Holy Vessels: Moved and Stretched
Matthew 8:1-4, 16-17
February 21, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/ffdHKhdMZvE
I have seen people with leprosy. It was not uncommon in my childhood home in Ghana. Hansen’s disease affects the nerves. People cannot feel pain or heat or cold, and so they are prone serious injury. The people I saw tended to be missing limbs or fingers or toes, not because of the disease, but because of injuries sustained when their bodies did not warn them of the danger. Hansen’s Disease is what we think of when the word leprosy is used in our time.
But that is not what the Biblical people meant by the word. In the Bible, leprosy was a broad category for any number of eruptions of the skin. They did not know about germs, but they did understand that some things were contagious. So whether you had hives or the chicken pox, the treatment was the same – separation and isolation until your skin was clear again.
If a blemish or a rash suddenly appeared on your body, you were at risk of being labelled “unclean.” To be unclean meant you were a public health risk. You were required to keep your distance from your family and friends, to live outside the community for an undetermined amount of time. Imagine how frightening it would be – to receive a life-altering diagnosis with no idea what the course of the disease might be. You might know people who got this diagnosis and left and were never seen again. You might know others whose rash cleared up in a week. How frightened you might be as you wondered about your future.
I wonder if you have ever woken up in the last year with a cough or an unusual headache or feeling that your sense of taste was off and wondered whether it was a sign of a life-altering diagnosis. Maybe you tried to shrug it, to tell yourself not to worry, that it would go away on its own, but still you worried until it did. I imagine people in Bible times did that too. They did not tell anyone about a skin blemish at first. They kept it covered up, telling themselves not to worry, that it would go away on its own.
Over time, the public health issues around leprosy became political and religious issues. There was an idea that if you had leprosy, it was a sign of God’s displeasure. So, once you had the label, even if you recovered, it was hard for people to feel safe with you, because there was still some suspicion that you were a bad person. Blaming the person who is sick for their illness is something that we still do. We are frightened by diseases that we do not understand and so we manage our fear with blame. When Covid stories began to hit the news, some of the first people I talked with were people who had been allies of those who suffered with HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s and 90’s. This pandemic triggered memories of how badly those patients had been treated and also some fears that we might respond similarly this time.
Because we understand germs and disease in ways that ancient people did not, we might have thought that we were past the point of making disease a political issue. The hue and cry about wearing masks and staying home, the heated protests about infringing on rights and the virus being a hoax – all of that suggests that we are not. That gives us a new window of understanding leprosy in Jesus’ day. Like Covid, like other diseases which we fear, it had implications for health and religion and politics.
Probably the worst part about it was the isolation. One day you lived with your family, in your community, doing your job as a fisher or shepherd or carpenter, the next you were alone, out in the countryside, hoping that your family would leave some food out somewhere for you. Totally isolated.
Chronic loneliness increases the odds of an early death by about 20%. [1] The stress hormones that come from feeling socially isolated can have as serious an impact on our bodies as smoking or obesity. In 2017, the British government appointed a minister for loneliness.[2] People in our culture and others were already dangerously lonely before the pandemic. Now, some have endured months without being touched by another human being. Some may be literally dying of loneliness.
All of those things that swirl around Covid for us were swirling around the man with leprosy. He was not a statistic. He represented neither a surge in leprosy cases nor a flattening of the curve. He was just a man, someone’s son or brother, perhaps someone’s father, who was desperately ill and lonely. He did not want to be a political or theological illustration. He just wanted his life back.
Maybe it is an indication of his political leanings that he doesn’t socially isolate. He does not keep his distance, but goes right up to Jesus and kneels in front of him. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with his politics, but with his faith in Jesus. “If you choose, you can make me clean.” That’s what he says. “If you choose, you can make me clean.” So much poignancy, so much yearning, so much desperate hope is wrapped up in that sentence.
This same story is found in the Gospel of Mark, but Mark provides a detail that Matthew does not. Mark says that Jesus is moved with pity. He heals the man with compassion. We can understand that. Jesus embodies love and compassion. He feels for the man and heals him. But interestingly, not all of the manuscripts say that. In some of the oldest manuscripts, the word for pity or compassion is not there. Instead it says that Jesus is moved with anger. Anger at whom? At what? Anger at disease which diminishes life. Anger at fear which is sometimes stronger than love. Anger at a social system which could not care for this man but instead left him excluded, isolated and marginalized and told him it must be his own fault.
I know some people who have recently lost loved ones to Covid. They told me about their deep sorrow because they truly loved the one who died. They shared their hard anger at the misinformation and not complying with protocols and lack of trust in medical science which put their loved ones in a place of vulnerability and risk. Jesus could easily have been angry and compassionate at the same time.
The man says “if you choose, you can make me clean.” Jesus stretches out his hand, Matthew says. The first thing he does is to touch him. The man who has not had human contact in a very long time. That act alone is healing. That act alone undoes a little bit of loneliness. It counter-acts a little bit of the isolation.
Moved with compassion and anger, Jesus stretches out his hand and says, “I do choose. Be made clean.” And the leprosy disappears.
Theological Paul Tillich says, “Sometimes a wave of light breaks into our darkness and it is as if a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted . . . sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say ‘yes’ to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate, and self-contempt disappear and that our self is reunited with itself.”[3]
We should understand that when Jesus heals this man, when he heals anyone, it creates a sense of wholeness on multiple levels. There is restoration of the physical body, and restoration of one’s self with itself, and restoration to community. Jesus’ healing enables life to go on in all its fullness. This is what we will see repeatedly in the stories of healing we are exploring this Lent.
But for some of us, this healing also triggers one of those difficult questions. Here, we are told that Jesus chooses to heal. We know many times when healing was prayed for, with as much trust and hope as the leper showed, but it did not happen. And so, we might ask, if Jesus can choose to heal, does Jesus also, on occasion, choose not to? This is a good question, a honest question. Maybe it is a question we will come back to in future weeks. What I note today is the last verses of our reading. Vs 16 and 17 read, “they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.” Over and over and over again, the gospels tell us about Jesus engaging in healing. What this suggests to me is that, whenever he could, Jesus chose to heal. That healing, with compassion and anger, restoring to wholeness of body, mind and spirit are inextricably bound up with his ministry and mission.
In Traveling Mercies, which is one of her older books, Anne Lamott wrote, “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.”[4]
“You take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people.” Friends, some of us are the more wounded people right now. So be tender with yourselves. Some of us are the more wounded people right now. So be tender with each other. Know that God’s great desire for us is shalom – well-being and peace and wholeness in every possible sense. And so, we join our spirits with God’s spirit to pray for healing, restoration and peace.
[1] John T Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), p. 5
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/world/europe/uk-britain-loneliness.html
[3] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, (London: Penguin Books, 1963) pp. 162-163
[4] Anne Lamott Traveling Mercies, (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 106