“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons


Texts: 
Psalm 6

2 Chronicles 26:1-21

Acts 3:1-10

Texts: 

Psalm 6

2 Chronicles 26:1-21

Acts 3:1-10

In today's texts, one man contracts leprosy and another is made able to walk.  The texts travel in opposite directions, it seems.  

"But when he had become strong he grew proud, to his destruction," (Chronicles 26:16a).

Having gained all this power, it seems Uzziah determined he did not need the other people within his community (or the roles they performed).  Choosing to make himself an island, choosing to value his power over the power of another, the response was leprosy.  In the end, his choice to be an island was granted; now, however, he was forced to live on his island of isolation.

Power is often more poisonous than what we would like to think it is.  Having traveled in both Israel/Palestine and Egypt, it is haunting the way in which power shifts the way people of faith engage each other; what is more, it is haunting how these are reflected in our own society, as they fly under the radar.  In Israel/Palestine, by and large, Palestinians (predominantly of Arab descent) live as second-class citizens.  Many of them are unable to reach family members of live on opposite sides of the wall, which snakes throughout the countryside.  In Egypt, a country which was conquered by Muslim armies in 641, Christians today (particularly Coptic Christians) live as a persecuted community.  It happens in places less obvious than these, however; different groups of Christians seek to silence other groups of Christians in order that their voices may be more readily heard.  Voices from the mainstream seek to silence voices from the margins, and voices from the margins seek to quiet the voices from the mainstream; both the mainstream and the margins determine divisions amongst them, further dividing the voice of Truth. 

Our issues of entitlement prevent us from being able to receive power as gift.  The man in Acts, placed at the Beautiful Gate so that he may beg for alms, held nothing in his hands: the gift he received was not silver or gold but power to walk.  His immediate response was to praise God for this new power, this healing.  Rather than pointing to all the reasons he deserved to be healed, he received the gift and immediately recognized its source.

To borrow the words of Mary:

“for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.  His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.  He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.  He has brought the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

It is when we think we are in control of power that it slips through our fingers, refusing the limits and demands we would place upon it.  It is when we come with empty hands and broken hearts that the Gift comes.  What we don't recognize is that power becomes the vehicle of our own self-destruction.  As we divide ourselves from those around us, eventually we find we have created so many divisions we have relegated ourselves an island, unable to reach out, unable to receive, unable to understand the gift of being fashioned as communal creatures.

Fortunately, the invitation to relationship, to community, comes again and again, inviting us to break down the walls that divide us, to see those around us not as powerful or weak, but as broken-holy children of God.