Lectionary texts:
2 Kings 5:1-14
Mark 1:40-45
Matthew 9:2-5

I wrote a letter to my brother Mark. "Happy Birthday!" it began, "I feel I'm long overdue to write you a letter to take care of some unfinished business."

This was one of the hardest letters I have ever had to write. The letter continued: "First, I want to apologize for any harsh words I've had with you over the years, especially those which may have left behind any unresolved anger, resentment, or alienation. I regret that we could have been closer over the last twenty years or so, especially to the extent that any lack of closeness between us was due to envy or other hard feelings on my part."

Envy or other hard feelings on my part. Envy is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult emotion to come to terms with. Why? Because acknowledgment of it is as much as an admission of inferiority. I am the eldest child in the family, and I was raised to be the stereotypical elder brother. I wish I'd had a dollar for every time my father said, "Set an example for your younger brothers and sisters."

But early on, my younger brother Mark excelled. I never needed to set an example for him, he set an example for me. It's not that I was any slouch. I was an A student in school, a leader in my boy scout troop and in my church priesthood quorums, an Eagle Scout, a Kimball Scholar at BYU who served an honorable mission in France. But Mark topped all that. He was not only a straight-A student, he got recognitions in regional and state competitions that I never got. Mark was just plain smarter. He was not just a leader in the boy scouts and in his priesthood quorums, but, while I tended to be a sensitive loner with few friends, he was well-liked and popular. And he achieved his Eagle Scout rank two years earlier than I did.

The gap between our achievements widened after college. Mark ended up teaching philosophy at BYU; I ended up a secretary. Mark has since published a dozen books, and is currently working on a book about philosophy and the band U2 that is being received with much fanfare; I've published one book, and have been struggling in my spare time since then to finish my first novel. Mark has accomplished everything he ever set out to do, and has received recognition and acclaim for it. I watched many of my dreams wither and fail; kept out of seminary because I was gay; unable to get a teaching job after finishing my Ph.D. at the U of M. Mark has a wife and four kids, and leads a respectable life as a Latter-day Saint living in the heart of Mormondom. I am a partnered gay man and a heretic living far from Mormondom, in some godforsaken place called Minnesota. I became an embarassment to the family, the "black sheep."

I was the first born, but I had become the fallen son. Like a modern version of Esau, except that the bowl of pottage for which I lost my inheritance was survival.

It hardly seemed fair.

But the unfairness of it all was not Mark's fault. And yet, even without acknowledging it to myself, I held the injustice of the world against him. Against my own brother. And that was not fair either.

We had had some pretty harsh words between us. I won't rehearse them. They were mean and hurtful. He said some pretty harsh things to me, that in my mind justified my connection of him personally to the larger picture of heterosexism and injustice that had so harmed me. There were insults other than words too. I boycotted his wedding. He boycotted mine. And eventually I just wrote him off. I just decided that we would never be close as brothers, unless and until he was willing to apologize for all the wrong he had done to me. And that's how we might have lived the rest of our lives and then died. Estranged brothers.

What could possibly save us from this kind of alienation? What could make me want to give up my anger, my hurt, and hard feelings, and try to be reconciled with him, as difficult as that is?

OK. I have a few theories.

Theory number one. Maybe it was just written in the stars. I checked a computer astrology program I have, and found that Saturn is currently in the fifth house of my natal horoscope, and in close paralel with where Pluto was when I was born, which has caused "self-love and self-acceptance to be paramount" to me, and which is pushing me to "take responsibility for previously unacknowledged areas of [my] life, whether [I] would like to or not." The alignment of the planets is causing me to "undergo an important transition in [my] life, entering an entire new phase of existence, in which the habitual patterns and concerns of the old way of [my] world may vanish entirely or diminish in their importance," causing me to "confront issues of power, control and authority ... in my personal life." "This is a time for facing squarely the past and its implications for [my] continued growth in the present." At least that's what my computer astrology program tells me.

That's kinda cool. It's actually a pretty good description of what I've been going through spiritually for the last six months.

But the problem with this theory is, what if the stars slip out of alignment again? Won't that leave me stuck again? Don't I need to take personal responsibility for my relationships with other people regardless of whether Saturn is in alignment with my natal Pluto or not?

Theory number two. A human being can only stay mad for so long. Maybe for some hurts it takes a day for us to get over our anger. For some hurts a week. For some a year. Or maybe ten years. Or maybe, in the case of me and my brother, almost twenty years. Maybe it takes so long that we think that our anger just becomes a part of who we are. It becomes the red-colored glasses through which we see the world. It becomes our reason for existence. But just as we think it's permanent anger, we realize it wasn't so permanent after all.

This is closely related to theory number three. I have learned not to hate myself any more. Sure, homophobia in the Mormon Church might get me excommunicated. Heterosexism and discrimination in the broader society might deny me the career of my choice. But it was self-hatred that drove me to suicide. What I have learned is that as damaging as external hatred is, internal hatred is a thousand times more destructive. It was my own belief that they, the haters, were right that put their gun in my hand and moved me to put it to my head. My anger became the only emotion powerful enough to save me. My anger is what let me say, "Well screw that. I'm not gonna do their dirty work for them. If they wanna kill me, they're gonna have to do it themselves." My anger was my way of projecting my self-hate back at a hating world where it belonged. My anger kept me alive long enough to begin to nurture the fragile seeds of self-love. But once my belief in myself, my confidence in my goodness, my trust that I am a child of God was strong enough, I discovered that the anger wasn't necessary any more. Once I didn't need my anger so much, I began to realize what a blunt tool it is; I began to realize that anger often burns those who don't deserve to be burned by it.

The problem with theories two and three is that the world is still unjust. Homophobia is still running amok from the highest office in the land to the lowliest gay bashers. They still think my marrying Goran is the number one threat to America. They still want to amend the constitution to make me a second class citizen. The Mormon Church still thinks I am worthy only of excommunication. My brother never took back any of the painful words he has said and written to me. All the things that made me so angry and that convinced me to hate myself twenty years ago are still out there alive and well, and even if I could get over them, I should get slapped in the face with them again every morning I wake up and read the headlines on Google News.

In a world filled with hatred, injustice, and cycles of violence and anger, it is a miracle that there is ever any healing or reconciliation at all. In a healing text different from the two in today's lectionary, in Matthew chapter 9, Jesus says, "Which is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?" Jesus says healing the heart is much harder than healing the body. I'm with him.

The story of Naaman is a perfect example of this. Naaman was a Syrian general who had killed and enslaved many Israelites. The slave girl in the story, a servant of his wife, remains nameless. In the world of Naaman the Syrian, she was a nothing. If she knew of a source of healing, why would she share it with the man who had killed her compatriots and taken her a slave? The story should have ended with her smoldering silence. And yet, she felt compassion when the general fell victim to the debilitating, humiliating disease of leprosy, and she told Naaman's wife about the Israelite prophet who might be able to save him. Perhaps she hoped that in his healing, there might be healing for her and her people as well.

But Naaman was a proud man. Why should he pay attention to a slave girl from a country he has helped to subjugate? His contempt for the Hebrews was demonstrated by his anger at not being treated with the deference and humility he expected, even from the prophet Elisha, a man most highly regarded among his own people. "Are not the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?" he raged when the prophet contented himself to send instructions to wash in the muddy Jordan River. The story should have ended with Naaman storming unhealed back to his native land. And why should a proud man like him brook impertinent questions from a servant? "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?"

So theory number four. There is a divine purpose at work we don't individually understand. Nevertheless, we are a part of that divine purpose. Creation is not a fiat by God, but a collaboration between God and humanity in which we are vital participants. The finished product will require blood, sweat, tears and pain from all of us. None of us may know how we will get there, but we all know what the end Work is. It is Salvation, Wholeness, Peace, Healing, and Universal Reconciliation. There is a divine purpose at work in us, both in our pain and anger. But if God is at work in us in our pain and anger, how much more so in our healing, in our offers of peace, and our reconciliation.

No choice that we make, either to protect ourselves or to heal ourselves is ever easy. Too often we are slaves of forces we don't understand: demons within ourselves, demons in others. We take the same turn at the crossroads again and again. Until we choose something different. We might say that healing and reconciliation is always there, waiting for us to be ready for it. It's the getting ready that's the hard part.

The thing is, there is never a good time to make peace. Remember Mikhail Gorbachev? Mikhail was the last leader of the Soviet Union. He realized that his people desperately needed peace. Remember "perestroika"? Openness. Do you remember who was Commander-in-Chief of the "free world" at the time that Gorbachev began to make peace? The rootin' tootin'-est, gun-slingin', Star-Wars-deployin', Libya-bombin', Grenada-invadin', Evil-Empire-invocatin'-est president the United States has ever had, Ronald Reagan. Can you imagine being the president of the Soviet Union, and having to make peace with that man? Does it seem like a good time to make peace, when the leader of the most powerful nation in the world is threatening you and bullying everybody else. But President Gorbachev realized that he and his country needed peace and openness. Do you remember what it was like before Gorbachev? All of us who grew up in that era remember it as a time when we saw an all-out nuclear holocaust as a real possibility. Now we only live under the threat of a devastating terrorist attack. I think that's progress... But when is a good time to make peace? It never seems good. We just have to start making it.

It is easy not to sympathize with Naaman the Syrian general. He's a warlord and a slave holder. He's arrogant. But in this story, we also see his vulnerability. To become a leper in his society, in his time, was to experience the most drastic kind of reversal. Leprosy would transform him from a man of power at the pinnacle of his society, to the most shunned kind of outcast, condemned to die a slow, painful death. To me, this story says that no matter who you are, there always comes a moment of truth. A time when we must choose between holding on to our anger and our pride, or letting go, accepting healing, and starting to make peace.

When I read the Naaman text now, I see my own crossroads. Healing comes when we choose to turn out of the course that seems inevitable. The inevitable anger, the inevitable pain, the inevitable patterns of injustice, rebellion, retaliation, recrimination. Yes, there is divine movement in the anger at injustice. But there is also divine movement in forgiveness, in the final understanding that God embraces us even when the whole world is against us. To choose reconciliation is by definition to go out of the normal path, to do what does not seem or feel right or comfortable to us. To travel into alien territory, to bathe in the muddy waters of somebody else's river.

There is too much allienation in the world right now, and that alienation exists not between aliens, but between human beings. Between people who are brothers and sisters, who are all children of God. Or between a brother and a brother. I pray that we might each follow with integrity whatever path of anger and self-healing we might need to travel, but in the end, I look forward to glorious reconciliations and reunions.

For this I pray every day, in Jesus' name. Amen.