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Lay Homily
February 15, 2009
Stephen Crippen
Diana, the Princess of Wales, has been dead for more than eleven years. Her story seems to be over, apart from the occasional tacky tabloid uncovering new evidence of her marital misery, or the latest escapades of her sons. She seems for the most part to be gone from our midst.
In 1997, which is so long, long ago in so many ways, all the world—and especially women—seemed to grieve the death of Diana. My friend Renee was no exception. She did not weep or carry on, but she surprised me nonetheless. Renee is a daughter of post-modernism, a feminist, an activist (well, some days an activist, other days just a delightful cat owner!) and—most of all—Renee was a public high-school teacher at the time of Diana’s death. Beautiful princesses weren’t exactly her type. But Renee, like many women, found herself thinking about the life of Diana. She was sorry to hear of her death.
I asked her why. Renee said, “Diana was one of the first celebrities to put her hands on people living with AIDS.” That’s what got Renee’s attention, what drew her toward this glamorous and surreal celebrity.
But what Diana did was such a simple and unremarkable thing to do, wasn’t it? We might expect that any compassionate human being would instinctively touch a sick and bedridden patient. We might expect that anyone—anyone—would naturally sit on the edge of the bed, unthinkingly run a hand through the patient’s hair, and gently wash his tired face with a warm cloth. But we know the power of fear. We know why, when Diana did this in front of the cameras, it was front-page news. It even caught the attention of a young jaded teacher of tough high-school kids. It was a big deal.
“Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him,” we heard in today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark. And in the context of Jesus’ day and time, it was big news. Jesus is not only healing the man. He is also breaking a social barrier that separated the man from the ritually “clean” people around him—including Jesus. By stretching out his hand and touching the so-called ‘leper,’ Jesus brought the man back into the fold of the community. After the healing, Jesus instructs the man to present himself to the priest—to complete the ritual act that confirms that this man is now clean, in more than one sense of the word.
This is also, once again, an incarnational story. Jesus, emotionally moved by this man’s physical and social dilemma, stretched out his hand and touched him…and by doing so allowed himself to be not just emotionally close, but physically close to the man, even to the point of physical contact. At the edge of respectable society, Jesus stretches out his hand beyond the edge and touches the untouchable—giving visceral, physical shape to his emotional compassion. Jesus doesn’t just have a feel-good response to this man. He can’t be of any use to the man if he stops there. No, he is helpful to the man—helpful to the point of both physical and social liberation!—because, to say it simply, Jesus went all the way.
Here’s a way to see it from a different angle. In the story I’m about to tell, I am myself in the role of the man in need of healing, but rest assured I do not fantasize that I am an outcast in my community! So it’s not a perfect match for today’s Gospel teaching. But this story can open up the story of Jesus and the leper, Diana and the people living with AIDS...stories of healing in which there is more than one thing going on.
The same year—even the same month—of Princess Diana’s tragic death, I packed all my earthly belongings into a moving truck and left Minnesota for the Puget Sound. I shared the truck with someone many of you have come to know in the past couple of years—I shared it with Samuel Torvend, our friend Samuel, who later today will be received as a priest in the Episcopal Church. (That explains all the red regalia ravishing you right now!)
Back then, Samuel and I had only been friends for a couple of years, but it was one of those fast and deep friendships—the kind of friendship where you know you’ll be best pals forever, and sob like a baby when one of you dies. And yet, as comfortable as I was with Samuel, and also his parents—his dad Silas drove with us on that long move, and I had met his mother the previous year—as comfortable as I was with my new friend and his family, on this journey I was highly aware that I was not at home. Samuel, for his part, was returning home—we stayed for the first couple of months in his parents’ house in Lacey until both of us could find apartments in Tacoma. And for Samuel, so much was familiar—his parents, the campus at PLU, the whole Seattle/Tacoma area that had been his first home.
But I was not in good shape. Not only was I coping with the excitement and anxiety of a major move—the first one of my life—but if you’ve ever driven across the country in three long days, you might imagine how I felt physically. We arrived in Lacey late on the third night, and by the next morning I was mysteriously sick. Headache, woozy stomach, dizziness, the dull grind and pull of what felt like a flu bug.
Samuel was compassionate, and if you know him you can imagine his friendliness, his natural bedside manner. But—and I love my friend!—he was not equal to the task. There I lay, pathetically, unable to rest, looking and feeling ridiculous, not at home, and not well.
And in the doorway of my bedroom appeared an angel, an angel in the form of Alice, Samuel’s mother. If you have the fortune of meeting her, you’ll see that Alice, now not so young, has not lost her beauty or her grace. Think Jackie Kennedy, except prettier, and with a crown of silver hair. Alice appeared in the doorway and said, by way of dismissing Samuel, “I’ll take care of this.” Knowing he was outgunned by a veteran healer and wonderworker, Samuel made room for her.
And here’s what she did. Alice sat by my bed, asked me simply to relax, and began massaging my shoulders and back. As she did so, she started talking to me, gently. “Driving that much is so hard,” she said. (Then some silence.) Then, “You’re exhausted, and it’s so disorienting to be so far from home, so far from your family.” She asked no questions, knowing in her bones that even easy questions are stressful for someone who is sick. And she knew everything anyway. Notice that Alice did not simply feel compassion for me, hand me some Advil, and encourage me to rest. She came down to me, she stretched out her hands and touched me…and so she practiced not just hospitality, but (and I’m borrowing some church lingo here) radical hospitality. She wasn’t just making room for a guest in her home. She was using her hands and body to touch me, and in our touching, lift me from my illness.
Which is what happened. I had taken no medication. There was no immediate technical reason I could point to to explain why I felt better. But I felt a thousand times better. Soon I was up and in the kitchen, drinking coffee and chattering away. And in my first morning in this new land, I was home.
So…more than one thing happened. I was restored to physical health, but I was also drawn more deeply into the family of my friend. I was restored to physical health, but I was also bid warm welcome in a new and unfamiliar land. I was restored to physical health, but I was also reminded that I, too, can call this place home.
Maybe it hasn’t escaped your notice that in all of these stories, the words and actions are pretty simple. A feeling of compassion. An outstretched hand. A physical connection. That’s it. You can do it. No doubt you do do it. And this is how God gathers an ever larger community into God’s embrace—not just an ethereal, spiritual “embrace,” but a palpable, physical one.
And the response to this grace is just as simple. The response is to sing an ancient song, which we did a bit earlier this morning:
“You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy.”
Works consulted:
Material taken and adapted from Stephen Crippen, The Healing Word, in “Homily Service” (Silver Spring, MD: The Liturgical Conference, 2000), 23-25.
John J. Pilch, The Cultural World of Jesus: Sunday by Sunday, Cycle B (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1996), 34-36.
Gerard S. Sloyan, Preaching from the Lectionary: An Exegetical Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 283.
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