“The Touch of Love”

Michael D. Powell February 15, 2009

Mark 1:40-45 6^th Sunday after the Epiphany

God’s love is able to heal disease! Jesus Christ is the love of God incarnate and his touch was fearless, forgiving, generous and unconditionally loving. The touch of Jesus Christ was and is able to heal disease.

We normally think of disease as physical, but disease is also emotional, spiritual, psychological and social. These are all forms of heart disease. For example: Some years ago I did a funeral for a teenage girl who had committed suicide. She and her boyfriend had lived an isolated, antisocial lifestyle in the mountains of Central Idaho. They were heavily involved in the drug culture. I was asked to do the service because I knew the girl’s brother, who was a logger in the little town where I had a church. Since I’d never met the girl, I asked her family if they had anything she’d written that might help me to make the memorial service more personal. As it turns out she had written some very revealing and soul searching poetry. I selected a couple of those poems to share. As is often the case in the untimely death of a young person, the service was packed and people were standing along the walls. It was a difficult, very emotional service. Everyone was sobbing and as I was in the middle of reading one of her poems, suddenly her boyfriend freaked out. He jumped up, sobbing and crying, yelling about how nobody had understood her. He was actually on the verge of violence, thrashing about, and several hundred grieving people went into shock, not knowing what to do. Almost instantly the girl's brother and several of his logger friends went into bouncer mode, corralled the boyfriend and dragged him out as he continued to scream and yell. The service was basically over at that point, so I simply said “Let us pray,” and led the congregation in a closing prayer with special words for the pain and anguish of the boyfriend.

The heart disease that caused that teenage girl to take her own life was the same disease that caused her boyfriend to cry out at her funeral. They were brokenhearted, alienated, and at a loss for love. For that kind of disease, there is only one cure. The touch of love is the only thing that can heal a broken heart.

Last week we saw how Jesus was able to drive out demons, and this week he cleanses a leper. In order to get the full impact, you have to understand not only the physical, but also the emotional and social implications of this healing. In the New Testament no disease was regarded with more terror and repulsion than leprosy, which reduced the sufferer to a hideous state. Leprosy is a horrible physical disease. It begins with discolored patches of skin, then nodules form on those patches, gathering specifically in the folds of the neck, nose, lips and forehead until gradually the whole appearance of the face is changed into something monstrous and beast-like. As the nodules grow larger, they give off a foul discharge and the eyebrows fall out. The eyes become staring, the voice hoarse and the breath wheezes because of ulcerations on the vocal chords. The hands and feet also ulcerate and tendons contract until the hands become like claws. Finally whole hands and feet drop off and the sufferer becomes utterly repulsive both to himself and to others.

But leprosy is also a social disease, with emotional, spiritual effects. Leprosy is another form of heart disease! It was so terrifying that any skin disorder was suspect and any rash, boil or even a burn was suspected as leprosy. The afflicted were declared unclean and were excluded from any kind of social interaction, and were especially forbidden from entering such sacred areas as the temple or synagogue. Lepers were instructed by law to call attention to themselves by wearing torn clothes, unkempt hair, covering the lower part of their face and to go about crying out "Unclean, unclean" so that others had plenty of time to get out of the way and avoid contamination. It was the ultimate social and religious isolation. The fear of leprosy was based on a kind of manifest destiny of spiritual rewards and punishments. If you were healthy and wealthy, you had obviously earned God’s blessing. If you were sick and poor, it was because you had sinned and deserved God’s curse.

It was just such a leper who threw himself at the feet of Jesus, begging for mercy. The leper had obviously broken the law. He had no right even speaking to Jesus, but Jesus met human desperation with divine compassion. Jesus touched him. He did not have to do that. Don’t you think the Son of God could have simply said, “Be healed” - from a distance? But Jesus chose to overcome fear with the touch of compassion. Do you see the point? He touched him precisely because he was considered untouchable! He was demonstrating an alternative to repulsion and fear. Instead of stoning him to death, Jesus loved him to life. He healed both his diseased body and his broken heart.

Who are the ones whose appearance and behavior frightens us today, who are considered unclean and unwelcome, even in many places of worship? The most obvious parallel is undoubtedly people in the advanced stages of AIDS, but that's too easy. So who else can you think of that is not here? Who else do we misunderstand, fear, and keep our distance from? I can think of all kinds of people, but I’ve got a personal example in mind.

I’m having an interesting and ongoing kind of exchange with some kids who have a little hideaway in the woods out behind our house. My neighbor calls them “hooligans,” but it occurs to me that they’re kind of like lepers. Their skin is discolored with strange designs; they have hair that's unkempt and clothes that are torn. They hang out there, drink beer and smoke dope and always leave a messy pile of litter. I threw away a bong they left behind (it looked just like the one Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps used). That’s when I learned that you can smoke an apple! The next week I found an apple there with a carved out notch that smelled like marijuana. They seem to have a thing about garbage. There’s a garbage can in one corner of the field that they like to tip over, throw in the creek, and sometimes roll a hundred yards away. I drag it back and clean it up, but I’m interested in the psychology and the sociology of the whole thing. I see them on the trail sometimes and I talk with them, but I don’t let them know I’m the guy who cleans up their mess. I guess they’re my own little community of lepers and I’m trying to figure out how to touch them with love.

Maybe I’m naïve. I know a lot of people would just get mad and scold them, but I’m studying the situation, trying to be patient and creative. I want to open, not close the possibility of dialogue. God loves these kids, and I ought to be able to figure out how to love them too, even those they’re a royal pain in the posterior. Impatience and irritation would be a perfectly valid and understandable human response to their behavior and I can easily identify with that attitude. But impatience and irritation also have a way of closing instead of opening the doors of hope for future healing.

I take inspiration from a story that William Sloan Coffin tells in his book, The Courage to Love. A man sits down on the bank of a stream, in the shade of a tree whose roots grow down into the water. Presently he discerns a commotion down among the roots. Concentrating his attention, he sees that a scorpion has become helplessly entangled in the roots. Pulling himself to his feet, he makes his way carefully among the tops of the roots to the place where the scorpion is trapped. He reaches down to extricate it. But each time he reaches out the scorpion lashes at him with its tail. Finally he withdraws to the shade of the tree to contemplate the situation. As he sits there he hears a young man standing above on the road laughing at him. “You’re a fool,” says the young man, “wasting your time trying to help a scorpion that can only do you harm.” The old man replies, “Simply because it is the nature of the scorpion to sting, should I change my nature, which is to save?”

The boyfriend of the girl who committed suicide disrupted her memorial service. His behavior was socially repulsive, but does anyone have any doubt that it was a cry for help and healing? Lepers may be physically and socially repulsive, but Jesus reaches out to touch the leper with love, and in that touch there is life and healing. I’ll keep you posted on my ongoing saga with the little leper colony of potheads and litterbugs who hang out in the woods behind my house. Just because it’s their nature to make a mess, is that any reason I should change the nature I aspire to, which is to offer them patience and the touch of God’s love?

God grant us the compassion to reach out and touch others with the healing hands of Christ, which have so gently and so lovingly touched us - body, mind, heart and soul. May Christ be your shalom. Amen.