Today's Old Testament Lesson is from the Book of Leviticus, beginning at the 13th Chapter, and the 1st Verse:
The LORD said to Moses and Aaron, "When a man has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a leprous disease on the skin of his body, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests, he is a leprous man, he is unclean; the priest must pronounce him unclean; his disease is on his head. The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry, 'Unclean, unclean.' He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in a habitation outside the camp.
Today's Epistle is from the 1st Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, beginning at the 10th Chapter, and the 31st Verse:
So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please all men in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.
+ A Reading from the Gospel of Mark, beginning at the 1st Chapter, and the 40th Verse:
And a leper came to him beseeching him, and kneeling said to him, "If you will, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I will; be clean." And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. And he sternly charged him, and sent him away at once, and said to him, "See that you say nothing to any one; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to the people." But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
Today's readings focus on Leprosy -- the scourge of ancient peoples. In the Old Testament readings, we see Moses making laws to safeguard the Israelites from contagion -- pushing the leper out of the community. In the Gospel, we see out Lord pulling a leper back into the life of the community -- healing him and sending him to the priests to be seen to be clean.
Leprosy was a disease which struck terror into the hearts of the ancients -- parts of the body turned white, and fell off. While not killing its victims, it made their lives a living hell.
We know today that leprosy is caused by a very fragile spirochete -- it is difficult to transmit, and easy to treat. In the past century, leprosariums -- places to hide lepers away from the world -- have disappeared, for the most part, in developed countries. Molokai, which was the Hawaiian Island where lepers were sent, is now a popular vacation resort.
Lepers were shunned and feared, not only because they looked horrible, but because no one knew how the disease was transmitted. The only way they knew to prevent its spread was to exile people out of the community.
In our day, too, we have lepers -- people cast out of the community, shunned and feared. The cause of their exile is not Mycobacterium Leprae, though, but Hate and Anger. They are the scapegoats for society's inability to control itself, to feel secure.
The lepers I am talking about are Drug Users -- those "evil criminals" who are "causing" our prison systems to burst at the seams. The overwhelming majority of both Federal and State prisoners are drug users, and overwhelmingly minorities -- if you are African-American and male, you have a one in four chance of having been in prison.
Americans pride themselves on being "can-do" types, but there are curious blindnesses, where ideology seems to overwhelm practicality. One of these is drug laws -- we seem not to have learned anything from Prohibition (1918-1933), which served only to corrupt police and enrich the mob.
The amounts of money which go into the drug trade now make the national budgets of the U.S. and Western Europe in 1920 look like chump change. That money is untaxed, for the most part, and goes guess where? Yup -- Mafia, Medelin, you name it.
Anyone who lived through the 60s and 70s knows that the "War on Drugs" is hypocrisy -- it is a war on the Civil Rights of the American people. It has been used as an excuse to seize property and to terrorize the ordinary man.
Reputable scientific studies going back over a century, to the British Indian Hemp Commission, have shown that Marijuana (Cannabis Sativa) is more benign than even beer and tobacco. Folk wisdom agrees -- including William Jefferson Clinton, if he would be honest.
Harder drugs a more problematical -- but only a very little bit. Street experience, and the experience of the Berkeley and San Francisco Free Clinics, indicate that a small minority of drug users -- around 5% -- become long-term, serious problems. This means that the 95% of recreational drug users are capable of living productive lives.
Drug use correlates with socioeconomic status, too -- the overwhelming majority of those convicted of drug use are African-American and Hispanic, and poor and uneducated and unemployable. American society has decided that, rather than educate and train its poor, we would rather stuff them into overcrowded modern "leprosariums" -- prisons.
The State of California spend over $40,000 per prisoner per year -- and there are about a quarter million of them; it spends less than $4,000 per student per year on Education. One see rather clearly where the priorities lie.
Aside from the subject to the legality of drugs themselves, treatment of drug and alcohol addiction is relatively simple -- if long. Supervision and counseling, sheltered living, and education all work, and work well. Well (and simply) managed, the cost about $4,000/year -- and the "client" can be employed in a real job as part of the treatment program.
Drug use, per se, is not dangerous to anyone but the user. What is dangerous to society is what the user may do under the influence, or in order to obtain drugs. There are plenty of laws about robbery, assault and murder, to deal with the effect of drug use -- we need to treat the causes.
The causes, as one can see on the streets of East Oakland, and indeed any major city, are ignorance, hopelessness, and oppression. Ill-educated adolescent minorities have no alternative to the drug trade -- they do not have the social, intellectual, or technical skills to hold down a "regular" job.
Cast off as pariahs, they do what they can, and survive however they can. The mob, being an equal-opportunity exploiter, happily employs them as distributors of its high-profit products -- an illiterate can make as much as a Ph.D. engineering graduate by being enterprising.
Instead of spending a quarter of his or her life in education, preparing for a career, however, he or she will likely spend that quarter in prison, learning the lesson that he or she is the modern leper, no good, unwanted, totally depraved. This is not Christian -- this is diabolical.
The message of the Incarnation is that God has come into Flesh to redeem sinners -- to heal the sick, to lift up the poor, not to grind them down into addiction and depravity, and ultimately destroy them. God came into the world to take on our humanity, so suffer with us, as He did in the Garden and on the Cross, and by his death and Resurrection, to bring us out of the depths of despair and addiction -- addiction to money and status and things, as well as drugs or alcohol.
We, as both individuals and as a society, need to heed the lesson of the Gospel -- the message of Jesus Christ -- which can transform both the individual (the drug- or alcohol-dependent person) and society. We need to do booth, else we will force more and more people into the underclass -- cast them out into the hell of rejections and exploitation.
In this Jubilee Year, we need to seek renewal and forgiveness -- both for those who have been made into lepers by our society, and for ourselves -- for having allowed this sinful and diabolical situation to develop. The door is open to the new century, the new millennium, and the new life in Jesus Christ -- let us boldly go forth, to love God, our fellow man, and even ourselves, sometimes, as He commands us . . . .
In the Name of
The Father +
And of the Son
And of the Holy Spirit
Amen.