read issue - Episcopal Church in the Philippines

“Will you go and do likewise?”
Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
The Episcopal Church (USA)
bring you greetings from The Episcopal Church.
I We’re engaged in God’s mission in about 7000
congregations in 16 nations – in Taiwan and Micronesia,
Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, Austria, Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, the Virgin
Islands, as well as the United States. We have been
known as the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society
since the early 1800s and we continue to try to live into
that identity, knowing that God calls us to bridge all the
borders that divide and separate human beings. This
season of Epiphany reminds us that Jesus crossed
the border between heaven and earth for the sake of
all families, languages, peoples, and nations. We are
sent to do the same kind of border-crossing work. This
morning’s celebration is an important example, as the
IFI and the ECP continue to move across borders that
have separated people in the past. St. Jude’s even
sits on the border between two dioceses, perhaps
encouraging the faithful to keep crossing over! The
relationships among our three churches are a further
witness to a divided world, and it’s clear that together
we have an ability to challenge the walls of injustice
and violence that others try to build in this country and
beyond.
The lepers in this morning’s readings are stuck
behind social borders. They are walled off from their
communities, forbidden to cross into “clean” territory.
Maybe you’ve seen an air curtain in an architecturally
innovative building. Those air curtains are designed to
separate the outside from the inside – usually to keep
the temperature inside the building more constant, to
save energy and keep the air cleaner. Clean rooms for
surgery or manufacturing computer chips are similarly
designed to keep the inside environment sterile.
Naaman and the leper in the gospel live in a
hermetically sealed world like that, shut away from
neighbors by an invisible wall, only they’re on the
outside, looking in. Their skin diseases give very public
evidence of their uncleanness, and their societies have
walled them off from interaction with so-called “clean”
and “normal” people. Being unclean is much more
a social disease than a physical one. In the ancient
world there were other ways of being unclean that
couldn’t be seen by your neighbors. The lepers know
they are judged unclean, and if you read carefully,
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached during
her visit at the St Jude’s Episcopal Church in Bangao, Buguias,
Benguet on February 12, 2012
you’ll discover that they ask to be cleansed, rather than
healed. The varieties of uncleanness are evidenced
by the requirement that their newly clean state be
certified before they’re permitted to rejoin society. It
isn’t enough just to look good.
T he ancient world had a well-defined system for
dividing up the world, with societies divided into
categories like clean and unclean, sacred and profane,
shamed and dignified (or perhaps something like
‘appropriately proud’). In those days, people were
afraid of pollution, both physical and spiritual, and the
things you were supposed to stay away from were well
known – dead people, women, foreigners, Samaritans.
We would recognize some of those categories today:
foreigners, immigrants, adherents of other religious
traditions, people from the “wrong” families or parts of
town. Adults divide up the world like that, and children
do it, too – you can watch them chalk off the playground,
often by gender and in-groups vs. out-groups.
Naaman is a powerful military leader, but he’s in
trouble because people can see he’s got a skin disease
– and something visible like eczema or psoriasis
gives others the idea that there must be something
dangerous about him, and they shouldn’t get too close.
He just might have an evil spirit that will infect us!
The gospel leper wants to be clean more
than anything else – he comes on his knees. He and
Naaman go looking for restorers, people who will make
them clean and once again fit for community interaction.
They want to be restored to relationship.
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The Philippine EPISCOPALIAN 3