Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Epiphany 6: February 12, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Lepers—growing up in the South we had heard about them mostly through Biblical stories like the one we just heard that seeped into Southern culture the way that water seeps into basements here in Seattle. Though we had never seen a leper, as adolescents, we used the term to describe what it felt to be shunned or to shun someone during the ups and downs of adolescent life.
And so after a bad day in which your social group decided that you were no longer cool, you became a “leper,” a most painful predicament to be in.
Owing to this, no matter how old I am, no matter what my situation in life is, I have never lost the fear of being as a leper—shunned and isolated. For social isolation is death for us human beings. This is so whether the social isolation comes on account of age, on account of being divorced or losing a partner, on account of being sick or disabled, on account of suffering financial or personal ruin, or on account of being strange or having a work or personal situation turn on you.
Social isolation is death to the human spirit.
In Hebrew culture leprosy was all about social isolation. A term used for unusual skin disorders of many kinds, leprosy was in fact important and different from other illnesses because it was not just a medical problem. It was also a social and religious problem.
And this is how it worked: When you got a strange skin rash you would not go to a doctor. You would go to the priest who took a look at it and pronounced you “unclean,” meaning you were no longer fit for social and religious life. From that moment on, you were banished from the community. You had to wear torn clothing and let your hair hang loose so that people who saw you coming could avoid you. You had to warn them, crying out: “Unclean, Unclean,” whenever others approached.
And you had to live outside the community, in a cave or an empty tomb, which was appropriate, because in terms of human social interaction, your life was over. You were not going to touch or be touched by anyone ever again: not by your beloved, not by your children and not by your parents. That’s because anyone you touched or who touched you would be unclean too.
This is the kind of person Jesus, the fully human being, encounters in our story from Mark for today: someone who is sick, but more than this, someone who is completely isolated from others.
So notice some specific details in this story. Notice that the leper does not ask Jesus to be healed of his leprosy. Instead, he makes a statement to him, saying: “If you choose, you can make me clean." He doesn’t asked to be healed of leprosy, but “clean” that is, restored from loneliness to connection, from social isolation to community.
And then Jesus, the fully human being, the Holy One, touches him and says: “I do choose. Be made clean.”
So I think we have to decide, you and I, who we are in this story at this time in our lives. Are you the leper, the one suffering painful social isolation and loneliness? Or are you standing in Jesus’ shoes, being asked, invited, even demanded to make a choice about engagement, about touching a person or a situation that others find untouchable?
Please take a moment to consider this. (silence)
If you’re the leper, this is what I believe our story is suggesting:
Somewhere, somehow, God is trying to break through to you. If you’re here this morning, God is trying to break through and touch you here in this place, through all of us, people who aren’t perfect, people that you may not even know well, but people who have hands and hearts and minds and ears, who have bread and wine and coffee and food, who have music and incense and movement and silence, who are in fact the hands of Christ, the voice of Christ.
And then there are your family members, friends and co-workers, some of whom are this same healing and restoring God trying to break through to you.
And if this morning you’re standing in Jesus’ shoes, being asked to risk touching life in its isolation, what I have to say to you is simple. Do it and notice in the doing of it what happens to you. Do it, touch life, engage the people and places that present themselves to you that are cut off and isolated from the whole. Touch this life. Be the Christ to a world in need of your touch. Do it, and you may find that you come to yourself in the doing of it.
Five years ago I got an e-mail from my sister that had one of those little exclamation points beside it, meaning the message was urgent. In the e-mail she let me know that I needed to come to Atlanta right away and that my eighty-six-year-old year father had fallen and was raging with dementia or Alzheimer’s—she didn’t know which. He had been put in the hospital and everyone was exhausted with trying to bring him back from the world he had entered, the world of confusion, the world of the past.
I packed up my laptop and told my co-workers at Tom’s of Maine that I was going to Atlanta to help my sisters and my mother manage the care of my father. After all, I was management!
I arrived to find him in the hospital and my mother and my sisters on their last nerve, as we say, needing sleep and completely exasperated with this 6 ft 3 inch now untouchable man, husband and father who no longer made any sense.
It didn’t take long to realize that I had a choice to make with him. I could “manage” the nurses and orderlies as they physically cared for my dad and I could join my sisters and my mother in continuing to urge him to behave as much as he could as if he still belonged to the world we inhabited, or I could take these hands, touch him and be his companion in the space where he was now living.
And that is, by the Grace of God, what I did. I bathed him, I shaved him and I fed him, more physical closeness than I had ever had with him when he was in his right mind. But more importantly for him, I went with him to all the places his mind wanted to go: back to cookouts on summer Alabama nights, we kids playing outside as the sun set until he finished the hamburgers and called us in for dinner, back to vegetable gardens he had planted and the specific varieties of tomatoes and cucumbers he had chosen, back to the early days of courtship with my mother.
If we choose, we can make them clean, bringing the untouchable back into community.
What I found, what I hope you will find is that the untouchable one are not the only one restored to community in the process. When we choose to touch, we can, in fact, come to ourselves in a new way, becoming more real, more fully human, more “in touch.”
In the book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott writes: “Broken things have been on my mind recently and in the lives of people I love. Our wonderful friend Ken died of AIDS—not long after, my friend, Mimi, began to die after a long struggle with a rare blood disease . . .Our preacher, Veronica, said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken, those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we, who are more or less OK for now, need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers.”
The good news is that the healer has come, the “wounded healer,” the one who touches the leper, the one who yearns for all of us to be more in touch with our own humanity. The good news is that the healer has come—Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen one. Amen.
Works Cited or Consulted
Ched Myers in Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.152-154.
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, p. 106, quoted in a sermon by John Buchanan of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, Illinois. Buchanan also draws the connection between this idea and Henri Nouwen’s idea of wounded healer.
