
This morning's story is about the usual containers of life being broken as well.  You don't touch lepers.  It isn't the done thing.  It doesn't matter if the skin condition of that person is contagious or not.  It's icky.  And we will be faithful, Lord, as long as you don't call us to deal with icky!
    
But a leper comes up to Jesus.  This is what happens around Jesus.  People get bold in asking for healing.  They break the social containers that say, "Know your place and stay there!"
   
And then Jesus is moved.  Moved by pity, is one translation.  Moved by anger is another.  Some cheat and translate it as he was deeply moved.  But what is it about pity and anger?  Why confuse these two?  The real word means to be moved in one's bowels.  Doesn't sound very pleasant.
    
In our day we say they touched our heart, or our heart is troubled, or someone broke our heart, or we experience heartache.  In Jesus' day, the gut was where emotion took place, not the heart.  So affection, kindness, pity, anger, these things were gut reactions.
    
So we can picture pity for the condition of the leper, whose skin disease keeps him from being a part of his family or a part of society, relying on begging, having no human contact.
    
And we can understand anger, at the condition of a child of God who must live this way.
    
And Jesus, moved in his core towards this man, reaches out and breaks the container.  He touches the leper.  He does the unthinkable.
    
And everybody knows what happens when you break the container.  You become unclean.  That's the way it is.  It has probably always been this way.
    
We think the bad stuff is uncontainable.  We know ourselves times of inconsolable grief, or of evil spilling out over the boundaries of what imaginable.  We can wander down the path of thinking on these and pretty soon we can believe that grief or hatred or depression or fear or anxiety or addiction or leprosy will win.  It will overflow its bounds, become contagious, infect everything it touches, and we will be lost.
    
But instead of Jesus becoming unclean, the leper becomes clean.  Leprosy doesn't spread to Jesus.  Holiness, wholeness, healing spreads from Jesus to the leper.  We see in Jesus that the uncontainable grace of God is more powerful than all that other stuff.  We see in Jesus that there is something more contagious, more infectious, more powerful than all those other problems, and that is the love of God.
    
And Jesus sternly charges this former leper, this healed child of God, to not tell anyone, but to go to the priest, whose job it is to do check-ups and see if those who were unclean are now clean, and do all that is necessary to get back into the world.  Jesus tells him to go back to join life as it has been.
    
But instead, the man's joy is uncontainable.  The real touch of grace doesn't send us back into the world as it has always been.  And the leper doesn't follow the instructions.
    
Because when grace is seen and felt and heard and experienced, it is uncontainable.  Just like the joy of the leper, who won't shut up about what has been done for him.
    
It causes Jesus trouble.  There is now friction with the world.  He can't go into towns without being swamped by requests for healing.  Pretty soon the powers that be will take note of this man who heals and preaches and feeds and breaks open the containers of this world.
    
And we might want Jesus to go to town, to set up shop, to heal all those who come to him in Nazareth or Capernaum or wherever he hangs his shingle.
    
But Jesus has a message that isn't limited to healing the sick.  It is about breaking open other containers, too.  Containers like prejudice, exclusion, lording it over one another.  Containers like the separation of people into categories of status or wealth or race or whatever label we use to say there's them and there's us.  Containers that say one person with worty of God's love and another isn't.
    
But the love of God is uncontainable.  That's the whole story of the Gospel.  Whatever we think is spilling out over the world, God's love can break in there too.  Not even death can stop it, not even death on a cross.
    
And when we get it, our joy is uncontainable too.  And we too can't stop telling people about it.
    
Thanks be to God.
Amen.