Lepers, Samaritans, and Cumbersome Wounds 2 of 2

By Jay Weldon

Remember the lepers mentioned in part 1 of this article?  I think that is where we find them on this afternoon.  They sit where they always sit, keeping their distance from any decent people.  They aren’t allowed to touch anyone, they cannot work, they are asked in effect not to love, and they can only beg.  And so they beg, as they watch their flesh eaten away, day by day, feeling more and more ostracized, feeling less and less like they matter.  On this day, they don’t matter.  Maybe once they did… until… that day when they started not to matter any more.  I don’t know if you and I can really identify with the pain that they felt, both physical and emotional, caused by an anomalous skin disease from antiquity, and maybe the sufferings of minorities and those in the third world today seem equally difficult for us to grasp.  Perhaps we cannot even see the wounds in the person sitting next to us, the years of abuse, the years of not mattering, the lifetime of self-hatred, of being asked not to love.  Maybe we cannot imagine that, but we can remember those days when our own lives seemed not to matter to anyone, and beginning in our own personal sense of pain we can begin to understand, and from there we can begin to practice understanding.

I hope we can also remember that day when someone showed love for us, when someone cared for us just enough to make a difference in our lives.  No, we may not be healed of leprosy, but we can testify to our own transformation by God’s grace.  In my own life, I watch every week as Christ is manifested for us in bread and in wine, as he is broken again and given to us, and not just as a reminder of God’s love for us demonstrated in Christ—although that would be enough—but so that we may go out and be the presence of Christ in the world, to live different lives, lives worthy of the grace and love God has given to us.

Sometimes we remember to say thank you, but every five year old has heard that saying thank you doesn’t matter as much as saying it like you mean it.  For us, it isn’t just a matter of “saying it like we mean it” as we teach our children, but of living different and resurrected lives every day.

Somewhere in the exile, after Jerusalem had been destroyed and everyone’s life had been torn apart, amid the oppression and pain, the prophet Jeremiah says it is time to build houses and gardens, to live again.  In his words to the exiles in Babylon, we can realize that there comes a point where, even in our pain, we lean instead on the healing power of God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  Even with memories of loss and destruction, as it was for those Israelites so many years ago, we too are called to build again.  We are called to rely on the grace and love of God as a trustworthy foundation on which we can begin to build the rest of our lives.  We could spend the rest of our lives making excuses for ourselves because of those dark days, or we can choose to move forward, anchored by the love we have been given in Christ. We can trust the words that the poet Robert Frost penned, “It will not do to say of night, since night is what brings out your light.”

Emmanuel Jal was a child soldier in Sudan. (1)   He was born in the southern part of Sudan around 1980, but nobody knows for sure.  If there were records of his birth, they were destroyed when his village was burned to the ground. The region was engulfed in civil war from early in his childhood.  When he was still a child his father left to fight as a rebel.  He soon watched his mother beaten to death by government soldiers as payment for his father’s absence.  After soldiers raped his sister and aunt, he was so bent on revenge that he became a soldier at the age of nine.  He was taught to fight by the rebels, slept with an AK-47, but soon realized that he could not live the life of a child soldier.  As one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan, he and about 400 other child soldiers abandoned the rebels and set out looking for freedom.  Only twelve of them survived their journey; most were victims of drowning, starvation, or were eaten by crocodiles.  Eventually, just before dying of starvation himself, he was rescued by a young British woman named Emma McCume who smuggled him onto an aid relief flight bound for Kenya.

He says that he became a child soldier in order to kill as many Muslims as possible—they had burned down his village, raped his sister, and killed his mother.  But once he arrived in Kenya, after being saved from starvation, his life began to change.  Still filled with rage, he began to appreciate that he had been saved from death.  He also began to meet Muslims who weren’t trying to oppress him as much as they were trying to befriend him.  He saw Muslims and Christians living together in peace, and he says that opening his heart to new possibilities helped him overcome the bitterness that once controlled him.

He soon turned to music to express the feelings he still had deep inside.  Once established, he began putting on benefit concerts to help homeless children in Nairobi, so that none of them would sleep on the ground as he had done.  Now the foundation he has started raises money to build schools in Africa so that children can be educated by teachers, not as he was—by warlords.  The lyrics to one of his songs represent the pain as well as the change that occurred in his own life. "My dreams are like torment/ My every moment/ Voices of my brain/ Of friends that were slain. Friends who died by my side of starvation/ In the burning jungle and the desert plain. But Jesus heard my cry."

I suppose that Jesus did hear his cry, there as he was starving in the jungle, just as he heard those lepers so many years ago.  I don’t know if Emmanuel officially thanked Jesus, or Emma, the woman who rescued him, but I suspect neither is still waiting for words of thanks; his life seems like thanks enough.  Our words of gratitude, while so important, are indeed outweighed by the life that we live.  

Let us rebuild lives of resurrection out of the ashes of our own pain; let us love others, seeking and serving Christ in each person that we meet, simply because we were called to this task in our baptism; let us no longer speak of night, since in dying we have been raised with Christ; let us bring redemption to others, and even in the dark night of our souls’ journeys, let us live as those who are being redeemed.

Source: (1) Internet resource accessed on October 11, 2007: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/10/10/dougherty.rapper/index.html

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