The Psalters were at Church this Sunday.



The Psalters were in Waco this past weekend, so Faith and I went out to see them on numerous occasions, banking on the promise that we'd experience a different kind of worship that you wouldn't find anywhere else. "Different" is definitely a gross understatement!

We were challenged and uneasy throughout the encounter...and it's not because of the tattered sackcloth and dreads they sported. Rather, it was the message they spoke, sang, and screamed at the top of their lungs. They boldly spoke out against issues such as affluence, war, and lust (to name a few), while embracing wholeheartedly peace, the poor, and justice.

One of their songs, entitled "We Are All Lepers Here" especially confronted me. The Psalters preached that leprosy isn't just a disease of the skin and nervous system that is virtually unknown here in the west but is still a dilemma in the eastern hemisphere. Leprosy, as you know, is a disease where one loses all feeling, so that they often end up with self-inflicted wounds that never heal. This curse of feeling no pain is the eventual cause of many lepers' demise. The Psalters reminded us of Jesus' reception and healing of the lepers in the Gospel text.

My whole life I've looked at leprosy as either 1. a horrible disese from biblical times or 2. something that underdeveloped countries on the other side of the world face. It's been something we comfortably talk about in sermons and Bible studies as we water down our need to be inclusive.

But then the Psalters did the the ridiculous.

They turned the tables.

I'll let the lyrics from their song do the speaking:

We are all lepers here overcome by our fear of pain let us remain...numb
To real we cannot feel our hands already froze holding our bloddless hearts...dear
Pumping liquified apathy through our veins hand frozen to heart now we can hold
Nothing else but the soothing lack of pulse still beating us we are all lepers here
Flood us with Fire consume with Your raging Waters to keep us bleeding give us Your feeling

Me?
A leper?
My stomach churns at such an absurd suggestion.
However, nothing could be more true.

Living in the comfort and safety of the country, I've come down with leprosy. For I don't feel pain! When I consider the billion-plus who scrape by on mere pennies each day, or when I think of the 30,000 children who die each day due to hunger-related causes, or when I'm reminded of the millions in Africa who have been missplaced or killed due to civil war, I do nothing.

I don't flinch.
I don't cry.
I don't yearn to throw myself into the midst of their lives.

Call it a desensitizing handed down by media and entertainment.
Call it a sense of apathy in the face of overwhelming need.
Call it what you want.

One thing is certain. And that is that I don't feel the pain for my brothers and sisters in Haiti, in Togo, or in Uganda. I'm a leper who is numb to the ache and misery of billions. As I ponder on what this means to me, I don't know where to go. For I know that the numbness causes my inflictions to worsen. And if healing doesn't occur, then I fear death may be around the corner.

May Christ bring to me the cry of the ending of "We Are All Lepers Here":

Flood us with Fire, consume with Your raging Waters to keep us breathing Life.
Give us Your feeling.

For it's with healing that leprosy gives way to feeling. And I suspect that pain's the most welcome result.

So it's as I decay with this callousness that I cry out for Christ's healing Fire to bring feeling.

And pain.