The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for February 15, 2009

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

Title: “The Referral”

              This week National Public Radio did a story chronicling the chaos that has overtaken Mexico as gangs vie to control drug trafficking in that nation.  Lawlessness goes unchecked across that nation. The story reported that the federal government and the police to whom the citizens of the nation might turn for protection lack the resources and the credibility to eradicate the drug menace and the violence it breeds. The very day the piece was aired seventeen persons were killed in a shootout between Mexican military personnel and gang members.

              Life in many parts of Mexico is lived under siege.  People of means are regularly targeted.  One person interviewed for the NPR story offered a glimpse of the burden so many Mexicans are forced to bear.

              The interviewee, a university professor living in Mexico City, shared a harrowing personal story.  She was at work one day when she received an anonymous phone call that her daughter had been kidnapped, though it turned out her daughter was safe. You can well imagine how such a report must have impacted the woman. The fear and sudden weakness she experienced were incapacitating.   

              When her brain was once again able to function she was overwhelmed by another consideration.  To whom would she turn for help?  Seized by panic, she realized that there was no one she could trust.  She felt completely isolated.

              At one time or another each one of us have had an experience akin to what the woman was experiencing.  The hardships so many across the nation are experiencing in the wake of our financial crisis are profoundly isolating. Nothing is as isolating as to be without work, or to have a growing stack of bills to pay with no money to pay them. Likewise a divorce, or the death of a loved one, is a terribly isolating event for those forced to experience them.

              The two lessons read earlier recount the experiences of two men who endured great isolation. Each man, as you know, was a leper. Leprosy was a much feared disease in the ancient world, and remained so through many centuries until means were at last discovered to arrest its spread.

              Leprosy, as many of you know, is a disease that can cause permanent damage to the skin, nerves, limbs and eyes. An outbreak of the highly contagious disease struck terror in the population.

                 No cure existing to treat the disease, or the other afflictions diagnosed as leprosy, the ancients invariably turned to the only strategy in their arsenal to protect the uninfected.  They turned to isolation.

                    Sequestered with other lepers away from family and friends, the leper’s freedom of movement was severely curtailed. Any leper who failed to observe the restrictions imposed upon him was punished without a hearing. In the book of Leviticus we read the following: “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”

                    Two lessons. Two lepers.  In the first lesson we learned that the afflicted one was a man of high rank in the Army of a great king. Disposed to doing all that he could to repay the valor of his commander, the king was ready to do an improbable thing.  He was ready to heed the counsel of a servant girl in his palace and send his commander to the neighboring nation of Israel in search of a cure.

                    Two lessons.  Two lepers.  Details surrounding how it came to be that the leper in our second lesson approached Jesus for a cure were not offered. But like the first lesson, however, the prospect of a cure mobilized the man to act.

                   One can presume that the great majority of women, men, and children diagnosed with leprosy died in their affliction for lack of the good fortune the two lepers in our lessons enjoyed. They died lacking a referral, a person to direct them to someone who might help them.                 

                   Referrals can have significant consequences, as most of us know full well.  When the diagnosis came down years ago that my dad had cancer the family sought a referral.  The referral that resulted put us in touch with a caring and empathetic oncologist who helped our family over a succession of hurdles in the months leading to dad’s death.

                 But there is hardly anything of consequence that we do where we do not seek a referral. When was the last time you planned a vacation without consulting with others? You sought help in arranging hotels and tours. You did your research on line.  You read your brochures. But it was the personal referral that ultimately sold you on the tour you booked or the hotel room you reserved. 

                   You wish to buy a home.  You seek a referral.  What real estate agent should you use?  You wish to buy a car, a flat screen TV, a new refrigerator. You seek a personal referral.

                  Options for saving his commander’s life non-existent, the king of Aram was willing to entertain a referral from any quarter.  Desperation will do that.

                   She was a servant girl who had been kidnapped in one the king’s raids. We do not know what motivated her to speak when the plight of the leprous commander was related to her, but speak she did.  “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria (the northern kingdom of Israel)! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

                   There was the risk of failing.  Suppose the commander went all the way down to Israel and came away with nothing for his trouble?  The servant girl may well have put her life in jeopardy. Yet that reality apparently didn’t faze the girl, for she made the referral unequivocally. “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”    

                 Scripture offers no explanation that would explain the source of her confidence. We can only speculate on what she might have known of the prophet and his powers. It was enough that she believed in him sufficiently to speak up when the time came.

               “The leper came to [Jesus] [Mark tells us] begging him, and kneeling…If you choose, you can make me clean.” Note the confidence the man expressed in Jesus. “If you choose, you can make me clean.” 

                 It was a statement of profound faith, expressing the conviction that Jesus could undo the ravages of a disease that had no cure. “If you choose, you can make me clean.”  It would be tantamount to someone in the final stages of pancreatic cancer or congestive heart failure today approaching his or her physician with utter confidence that the physician could restore his or her health.   

                “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” “If you choose, you can make me clean.” The two declarations express utter confidence in God’s power to restore and heal. 

                Behind each of those declarations there was a referral or referrals that directed the servant girl and the leper in our second lesson to the source of healing power.  Each of those persons, the servant girl and the leper in turn made referrals. Mark tells us that the now cleansed leper was so enthusiastic about his healing that he spread the news wherever he went, this despite the Lord’s stern warning to keep silent.

               When you have been exposed to a power that has so dramatically changed your life, it follows that you are anxious to talk about it, not only talk about it, but also make referrals that might lead others to the source of your life-altering good fortune.

                  Somewhere in the background of each one of us there is a referral that is responsible for us being here. I would submit that for the majority of us the referral came in the form of a parent presenting us for baptism and assuming responsibility for our attendance at Sunday school and worship. It is also likely that the person responsible for our referral, the parent who got us up and dressed for Sunday school, received their referral in a similar form, from parents who got them up and dressed for Sunday school. 

                   Our families have historically been powerful referral structures, constantly feeding new recruits into the family of God. As families have grown smaller over the years, however, there have been fewer and fewer new recruits to feed into the family of God. As this has occurred, the culture in which live has become less and less supportive of our efforts to maintain our referral structures, offering a variety of tempting diversions to keep us away from  church on Sunday morning.

                  The power of the family referral, the means by which most of us received our introduction to the church is waning, because those structures by and large no longer make convincing referrals. We have been socialized into churches that have effectively maintained a block of tradition, but have been far less successful in offering a compelling justification for faith in Jesus Christ. Our churches have failed.

                 By virtue of our membership in the church we are referral agents appointed to direct the world to a source of power, hope, and salvation that can remake the world into the kingdom of God.  It is an awesome task, but then we serve an awesome God.

                  We will not remake the world overnight, that’s a given, but that reality must not excuse our inaction. The world can’t change unless we change, and that involves a two step process.  First, it involves arriving at a level of clarity about our personal faith sufficient to explain why we believe that Jesus Christ is our personal savior, and second, it involves making referrals.  If Jesus Christ is, in fact, our personal savior, the author of our salvation, the healer, and one sure source of hope for the world, is that not news worth communicating as widely as possible?

                 The church’s principal task is referral, and each of us has been elected by grace, to make those referrals. As we become better informed about our own personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our capacity to refer becomes stronger, and frankly there is no real reason for being here aside from seeing our relationship with the Christ go deeper, that we might through our referrals take his name further into the world.

                There is a power in the world we need to tap into and it shows up daily in the referrals people like us are making. The other day I read of one such referral. It seems a man in the African nation of Zambia discovered he was HIV positive.  HIV/AIDS, of course, is this generation’s leprosy.  As a consequence of his diagnosis his employer fired him, and he was forced to move out of the company-owned house. His wife and six children abandoned him.  Thin and covered with sores he was shunned and reduced to begging. Finally, someone made a referral.  They took him to the home of a trained caregiver. We are told that “she became like a mother to him.” 

              She helped him clean up.  She gave him clean clothes, fed him, and found him a place to stay.  She told him about a drug program to treat his disease. She cleaned the place where he lived, and nurtured him spiritually and psychologically.

              Someone made a referral, and because of that a man who suffered severe isolation saw his life transformed.  You can bet that that man is making some referrals of his own these days. 

             There are experiences in your life God can use as the basis of a referral, experiences where God was active that may well help another child of God find her way. Where have you seen God active in your life?  Where is he active today? Prayer, Bible study, and worship will help you discern God’s presence. Be persistent in those activities. God has much to reveal to you and through you. AMEN.          

              PRAYER         

              Living God, in whose strong name we have gathered, may your Spirit gain new access to our lives.  We know we have failed to heed your direction, that we have allowed our personal ego needs and ambitions to set the course of our lives. We have made mistakes, but whatever wisdom we may have obtained along the way has profited us little, for we stubbornly insist that we know what is best for us much better than you do. In your mercy, O God, forgive us for our failure to heed your counsel, or the counsel of those you have sent us in your name. Seize our imaginations that we might see the new possibilities available to us if we but surrender to you in faith.

              We praise you for the privileges you have granted us, O God, by virtue of our citizenship in a land of great abundance. We praise you for food, clothing, shelter, and the work through which we earn our daily bread. All that we have is but a gift from your hand, much as we might insist that our industry and labors secured our good fortune.

              Forgive us when we who have so much close our hand to those who have been deprived our privileges. Forgive us, O God, when we justify our good fortune as a reward for our personal virtue, when we judge the poor and the less competitive in our society as being less worthy than ourselves.

              Even as the Congress continues to debate strategies that will address our great financial crisis, we know that women, men, and children cannot survive a prolonged debate. May the women and men who make public policy be willing to hold themselves accountable to the citizens of the land, action displacing rhetoric as the strategy of choice.

              Lord, we praise you for all those who make referrals, whose love for you is a cherished gift they are eager to share.  We thank you for the women and men of this church who from generation to generation have made their faith a regular topic of conversation. We lift up those who have shared their faith with generations of young people in the church’s Sunday school, and we praise you for those young people who are now sharing their faith with youngsters in churches across our land.

              Abide, O Lord, with our church as we continue our strivings to faithfully serve you.  May your Spirit broaden our imaginations to consider new ways of outreach into the community beyond our doors. Grant us the will to look anew at the assumptions we maintain about our ministry, and where we maintain false assumptions about ministry there be to redirect us to the path you would have us follow.

              O Christ, head of the Church, continue to prosper your church in these stressful times.  May the church and all those who serve through it be inspired anew to proclaim the good news with the clarity and passion it deserves.  Abide with denominations and churches experiencing conflict.  Be present to reconcile those whose passions and energies are committed to the pettiness of church life rather than the vision, O Christ, you set before us.

              Lord of all; grant us faith and courage to believe amid all the events in life that challenges us to surrender belief. Be with those who have experienced personal tragedy.  Be with those who have been deprived of justice.  Be with those whose personal dignity has been abused. Uphold the despairing and the afflicted in their time of trial.

              We present to you, O God, petitions on behalf of those within the congregation or the congregation’s extended family who have special needs.  We pray for Holly Wilson and her family in their time of sorrow.   In your mercy support them. We pray for…