read issue - Episcopal Church in the Philippines

4
from previous page
We know that orphans don’t thrive if they are put in
institutions that only care for their physical needs.
Children need to be held and hugged and talked to.
Adults need human interaction just as much – we all
eventually begin to shrivel in enforced solitude.
Gospel work is about restoring relationships,
with God and neighbor. It’s about cleaning us up for
polite and wholesome society, and welcoming us back
to the banquet table.
Most of the pain and dysfunction in human
lives, whether it’s poverty, violence, war, arrogance,
or oppression, arises from the boundaries we draw
between “our” kind of people, the clean ones, and those
outside the wall, whom we often define as dirty or less
than human. We are pretty good at dressing up those
divisions with fancy language, saying that this person
is a criminal or an enemy, or that one isn’t “nice,” or
that group over there will corrupt my children. In spite
of all that division, God keeps looking for ways to break
down the walls.
Who are the lepers around the edges of your
community? People who’ve got HIV? Muslims?
People from the lowlands? Tourists? Soldiers?
What does it take to pronounce them clean and fit for
relationship? Jesus gives us example after example
of breaking down those walls. He eats with all sorts
of officially unclean people, he talks to women, he
touches dirty people, he meets with his enemies, and
he invites everybody to the banquet.
The people Jesus gathers as disciples are mostly
unclean or dubiously righteous: Mary Magdalene,
who has been healed from “demons,” fishermen, a
tax collector, at least one revolutionary zealot, and
plenty of other folk who know what it is to live on the
margins. He is particularly attractive to people on the
outs – that’s who all those crowds of people following
him were – the landless and unemployed, the sick and
the poor, and even some of the officially clean people
who didn’t feel so clean.
Those marginal people are often the source of
societal cleansing, even when they are feared because
of their difference. Look at the slave girl in Naaman’s
story, who steps across a border in order to break down
a wall. She is a slave because her master’s soldiers
captured her. But she offers to help him through one
of her home-town prophets. There’s quite a lot of risky
boundary-crossing going on here! The outsider is an
essential part of our own cleansing, for we cannot be
The Philippine EPISCOPALIAN
Presiding Bishop Schori (with shades) and Rev Peter Ng
(shaking hands) are welcomed by Bishop Brent Alawas and
Bishop Joel Pachao (right).
wholly restored to right relationship without him or her.
What we see as unclean God has already pronounced
good at creation. That one on the outside is God’s
beloved daughter or son. Who are we to cry, “unclean,
unclean!”
The divisions between clean and unclean,
inside and outside, friend and stranger, are maintained
not only by those who draw the boundaries, but by those
who accept those boundaries as normal. Sometimes
we participate in our own exclusion by accepting
somebody else’s definition of us as “unclean.” That
has something to do with the requirement that the leper
go and show himself to the priest. He needs somebody
else to validate his cleansing. We need others to
remind us of our belovedness – we cannot be whole
and healed and holy all alone. It takes a community.
Even God is a community.
A t creation, God pronounces all of it “good.”
Humanity is blessed and called “very good.” The
great creation stories of Genesis insist that human
beings are made for relationship, that it is not good
for human beings to be alone. We are created for
partnership with other human beings and with God,
to tend the garden, break down the dividing walls,
and bring the unclean inside the community. Who is
being left outside? Who needs to hear, “I do choose
– be made clean”? We can say those words and be
the ones who restore others to community. All of us
at one time or another need to hear those words and
experience that restoration ourselves. Will you go and
do likewise?
[Homily delivered at the St Jude’s Episcopal Church in
Bangao, Buguias, Benguet, PHILIPPINES during the
Presiding Bishop’s visit on February 12, 2012.]