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Healing Touch
Sermon by Rev. Sarah Buteux
for Sunday, 2003
Scripture: II Kings 5:1-14 Mark 1:40-45
You have probably noticed that there is no title for this sermon in your
program. This is because today’s topic, as you might have guessed from our
readings, is leprosy, and, well …it was hard to think of a catchy title. To be
perfectly honest, it was also hard to think of an appropriate sermon, and by
Friday, when Allison was ready to print out the programs, I really had no idea
what I would be saying to you this morning. I’d done some research -and just
as a side note I now feel fully qualified to recommend that you not read up on
the symptoms of leprosy over breakfast – I’d flipped back and forth between 2
Kings and Mark, I had read Swedenborg’s take on it all, and I had cast about
my shelves searching for some way to relate this foreign disease to our
present circumstance in some meaningful way. But its difficult. I think the
closest I’ve ever come to leprosy was watching Ben Hur, and I’ll be the first
to admit that this does not count for all that much.
And then Leah, Jackie, and I, as we were finishing up our work on Friday
afternoon, noticed some strange behavior out in the parking lot. No, it
wasn’t people, it was actually two birds. We couldn’t quite figure out what
was going on as they hopped about outside, but in the end, one was able to fly
away and the other just lay in the snow. Leah and I went out to check on the
fallen bird, and found it shivering and damp, lying on the ground, waiting to
die. The feathers on it’s head were matted down with blood where the other
bird had pecked at it, and it was clear the little bird was quite sick. I
imagine the other birds had turned it out of their nests so that it wouldn’t
infect the rest of them. As I looked down at the bird I wanted to help it,
but even I was afraid to touch it. What if it had some disease I could catch,
or bird lice, or what if it bit me? I wondered if I would get infected if I
got too close? I just didn’t feel comfortable touching it, picking it up with
my bare hands.
So Leah went and got a t-shirt and a box, but trying to pick the bird up with
the shirt proved too clumsy and it managed to fly under cover where we
couldn’t get to it. We both felt really sad about the whole situation, wishing
we could help and yet knowing there was really nothing we could do. And it had
been disturbing to see the other bird hurt its own kind. But as Leah and I
made our way back into the warmth of the chapel, I began to think about how we
as humans have traditionally responded to one another in such situations.
When we can’t heal people we have a tendency to abandon them, both out of fear
and because being in their presence makes us uncomfortable. The experience of
those who suffer from leprosy in particular has always been much like the
experience of that dying bird. So many people have been cast out, beaten, and
left alone to die, while people like me stand just out of range, too scared
and too repulsed to provide any help.
Okay, so I was going to tell you some specifics about leprosy, but Andrew,
after reading this over last night, thought the sermon was a bit on the long
side, and that one really shouldn’t go into the kind of details I was going
into in polite company. So, suffice it to say that leprosy is caused by a
failure of the nervous system. Pain signals, which aid the brain and tell you
to stop actions that are harming you, no longer transmit properly. Infection
sets in easily, muscles waste away from disuse, and tendons contract.
Eventually your extremities cease to function. You too can rent Ben Hur if you
want more detail. And it is a contagious disease, though not extremely
contagious as one might expect. It has traditionally been the priests who had
the job of declaring a person unclean if they showed any symptoms of leprosy,
and these people were immediately cast out and instructed to yell, “unclean!”
if anyone came near them. In the middle ages they were given bells to wear
around their necks, and in more modern times they have been sent to leper
colonies far away from healthy people.
Lepers have always lived on the very fringe of society, outside the walls of
cities, the borders of villages. And they behaved as they were taught,
alerting people to their disease if they came too close, for it was only
through the generosity of the healthy that they would ever receive basic
necessities like food. They could not work, they could not settle, they could
not participate in any way with the life they were forced to leave behind when
they were first diagnosed. To be labeled a leper was to be consigned to a
living death. Now, back in Biblical times they referred to most skin ailments
as leprosy, just to be safe I guess, and this is probably why some people were
healed and there were provisions for declaring a person clean and allowing
them back into society. I imagine that until this century, nothing short of a
miracle could heal the true forms of the disease.
So, as cruel as it might seem, you can understand why people would react the
way they did, and the way they still do. Believe it or not, leprosy still
effects more than 15 million people worldwide. You can understand why there
were rules, and laws and customs set up to protect the healthy from infection.
Why leprous people were cast out, turned away, and kept at a distance. What
else can you do for a contagious disease with no cure? If I was afraid on
Friday to touch a sick bird, I can’t imagine how I would react to a victim of
leprosy, especially if I lived in an age where there was no hope of a
treatment or a cure. I am in no place to judge those who cast these sick
people from their midst. I understand why they did what they did.
But what is hard to understand is why both the leper in our Gospel reading and
Jesus would react so differently. When Jesus passed by, the leper should
have, by law, simply said, “unclean” as a warning, and Jesus should have
stayed away. Why would the leper say, so audaciously, “If you are willing,
you can make me clean.” Well maybe he had heard of Jesus. Jesus was already
garnering a reputation as a great teacher and healer. But even then, I would
think this poor man would have said something more like “If you are willing
you can heal me.”
But healing was not all that he wanted, and a healer was not all that he
recognized in Jesus. In asking to be made clean, this man was asking, one man
to another, to be recognized as a living human being again. He was asking to
rejoin society He was asking for acceptance. And in asking this of Jesus in
particular, he was acknowledging that Jesus was not just a healer, but a holy
man of God, a man as qualified as any priest to declare him “clean.” Jesus,
filled with compassion, reached out his hand, touched this man, and said, “I
am willing. Be clean.”
By all rights, the leper should have warned Jesus away, and Jesus should have
avoided the leper, but instead each one reached out, the leper with his voice,
Jesus with his hands. They made contact, even though such contact was
forbidden by both the law and basic common sense, and together they achieved
something miraculous. Yes, healing took place, but healing was not all that
was asked for and it was only part of what was given. The leper spoke to Jesus
out of his greatest need. Because, although the leprosy was bad, even the
dread disease was not as painful physically as the stigma of the disease had
rendered him socially. So Jesus, when he touched this man, restored his
flesh, but more importantly he restored his life, his place in society. Jesus
reached out and acknowledged that this man was still alive and in a sense
resurrected him with his compassionate touch.
I think it is important to pause here and realize that even if Jesus had not
been able to heal, the mere fact that he reached out to this man would have
accomplished something profound. In simply acknowledging this man’s existence
Jesus was affirming that the leper was still a human being. Mother Teresa, a
woman who worked with lepers throughout her career in Calcutta, spoke of this
once. She said, “We have drugs for people with diseases like leprosy. But
these drugs do not treat the main problem, the disease of being unwanted”
(“Soul Survivor” p 76, by Phillip Yancey).
When Jesus reached out and touched this man, he went right to the heart of the
problem. The greatest pain experienced by the leper was a lack of love,
acknowledgement, recognition, and Jesus restored all of these when he reached
out his hand and said, “I am willing.” The leprosy, and his words, “be clean”
were another matter. A second sentence. Not an after thought, no certainly
not, but also not the heart of the matter. Jesus was willing to touch this man
who no one would come near, as I was not willing to touch even a little bird.
Swedenborg speaks of how all of our senses: taste, smell, hearing, and
sight “are just long distance versions of the major sense of touch” (“The
Hopeful Year”, Smith p151, paraphrase of AC 3528,10023,10199, and CL 393).
I don’t know if this is true scientifically, but I can perceive that it is
true spiritually. All of our senses, according to Swedenborg’s understanding,
are given to us that we night make contact with one another and all that
exists in the world. With our eyes, our sense of taste, our ears, our noses,
we reach out and touch all that is around us, but more importantly, we reach
out and come to know the world around us.
He writes “these external contacts with the outside world exist to serve
different kinds of internal awareness or perception, formed by what seems good
and true. The several varieties of sensory experience all reflect spiritual
qualities of goodness and truth because perception starts within, and is
sparked off by what people know and want. The sense of touch thus has a
general overall meaning to do with giving and receiving.”
So it is in touching one another, therefore, that we come to know,
acknowledge, recognize, and love what is good and true in other people and in
the world around us. Stroking a beloved cat, feeling a forehead for signs of
fever, a hug, the words read in a card, the taste of birthday cake made just
for you, the smell of flowers picked by your grandchildren, all of these sense
experiences are ways we are able to reach out and touch the truth in the
world, and why it is so important that we reach out and touch one another.
“Innocence and affection”, says Swedenborg, “may be conveyed by touch as
between mothers and babies, or between lovers. Even mental concepts can be
conveyed by touch. So Jesus touched infants and (Jesus touched) invalids.”
Our willingness to touch, our need to be touched, is integral to our ability
to communicate and truly know one another. To be a leper and be consigned to
never being touched again, it truly would be a living death.
Phillip Yancey, a favorite author of mine, has long been obsessed with the
problem of evil and suffering in light of God’s loving nature. Two of his
closest friends, Drs. Philip and Margaret Brand, made it their life’s work to
treat victims of leprosy, and Phillip would often visit them in an attempt to
find some answers to his own questions about pain. The Brands took him to
visit a former patient of theirs named Sadan. Yancey writes that:
“Sadan … looked like a miniature version of Gandhi: skinny, balding, with
thick spectacles, perched cross-legged on the edge of a bed. The door to his
modest apartment was open, and small birds flew in and out. A mangy dog
lounged on the step. Sadan showed me his feet, which ended in smooth rounded
stumps instead of toes. “I met the Brands too late to save these,” he
said. “But they gave me shoes that let me walk.”
In a high pitched, singsong voice Sadan told me wrenching stories of past
rejection: the classmates who made fun of him at school, the driver who
forcibly threw him off a public bus, the many employers who refused to hire
him despite his training and talent, the hospitals that turned him away with a
brusque, “we don’t treat lepers here.”
When I got to Vellore, I spent the night on the Brand’s veranda,
because I had nowhere else to go,” said Sadan. “That was unheard of for a
person with leprosy back then. I can still remember when Dr. Brand took my
infected, bleeding feet in his hands. I had been to many doctors. A few had
examined my hands and feet from a distance, but Drs. Paul and Margaret were
the first medical workers who dared to touch me. I had nearly forgotten what
human touch felt like. Even more impressive, they let me stay in their house
that night, and this was when even health workers were terrified of leprosy.”
Sadan then recounted the elaborate sequence of medical procedures – tendon
transfers, nerve strippings, toe amputations, and cataract removal – performed
by the Brands. By transferring tendons to his fingers, they made it possible
for him to write again, and now he kept accounts for a program that gave free
leprosy care through fifty-three mobile clinics. He spoke for half an hour.
His past was a catalogue of human suffering. And the stigma continues to this
day: just recently he had sat in a car alone and watched his daughters wedding
from a distance, afraid his presence would disturb the guests.
As the Brands and I sipped our last cup of tea in his home, just
before leaving to catch a plane home to England, Sadan made this astonishing
statement: “Still I must say that I am now happy that I had this disease.”
“Happy?” I said, incredulous.
“Yes,” replied Sadan. “Apart from leprosy, I would have been a normal man with
a normal family, chasing wealth and a higher position in society. I would
never have known such wonderful people as Dr. Paul and Dr. Margaret, and I
would never have known the God who lives in them” (“Soul Survivor” p 83-84).
“ I would never have known such wonderful people as Dr. Paul and Dr. Margaret,
and I would never have known the God who lives in them”
Sadan knew the Lord within Paul and mArgaret because he felt the Lord’s love
reach through them from the very first moment they met. The physical healing
came later, and it was much more painstaking and much less effective then the
healing Jesus would have accomplished with the two words, “be clean,” but the
more important healing that need to take place, the healing of Sadan’s
emotionally starved soul, began that very first night on the porch when the
Doctors took his bleeding hands into their own clean ones and welcomed him
into their home just as he was. They were willing to reach out and touch
him, and in that moment he may not have been healed, but Sadan was declared
clean, worthy, and human.
The power of being touched…the pain of not being touched…the knowledge of God
that comes when we reach out and meet one another in the middle… perhaps this
was why Jesus healed. For in touching the sick he conveyed in the most
concrete way possible just how much God loved them. He communicated the Love
within him in a way they could not help but understand. He was willing, and
though his divine powers made him able to heal the wounded, it was his very
human love which made the wounded whole.
Now you may be wondering what leprosy corresponds to, and I am eager to tell
you.
Leprosy represents a person who knows the truth but does not live it out, or,
as Swedenborg would say, a person who falsifies the truth within themselves.
When you think about it, this correspondence is particularly apt, for the
nature of the disease is such that the body “falsifies” its own sense
experience.
Leprosy is a break down of the nervous system. The nerve endings cease to
send signals of pain, and the body is damaged by actions as simple as wearing
cramped shoes or grasping a splintered rake. “Pressure sores form, infection
sets in, and no pain signals alerts the person to tend the wounded
area.”(Yancey p 71).
The truth is that there is damage being done to the body, but in a sense,
because it is frayed, the nervous system can no longer convey the truth of its
physical circumstance to the brain. The body then, is in a sense lying to
itself, and in so doing begins to disintegrate. What a fantastic word to
describe this, “disintegrate” for that is exactly what falsifying truth is, a
process of disintegration, dis-integration. When the truth is no longer
integrated correctly into one’s life, things begin to fall apart and damage is
so easily done.
Leprosy represents a falsification of what we know to be true. Which means we
still have the truth on the inside but we don’t act on it outside. We don’t
live according to it. It makes me realize how easy it is to become leprous in
a spiritual sense, how easy it is to contract a leprosy of the heart. And the
irony is that it takes something as horrid as leprosy to reveal this
temptation within our own nature. For in our hearts we know the truth. We
know that we ought to reach out to those who suffer. I felt it immediately
when I looked down on the ground at that dying bird. Common sense told me not
to touch it, but my uncommon sense if you will, wanted to comfort and heal
it.
There is always a part of us that longs to reach out as Jesus did –that part
of us where our compassion lies- but there is another part of us that fears
what will happen if we do. And if we know the cause is hopeless, be it
leprosy, AIDS, or just old age, often we would rather just walk away and not
subject ourselves to the pain of inevitable loss. But as people of God we are
called to reach out to the sick, the hungry, the oppressed, the lonely, the
outcasts, the prisoners, the disenfranchised, the mentally ill, the ones we
hate, the ones we fear, the ones we turn away from and pretend not to see.
We are called to imitate Christ, to reach out with hands that our willing.
These hands cannot perform miracles of healing, but they can perform miracles
of acceptance and compassion.
We may not be able to heal like Jesus, but if we are willing, we can
certainly love like Jesus. We may not have the power to heal each other
physically but we do have the power to declare each other clean, touchable,
worthy, human.
For it is never simply a matter of more money, or better health, or even
communication, but it is and always will be at the center of it all, a matter
of love. A matter of compassion. A matter of truth upheld, rather than truth
falsified. If we are willing we can reach out and touch those in need of us,
in need of our recognition, in need of being known.
The alternative, the common sense response not to reach out and touch those
who suffer -because we ourselves are afraid of suffering, causes us to become
on a spiritual level what we fear on the physical level. When we turn our
hearts from caring for those who need us, we render ourselves untouchable in
a spiritual sense. We deny the truth we know, the truth that tells us we
ought to help, and parts of our own hearts begin to contract. The more numb
we become to the pain around us, the more numb we will eventually become to
everything around us.
Before I close I do want to say that there is always a balance. For we must
take care of ourselves if we are to take care of others. But love can find
safe ways to reach across those things that divide us that our fear will never
allow us to see. Sometimes it is almost impossible to see how we could ever
reach out to certain kinds of people. I have slammed many a door and cast
many a person away in an attempt to protect myself, and perhaps I was right to
do so, but perhaps I was wrong.
For in my own limited way I cannot always see how we can best imitate Christ,
anymore than I can understand why he healed this man and then told him to keep
quiet about it. There are deep mysteries here I am only beginning to
understand. But I do find myself coming back to those words, “If you are
willing, you can make me clean.” We are not necessarily called or able to heal
one another, but we are called to accept and love one another. For healing
without love leaves a body as sick and lonely at heart as ever it was, but
love, even if there can be no healing, allows the heart, even if only for a
short while, to truly live.
Let us pray…
Copyright 2003 by Rev. Sarah Buteux
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