Passage: This Week's Second Reading

"A Conversion Conversation"

This coming Tuesday is doomsday. It is the day we’ve all been warned about again and again over the last couple of years. I’ve heard about it so much that I’m sick of hearing about it and I’ll be glad when it’s over. Tuesday is doomsday for analog television. From Tuesday on, TV programs will be digital broadcasts.

For those of you who are young and have grown up in a digital age, that event may not seem all that significant, but those of us who are older may feel like there’s a huge change taking place. Since the very beginning of radio and TV and the first magnetic recordings, whether you know it or not, audio and video transmissions have been in analog. So this Tuesday, broadcasting as we have known it since the beginning is going away.

There’s a good chance, however, that most of us won’t care. They tell us that if we have one of the newer TVs or if our old TV is connected to cable, we will continue to receive programming just fine. And even if we are still grabbing our signal out of the atmosphere with rabbit ears, we can make the transition by means of a converter box. What’s more, most television stations have been broadcasting in both analog and digital for a couple of years now, so for better or worse, our TVs should continue bringing programming into our homes without interruption.

The apparent ease of this transition does not change the fact that the new way of broadcasting really is different technology. There are technical differences in digital and analog that make digital faster and more efficient. Our modern computers use digital technology, while, the old computers that used to take up entire rooms worked on analog technology. A wristwatch with hands on the watch-face represents analog technology.

Old telephones turned voice vibrations into electrical vibrations of the same shape, and then changed them back on the other end. Analog also sends a continuous signal, whereas digital broadcasting breaks everything into numbers and sends them in a discontinuous signal. Now, fiber optic technology combined with digital technology allows us to watch TV, talk on the phone, and work on the internet all at the same time and all on the same fiber cable. Anyway, if all goes according to plan, the conversion to DTV will be completed this Tuesday.

Today’s reading from Mark gives us an opportunity to think about a different type of DTV conversion. Call it the Divine Touch Vertex. (A vertex, by the way is a peak, an apex, a high point.) We see it in our text as the turning-point moment when Jesus touched a man with leprosy and everything in that man’s life changed. He who had been separated from his family, community, temple and friends by disease, who was considered unclean and made an outcast because of the wasting away of his flesh, was now made whole and enabled to join the mainstream again. He went from sickness to health, from unclean to clean, from brokenness to wholeness as the result of Jesus’ touch.

Our text does not say that this man experienced conversion in the religious sense of the word, which is how we often use it in church. But in some ways, that makes this a good text from which to think about religious conversion. It has more in common with conversion than we might think. In the Bible, the Hebrew word for conversion is shub, which means “to turn” or “to return,” and the Greek word is (μετάνοια) metanoia, which means “to turn around.”

In the case of this man Jesus healed, there was clearly a return, in that he could now go back to his family and community, but there was also a turning around. As defined by The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, "To be converted means to have the direction of one’s life shifted, so that it no longer points toward self, but points toward God." And that’s exactly what happened to this man. He stepped off the "woe is me" path and onto the "Jesus is great" road.

The conversions we usually hear about, whether of a religious nature or of some other type, are often accompanied, at least initially, by excitement, zeal,

intensity, and an eagerness to tell others about it and efforts to make significant changes in one’s life. Often, the converted person looks back at the time of the conversion as a significant turning point in their lives.

For example, consider how the folk singer Judy Collins describes her turn from classical music performance to folk music performance. She was 14 years old when this happened, had been playing piano for 11 years and loved classical music. Her piano teacher was the famed conductor and pianist Antonia Brico, and she told Collins that she had a bright future in classical music performance.

But then one day, while Collins was preparing to perform Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with a local orchestra, she happened to hear the 17th-century English ballad "Barbara Allen" on the radio, sung by Jo Stafford. It was the first folk song Collins had ever heard, but it captured her. Here’s how she describes the moment:

... the poignancy of Stafford’s music about a woman’s remorse over her lover’s death changed everything. Its message was so potent; it overpowered the richness of Rachmaninoff and tapped into my adolescent yearnings of love and loss. Hearing its poetic, antique lyrics made me sit up and say, "That’s what I want to do: tell stories with my music." It was like hitting a vein of gold.

She goes on to say that the full switch took about a year. She continued studying piano while immersing herself in folk music. She taught herself to play a guitar, practicing till her fingers bled. Her parents and her piano teacher opposed the change, but Collins was convinced that her future was in folk music. And once she made the change, she says, she "felt ecstasy, as if a burden had been lifted." That sounds a lot like conversion to me.

Here’s another example: Alice Flaherty is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also teaches at Harvard Medical School. She says that when, as a student, she first applied to med school, she wasn’t especially committed to being a physician. She just wanted to know how the brain works. But then, on her first day in class, there was a case presentation of a young man who’d had a brain hemorrhage after a bike accident.

To decompress the injured man’s brain, the surgeon had removed a piece of his skull and sewn it into the patient’s abdominal cavity for sterility and safekeeping until it could be later put back over his brain. Flaherty says that this radical but simple rearrangement of someone’s body to save his life "riveted" her. She continues:

And the fact that the someone was a specific person, with a particular girlfriend and parents who were worried sick, was a revelation after years of reading about neuro-scientific abstractions. I became abruptly convinced that I was in the right profession, that I had a calling to be a doctor. The exaggerated, perhaps even pretentious, feeling of duty and joy that filled me was such that I am embarrassed to describe it. But I still feel a little of it every time I turn on a new stimulator in a Parkinson’s patient and watch her go from being frozen to walking nearly normally.

Neither Collins’ nor Flaherty’s conversions were of a religious nature, yet both were life-changing turning points. They were both marked by deep feelings, a sense of calling and other characteristics that often accompany conversion. And both, just like the healed leper, told others about it: Collins first told her parents and piano teacher; Flaherty tells of hers in her book.

These three conversions — the leper’s, Collins’ and Flaherty’s — are to some degree models of what any conversion, including a religious one, can look like. We say "can" because God deals uniquely with each person. Still, some of us may have had something similar occur, perhaps a dramatic opening of ourselves at church camp or a youth rally or a revival service And that may have been a real milestone experience that we can look back on and say, "Right there. That’s when my life became different because of the realization of what Christ did for me."

But others of us cannot point to a moment of conversion. We may have attended church since childhood and never questioned the faith as it was presented to us. Faith in Jesus may have always been part of our lives, without ever wandering deeply into sin or recognizing a moment of turning from it. Maybe we entered a church as a teen or an adult, and by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Gospel realized that it made sense and that this was the direction and foundation we were seeking for our lives. There may have been no precise moment when that happened, but we know today that we are disciples of Jesus Christ.

While it’s essential that one be committed to follow Jesus today, it’s not essential that one can point to a calendar date as the moment of one’s conversion. The lack of a conversion story is no shortcoming in terms of our acceptance by God and Christ.

But maybe those of us who are not conscious converts to Christianity have missed out on some of the passion and intensity that often marks new converts. And when we don’t have a faith-conversion story to tell, sometimes we tell nothing at all about our faith. Not only don’t we "proclaim it freely" and "spread the word," we sometimes act as if our spiritual stance is strictly a private matter. Yet the fact is, whether we’ve had a turning-point experience or not, we do have a story about the content of faith that we can share.

The healed leper could say, "Once I was very sick; now I am well. Praise God!" On the other hand, he probably had neighbors who could say, "I have always had good health. Praise God!" Both are testimonies, and both are potentially conversion conversations, for they both tell of faith in God and can be used to invite others to see the action of God in their lives as well.

To put this in the vocabulary of DTV, we might say it this way: Whether we once were analog and now, thanks to Divine Touch Vertex, we are digital, or we are digital and can’t remember ever being analog, we who follow Jesus are empowered to have conversion conversations with those who don’t even have converter boxes installed or have their rabbit ears aimed in the right direction.

There was neither analog nor digital technology in that day, but that didn’t stop this man from broadcasting what Jesus had done for him. In spite of Jesus’ instructions to keep this incident quiet, he "talked freely about it" and "spread the news." He talked about it so much that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town. He had to stay out in the desolate places and even then, the people were coming to him from every corner.

How ironic are the events of our text. Compelled to stay out of the city, away from the throngs, lodging in the desert areas, the Healer of lepers was condemned to the same fate experienced by the leper he healed.

Of course, Jesus did some of his best work in the desert and deserted places. He overcame the devil’s temptation, he fed thousands of people, he was able to spend all night praying to His Father. But his crucifixion is the most important example. After openly entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus was crucified outside the city in a desert place called Calvary.

Of course Calvary wasn’t that far outside the city, but it was a desert-like place. On that skull-shaped knoll called Golgotha where the crucifixion took place, an unbridgeable void opened between Father and Son when Jesus bore our sin and God forsook Him. Because of our sin placed on him, at that eternal moment Jesus could not enter the city – the city of God.

But thanks to what the Father and Son did, we can enter the city. We’re no longer exiled to the deserted wilderness places. The writer to the Hebrews says we are able to come "unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels. If that’s not something worth having a conversion conversation about, I don’t know what is. Amen.