2012-02-12 Becoming Whole

BECOMING WHOLE

Scriptures: 2 Kings 5:1-14, Mark 1:40-45

OK, it’s ‘fess up time. As you may be aware, the lectionary, on which we usually base our sermons, is on a three-year cycle. I went back and looked at the sermon I preached on this comparable date in 2009, when the scriptural texts were precisely the same – and you know what? – it’s pretty darn good. So, I’m basically going to repeat that sermon, with some updating and changes. But I figured if TV networks can offer umpteen reruns, why not a preacher? If you were here three years ago and can repeat this sermon word-for-word, you’re welcome to text or tweet or even just nod off.

As I mentioned last week, my wife, Ann, is an advocate of the healing technique called “therapeutic touch”. The basic concept behind it is that the human body includes an energy field which can be sensed if you put your hands close to the skin. When there is illness or pain that energy field becomes different – perhaps hotter, or colder, or static-y – and the administrator of therapeutic touch can sense that energy, carrying it across and out of the body, and eventually relieve some or even all of the painful symptoms.

Perhaps like some of you, I’ve been skeptical of the claims of this approach to a healing process – although it’s a bit hard to be too skeptical when you see it actually working. I’ve heard people refer to it as “magic” or “voodoo medicine” (or even “flaky”, as I heard from one nursing professor), which is probably something to be expected when confronted by a new and different approach to healing that you don’t at first really understand. I’m sure our forbearers had similar kinds of reactions to vaccines and x-rays and antibiotics – many of the advances in medical technologies over the past couple of centuries must have first come across as “voodoo medicine”.

While there isn’t specific research data to support the efficacy of therapeutic touch, there is research (according to Dr. Marsha Fowler, whom I heard speak at a Clark County Ministerial Association meeting this past Wednesday) that points up how important it is for a baby to be touched and held – in fact the lack of such touching for a baby can even lead to its death. Just about everyone finds a massage to feel pleasurable and to be relaxing. It’s clear that touching – holding and being held – is central to our feeling good about ourselves.

Therapeutic touch, though, is not such a new concept. After all, that’s essentially what Jesus did in all of the healing stories that we have in the gospels. It was certainly central to what he did with Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, as we heard about last week. In fact, that’s a large part of what got him in trouble with the authorities. They thought he was doing what today we might call “inappropriate touching” – though nowadays that phrase is mostly reserved for a sexual context. But for Jesus it was important for him to feel the pain that he encountered in order to be able to find what it was that could be curative. And, of course, what he felt was not just the pain of the body but the pain of the mind and soul that accompanied physical suffering – the whole person. For Jesus, the most important thing was to be able to make someone whole.

Today’s texts are actually two healing stories: Mark continues Jesus’ journey throughout Galilee and the astonishing acts that he undertakes there, while in 2 Kings we have this interesting story of Na’aman who seeks to be cured by the prophet Elisha. In both stories the person needing to be healed is afflicted with leprosy. Many commentators note that in the Bible the word “leprosy” can refer to a wide variety of skin ailments, much like we use the word “schizophrenia” today to refer to a potpourri of mental disorders. But the key to anyone who was described as a leper in the Bible is their ostracism – no one would touch them, no one wanted them as part of the community, no one wanted to come anywhere near them. In particular they were declared to be ritually unclean, which meant that they were even excluded from religious services, the very heart of the faith community. In Judaism there was a detailed and formal process of being examined by a priest before a person could be declared healed and allowed to again participate in community life.

Na’aman was a high-ranking Syrian government official, and he was becoming very impatient with his illness. He wanted to find a quick and easy cure. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Whenever any of us is faced with a lengthy and wearisome rehabilitation process we yearn for a “magic bullet” – that pill or medicine that will make it all better just like that. And even though we have our own doctors and other medical professionals surrounding us, when we’re in pain like that we look for help wherever we can find it.

So, Na’aman reaches out for some way to cure his ailment. And the first rather surprising thing that happens is that he is given some advice by a servant girl. Not only is she female and a servant but she is an Israelite, captured during an Aramean military raid. The second surprising thing is that she is willing to proffer this advice, going first to her mistress, Na’aman’s wife, who tells Na’aman what the girl is suggesting. You wouldn’t think a captured prisoner who had been pressed into slavery would be this forthcoming, would you? But this young Israelite realized that she was to be “of service” to her master, and so she was desirous of his healing. Plus, she knew that there was this wonderful prophet in Israel, Elisha, who knows something about curing a leper.

Now Na’aman puts on a big show to try to impress the king of Israel and the king’s prophet with his wealth. We all know stories about people who think that power and authority and affluence can help them buy their way to better health. But such ostentatious displays do not help someone return to the healed and healing community, and here, too, Na’aman’s lavish gifts do not impress either the king or Elisha. Instead, Elisha offers a simple procedure – wash yourself seven times in the Jordan River in order to become clean.

What a come-down and a put-down for the powerful Na’aman! As we discovered when we were in Israel last November the Jordan is hardly a river at all; it’s more like a stream or a creek. Plus which it’s rather dirty. And seven times?!? Na’aman was used to getting action much more quickly than that – even if this was a ritually significant number. But yet another surprise: his servants convince Na’aman to do as the prophet bids. And so he does. The result? “(H)is flesh was restored like the flesh of a young man, and he was clean.” He became like a child again. Despite his arrogance and display of wealth to try to effect a cure, Na’aman is continually surprised and thereby humbled, and it is this humility that helps him find his place back into community, back into health, back into wholeness. His loneliness has been taken away; he has been touched.

This, too, is what the leper who confronts Jesus desires, begs of him, prostrates himself before him. Coty Pinckney puts this need quite poetically: “More than any other person in the world the person with leprosy needs to be treated by somebody who will reach out his hand . . . and touch him. . . . Oh, I have seen men break down into tears at that time because they have found someone who would touch them.” Jesus, the text says, was “moved with pity”. Earlier versions of this text, though, translate this to read “with anger”, and this is probably the more accurate translation. Was Jesus angry at the leper for interrupting him? More likely he was enraged at the man’s additional suffering by being isolated from his community – by the people all around him who refused to touch him. Jesus felt something powerful, something physical, when he looked at this man, an emotion better translated, Richard Swanson says, as, “Jesus felt his stomach turn.” This was no gentle healing, no “balm in Gilead”, as we sang about last week. This was closer to the casting out of demons that Jesus had done earlier at the synagogue and at Simon’s home after he had cured Simon’s mother-in-law. Both pity for his substantial suffering and anger at his social status were involved in what Jesus did for this man.

And the result was also dual: Jesus heals the disease and he cleanses the leper. These are two, separate results, not two ways of saying the same thing. What was it that the leper asked of Jesus? Note: not “Heal my disease”, but, “Make me clean”. With this simple phrase the leper is saying a multitude of things, all of which Jesus hears: “I want to worship God!” “I want to be a part of God’s people, in relationship to God!” “I want to touch others, to be in relationship to the people of God!” In other words, “I want to be part of the community once again, and I want people to feel free to be able to touch me. I want to be made whole.”

You’ll recall that I said earlier in relation to Na’aman’s story that in Judaism there was a detailed and formal process of being examined by a priest before a person could be declared healed and allowed to again participate in community life. This is the path Jesus is now offering to this man: “’go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them,” meaning the priests. But now comes one of the surprises in this story. Instead of doing what you would have expected him to do and follow Jesus’ admonition, because, after all, that would have been the way to get back into the community, the man goes about the countryside telling everyone what Jesus had done for him – despite Jesus having asked him specifically not to do that! And so the second surprise in this story is that the tables are turned: by healing and cleansing the man Jesus himself becomes a kind of leper, banished, in a sense,

by his own popularity and power, by the overwhelming needs of the people, and perhaps by the rumbles of tension between him and the priests. Yet, at the same time, his fame is beginning to spread among the people.

Who do you identify with in this story? It’s easy, I suppose, to feel critical of and superior to the people who refused to touch this unclean man, out of fear of becoming unclean themselves, and who therefore ostracized him and caused his extreme loneliness. But don’t we 21^st century, scientifically-minded folk know people we’d rather not see, let alone touch? Skin disease is difficult enough, but for a long time people with cancer and later those with HIV/AIDS have experienced a distance that surrounds them once they’re diagnosed. Many forms of mental illness cause us to shy away, preferring not to be in the presence of those whose behavior we can’t predict. Even the stigma of someone who has lost his or her job and become unemployed for a long period of time can cause this reaction – sort of like: “I don’t want to catch what they’ve got.” Those of us with aging parents who may exhibit some form of dementia are often uncomfortable if we stay with them too long.

There’s a marvelous short film that came out in the mid-70’s called “Peege” in which a family – middle-aged parents and three college- and high-school-aged boys – visit the man’s mother (the boys’ grandmother, lovingly called “Peege”) in a nursing home at Christmastime. Her mind is completely gone, and their efforts to connect – such as by giving her Christmas cookies, which crumble as she tries to hold them – are really rather pitiful. There is no touching at all. But at the film’s end the oldest boy, whom you have seen in flashbacks remembering his grandmother when he was a small boy and she was a vibrant presence in his life, comes back in the room and simply holds her and talks about those reminiscences. The final image you see is of a smile slowly crossing Peege’s face.

That wonderful author Wendell Berry has said, “Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.”

Who do you identify with in this story? We are both the leper and the people – both in need ourselves of healing and cleansing and wholeness and those members of the community who can reach out and touch and make whole. Our faith calls us to serve and to heal, to restore and rebuild community. Like the leper who went about the countryside proclaiming what Jesus had done for him,

we have opportunities as individuals and as a congregation to tell the story of God’s love, of the healing power available to us and to all people in the good news of Jesus Christ. Let us, then, surprise others and surprise ourselves as we share ministries that in many ways, various shapes, and different forms offer a healing touch to our world and its hurting people. It is possible to touch with a healing power – to make whole — because God’s love has said that it will be so.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ

Las Vegas, NV

February 12, 2012