Originally broadcast on "The Protestant Hour" on February 15, 1976

What would it have been like to have had the Bicentennial celebration twenty years earlier?

Do you remember 1956 -- before Watergate, before Vietnam, before a hideous sequence of assassinations, back when world hunger was a distant specter, before Watts? Do you remember Watts and Kent State, back when most of us were convinced that the issues were cut and dried in the eternal battle of right and wrong, and all the world was singing “Love Letters in the Sand” and “You Ain't Nothin’ but a Hound Dog”? Then it all started to go wrong. We reeled under blow after blow to our national ego. We didn't want to believe in a credibility gap, but we were forced to accept it as a fact. We didn't want to believe that those we had placed in high office had lied. We didn't want to feel responsible for tragic deaths at My Lai, in Dallas, or in Memphis. After all this, as a nation, we found ourselves to be much like Lady Macbeth after her atrocious homicidal acts when she said, “Out damned spot,” and was the case with Lady Macbeth, we, too, find that it won't come clean. The stain on our nation's flawed image and our spattered vision will not wash away.

If we had only celebrated our Bicentennial twenty years ago, in 1956 instead of 1976, how much more festive and uncomplicated it could have been. Of course, we know that things cannot always be exactly as we want them. We don't want it to rain on our parade, but we know that sooner or later it will. How many persons have reached a point of affluence or wisdom in later years and said if I were only twenty years younger, or if I had only known then what I know now? This truth was captured so well by John Greenleaf Whittier in the lines, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"

I have never had heart disease or tuberculosis or cancer or leprosy, and yet it doesn't take much imagination for you or for me to feel something of the sick and empty feeling of someone who hears the verdict, “You are sick, you will never be the same again.” What emptiness, what loneliness, what anguish. These must have been feelings familiar to the man who came to Jesus saying, “If you will, you can make me clean.” How long had he been a leper? Did he really have what would be diagnosed by modern medicine as leprosy? These things we cannot know. What we do know is this, the ancient law required that he live outside the city wall, that he cry, “Unclean, unclean” as a warning to everyone who came near. Furthermore, he was required to live in this degrading alienation until his disease cleared up, until the moment that he presented himself to the priest and was pronounced clean, cured and healed. This leper came to Jesus, and the only words of his that the Bible records in any of the three Synoptic Gospel are these: “If you will, you can make me clean.” It had been a long, lonely journey for this man.

How long had it been? Day after relentless day had dragged into weeks and months and years since the dread word “unclean” had been imposed upon him. “Unclean,” he had cried, but underneath he felt that these blemishes do not really change me. My feelings are the same. My needs are the same. I'm the same person I've always been. What do you mean “unclean”? But try as he might, no matter whether he felt unclean or not, the law prevailed. It is all right there in the Book of the Law, Leviticus 13 and 14, which says that all skin blemishes are considered leprosy until proven otherwise. If I have one, I am unclean. I may deny it. I may resent it. I may protest, but I am afflicted. Healing has to take place before my life can be restored.

The man in our story is past anger and rebellion. He is past saying, “Why me, Lord?” He has accepted his stigma and he has heard of a healer. We meet him as he places himself in the path of healing. We meet him as he says to Jesus, “If you will, you can make me clean.” The response of Jesus, “I will. Be clean.” The man cried out of his need, his pain, his loneliness, his alienation, and then he heard God say, “Yes.”

Today in these United States, we don't know much about leprosy, but we do know about cancer and heart disease. We don't know much about banishment from the city, but we do know about alienation and discrimination and hypocrisy and bigotry. We know these demons from both sides. We've been their allies as well as their victims. We've been sick, sick unto death, and most of the time we didn't even know it.

The leper who cried out to Jesus knew that he was ill and needed healing. The first step in his therapy was his insight into his need, and Jesus, moved with pity, reached out and touched him. “Those who are well,” he said, “have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous but sinners.”

We can so easily live on the surface of life, avoiding in superficial busyness the fact of our alienation. We're so afraid. We look into a mirror and see how frightened and lonely and disfigured we really are. This is where we've often been as a nation during our first 200 years. We won our independence. We raced to push the frontier westward. We tamed the wilderness, tapped deep reservoirs of natural resources, built unparalleled industrial machines, and fought wars under the banner of making the world safe for democracy. Then and only then, possibly in our vanity, did we look into the mirror and begin to see our blemishes, the ravished land and the filth laden air, the seamy ghettos and glutted junkyards that bespeak our waste, arrogance and illness. More and more of us, though not by any means all of us, are more and more aware of the fact that we are stricken. We are unclean.

Isaiah's ancient confession becomes strangely appropriate for us today. We can mean it when we say, “Woe is me, for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” Somehow, this new understanding of our feet of clay, our sickness, runs counter to what we've learned and felt about our nation: “My country, ‘tis of thee,” we sing, “sweet land of liberty.” Let freedom ring, liberty and justice for all, my country, right or wrong These are still good words and noble feelings. What seems to have changed is our notion about our country when it is not right, but wrong. We heard the words, but we didn't really believe that Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, could ever be wrong. We had never lost a war. We knew what was right for our nation and for every other nation in the world. In the exuberance of our adolescence, nobody could tell us anything. Then came the fever, the blurred vision, the queasiness. We know, at least many of us do, that we are sick. After Watergate and Kent State after My Lai and Attica, the nation no longer protests unequivocally of its perfect health. Collectively, we may well cry, “Unclean, unclean.” It is precisely here that the Christian gospel has something to say to the United States of America.

This Gospel says that Jesus stands among us, the Lord of all history. God himself is with us when we realize and confess that our nation was built on the death of ten million Indians and the sweat of forty million slaves. Even then, He says “yes” to us, in spite of our uncleanness, He is not reluctant to reach out and touch and heal. The Gospel says, “Do not wallow in your sickness and isolation, rather repent and be healed.” This is seldom easy and painless, because saying, “Help me” can sometimes be the most difficult thing to do, and God's healing may not be what we expected. One thing God's healing always does is free us to be filled with hope for the future. Frederick Buechner has said that true repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, “I am sorry,” than to the future and saying, “Wow!” Can this nation, or we who comprise this nation, fall on our knees before God and cry, “Jesus, if you will, you can make me clean.”

If the Bicentennial had come twenty years earlier, we might have celebrated with more zest, lighter hearts, and greater revelry. Perhaps, though, it is better that we celebrate now, for we know ourselves much more honestly now. We no longer kid ourselves into denial of our sickness, our estrangement, or our need of a physician. We may even be learning how to say, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” For his part, we can be certain that he will be moved with compassion and will heal.