One verse of today’s Gospel is particularly difficult to translate. For one thing, the codices – i.e. the source papyri – differ in one of the original Greek words. The word, translated in today’s NRSV reading to say that Jesus was “moved with pity,” does not appear in many other codices. There, a different Greek word is used – one that can be translated to say that Jesus was “moved with anger.” For another thing, the Greek word translated as the imperative, “Be made clean!” can just as well be translated as the declarative, “You are clean.” So, the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly group of Bible students, translates the verse this way: “Although Jesus was indignant, he stretched out his hand, touched [the leper], and says to him, ‘Okay – you’re clean.’”

I chose this translation because it resonates with a story that Frederick Buechner tells about Maya Angelou – actually, a story she tells about herself, repeated by Buechner.

Maya Angelou, now close to eighty, has been a kind of renaissance woman. She has done all sorts of things. She is a writer; she has written a number of autobiographical works including one wonderful one called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; she has sung and danced; she worked with Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights period in the sixties; she has written an opera. At one point, because of economic necessity, she tells how she worked as a prostitute for a brief time. She is a remarkable looking woman – tall, black, attractive as all get out – and she has tremendous presence.

At the first night of a church conference at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Ms. Angelou told how she had been in the San Francisco area ten or fifteen years earlier to do a Public Television show about African art. Before the show was to air, she received a call from a stranger who said that he happened to have a collection of African statues of some kind that he thought might be very useful to her on her program and perhaps she would like to see them and maybe use them. Of course, she accepted the offer and saw them. They were indeed just what she wanted. He lent them to her and she used them in her program in very artful ways which were appealing to the man who loaned them.

As a result of that, they started a friendship. She got to know the man and his wife. They had dinner together a number of times and got to be really good pals. When the Public Television thing was over, she went back to the East Coast.

A few years later, she returned to the Bay Area and remembering this friendship, she called up the man and said, "It is Maya Angelou. I'm back again. I would love to pick up our friendship where we left it off. I enjoyed you so much before."

He said, "Terrific. Let me tell you a little bit about what I have been doing during the interval." He had been in Europe working with the problems of the American troops stationed over there.

She said, "How did it go?"

He said, "The black troops have a particularly hard time because they are black and there aren't many blacks around. But our boys, also..."

She said, "What did you say?"

He said, "The black troops have a particularly difficult time for various reasons but our boys, also..."

She said, "What did you say?"

A third time he went through it. All of a sudden, as she described it, he himself finally heard what he'd been saying, and then said in effect, "This is the most awful thing I have ever done. I can't continue the conversation. I have got to hang up, to have said such a thing to you, Maya Angelou, 'the black boys, our boys.'"

She said, "No. This is just why we must talk because that is what racial prejudice is. Beneath the superficial liberal utterance, there is the deep, ingrained sense of 'black boys, our boys.'" So, they continued the conversation and agreed to meet.

What happened then was she tried a number of times to get hold of them, to meet him and see him and his wife. Again and again, the calls didn't go through. She left messages which weren't answered and finally the whole thing just fizzled out. So that was, in a way, her answer to the question, "How about racism?"

It moved her and upset her and that was the last question she took that day.

The next day of the Grace Cathedral conference, Maya Angelou returned to the podium and said, "I'm sure you noticed that I was moved by what I told you yesterday in answer to your question about racism." Then she said, "A remarkable thing happened as I was leaving the hall. A man in the audience stood up and said, 'Here I am.'"

It was the man she had been talking about. As she said that, the man himself again rose up, a small, white, Episcopal priest as it turned out. He walked up to the platform and threw his arms around Maya Angelou and she around him. They embraced one another and they wept and laughed, wept and laughed. It was a tremendously moving moment.

What made it so moving? The contact across not only racial barriers, but so many different kinds of barriers that separate us as human beings -- fear, mistrust, misunderstanding, anger, loneliness, the inability to communicate with each other, even those we love the most and are closest to. In so many ways, we move through our lives like lepers, the untouchable ones, the unclean ones, afraid to touch other people's lives and let our lives be touched by other people, ashamed of our own uncleanness, suspicious of other people.

Again, the Gospel verses. “Then a leper comes up to him, pleads with him, falls down on his knees, and says to him, ‘If you want to, you can make me clean.’ Although Jesus was indignant, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and says to him, ‘Okay – you’re clean.’”

Maya Angelou could have walked right past that offensive priest when he stood up and said, “Here I am.” In righteous indignation, she could have refused contact with him. She could have done what Jesus might have done with the leper – she could have ignored him. But with a touch, she declared him clean – effectively cleansing his deep disease of racism.

Do you get this thing about grace – about being lepers begging to be made clean, and about touching lepers to make them clean?

Angelou told a summary story at that Grace Cathedral conference. "You know, in slavery times the slaves were not allowed to laugh in many plantations." There was a rule against it which I had never heard before. You can see why there might have been such a rule -- the fear, I suppose, that if the slaves started laughing, then they end up laughing at the masters or maybe worse than that; if the slaves started laughing, the laughter might become infectious and the master would laugh with the slave. How can you laugh with a person one day and have the person be a slave the next day?

In any event, that was the rule. On some plantations, there grew up a practice among the slaves of dealing with that. When the urge to laugh became absolutely irrepressible, they had what they called "the laughter barrel." At the moment when they couldn't hold it any longer they would, under the pretext of getting something out of the barrel, lean way down inside the barrel and let it all come out. They would laugh and laugh and laugh.”

Then she described the wonderful service the night before – the thing that began the lectures. It was a high Episcopal service. Many bishops were there. There was incense, chanting, cloth of gold, beautiful vestments, miters. There was a man holding the silver cross coming down the aisle in front of the whole procession.  And she said, "As I watched that, I thought to myself that off of every chancel in every church, there should be a laughter room, and at a certain point in these great services, everybody should go off into the laughter room and just laugh and then come back and pick up the silver cross and gold garments and continue the thing on again."

What’s to laugh about? Just this. That here and in every church that can seem so pompous in its ceremonies, the Master sticks his head in the barrel with us – touching and being touched, pronouncing clean everyone who knows him or herself to be a slave to sin – Episcopal priests included.

“Here I am,” says a leprous Episcopal priest from the floor of a cathedral aptly named Grace. “Here we are,” say we assorted lepers from this floor. “Okay, you’re clean,” says the Master – and our diseases begin to fall away and we can laugh together with our heads in the barrel at this wonderful joke on people who try to keep us something like slaves because of our various uncounted sins and because of theirs. But now graced ourselves, we might be as gracious as Jesus and his disciple, Maya Angelou.