The Fourth Church Pulpit

TO TOUCH A LEPER...
RELIGION BECOMING SUBVERSIVE

February 13, 1994

John M. Buchanan

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611-2094
Phone: 312.787.4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Seripture: Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:40-45

“Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.. .”
—Mark 1:41 (NRSV)

it had been a long time since he had put his arms around his wife, held his son close, cradled his baby to his
chest, kissed his aging mother, embraced his father. He had not touched another human being since that day
months ago — or was it a year now? — when the priest had examined him and determined that the blemishes on
his skin were leprosy. He had noticed them first when he tock his cloak off while fishing. He had hoped the
spots would go away, but they did not. Instead they seemed to be deepening and spreading. And when his
. companions noticed, he knew he had to go to the priest.

The priest, in turn, knew what he had to do when he saw the dreaded blotches on his skin. The Book of
the Law, Leviticus, Chapter 13, verses 45 and 46:

“The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be
disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain

unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone: his dwelling shall be
outside the camp.”

And so, that is how he had lived — alone, outside the village, isolated for so long he had lost track of time
until that day when he found Jesus.

The idea of uncleanness is important in the ancient religion. A person could become unclean in a lot of
ways: by eating food that was taboo, or touching blood, or being around a corpse, engaging in forbidden sexual
acts, and by having any kind of skin disease. The taboos often — not always — but often turn out to have some
scientific merit. Cleanliness is a good idea. It is nota good idea to risk infection, or to eat meat that may be
“voiling. And sexual activity that does not result in conception and birth, and those are the ones that are
_arbidden, by and large, does not build up the nation and the community numerically.

More important were the social implications. Unclean meant unfit for contact with the rest of the
community and unfit for worship in the Synagogue. Unclean meant separated from family and from God.
Unclean meant outcast, utter alienation, absolute aloneness, without hope for restoration until a priest verified
that whatever condition prompted the initial diagnosis was gone, or that an appropriate time elapsed since the
unclean person was thought to be contaminated and contagious. Once a month, and after giving birth, for
instance, a woman was thought to be unclean, until the prescribed time elapsed.

One of the ways you got to be unclean was by having leprosy. When the Bible uses that term it actually
refers to any abnormality, discoloration, or eruption of the skin. Modern diagnostic techniques were unknown
obviously. Leprosy surely included Hansen’s Disease, the modern medical name for leprosy; but it included a
lot more: simple skin conditions we know as psoriasis, eczema - perhaps even forms of acne.

In his memoir, Self Consciousness, John Updike, who has suffered all his life with psoriasis, has written a
chapter, “At War With My Skin,” and talks about how, as an adolescent, he had to organize his life around not
exposing himself to embarrassment. One time he wrote a short story, From the Journal of A Leper.

The ancient world lived in fear of leprosy and dealt with it, and all skin disease, in the only way it knew
how - isolation. oe

New Testament scholar, Fred Craddock, commenting on this story, says,

“Into every culture sooner or later come diseases so mysterious and so threatening that they are
met primarily with fear and ignorance. Having no explanation or treatment, religious, social and
political forces join in the demand that the diseased persons be removed from sight, isolated
from all domestic, religious and commercial contact.” [Interpretation]

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And so this is the man who comes to Jesus. He is no abstraction. I don’t know anything about him except
his condition, but I think I know enough about being human to wonder what it must be like to have no contact
with other people, to lose your job, your family and your friends, and even your faith community: to know
yourself unfit to be touched, to cover your mouth and warn anyone who happens to come close, “I’m unclean”;
not be with those you love most, perhaps to sit on a hill outside town and watch them, to go at night to the spot

where they leave food for you. One commentator says that the man is in mourning for his lost life because he is
quite dead.

This is the one who breaks all the rules and comes to Jesus and says in total confidence borne of his
absolute desperation,

“If you choose, you can make me clean.” Notice, not — “Make me well, make me better, heal my
leprosy,” but “make me clean — fit — acceptable — restore me to my family, my community, my
Synagogue.”

Mark is writing this story maybe thirty-five years after the fact. He’s stil] introducing the story of Jesus of
Nazareth in the little book he’s writing and he remembers even the detail that Jesus was moved by pity and that
he was so moved he did something unheard of: something radically subversive to the religious and social and
political structures of his society. He, Mark remembers, stretched out his hand and touched the man. “I do
choose,” he said. “Be clean.” And that’s what happened.

Now there is a wonderful caveat about this dramatic story. We are tying, in these sermons, to learn what
we can about the story of Jesus, the Quest of the Historical Jesus. And we have acknowledged that our only
source of information is the Bible, which in the case of the story of Jesus was not written down until at least a
generation had passed. Mark is the first to write it down but he doesn’t start until about thirty-five or forty
years after the fact: like trying to recall exactly what happened one afternoon in 1954. Furthermore, we don’t
have the originals. What we have are copies of copies of copies. And unless you believe that God inspires
copiers and editors, the task of scholarship is to keep pushing back into history, digging around in old caves
and archeological sites and fourth century monastery libraries for fragments of ancient manuscripts which
might be older and therefore closer to the source than anything we yet have. In the process of doing that, the
scholars discover some variances, not big ones but sometimes important ones. In this story, for instance, some
of those ancient manuscripts say Jesus wasn’t moved by pity at all. It was anger! You can look it up. There’s a
footnote for Mark 1:41 which says,

“Other ancient authorities read anger.”
“Moved with anger, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.” ~

Anger? At what? At the man’s presumptuousness, his brash breaking of tradition? It doesn’t feel like that -
to me. Anger at a disease which takes life from innocent people? Anger at a religious tradition, a religious rule
that ends up in conflict with the heart and will of God as jesus thinks he knows it? Anger at religion, of all
things, denying God’s Kingdom in which there are all sorts of people who are not acceptable in polite, civil,

righteous, religious circles?

That's how Mark introduces Jesus: associating with fishermen, sinners, tax collectors, lepers — all gathered
Into a kind of community no one had ever seen before — the family of God. I think it was both compassion and
anger: God’s inclusive love for this poor man and God’s impatience with the way religious people, God’s
people, keep missing the point and keep finding ways to restrict who gets in, who is okay, who is acceptable,
morally correct, clean.

John Dominic Crossan, in his controversial book, Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography, says about Jesus
touching the leper,

“That act deliberately impugns the rights and prerogatives of society’s boundary keepers and

controllers. Jesus acted as an alternative boundary keeper in a way subversive to the established
procedures of society.” [p. 82-83]

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Crossan who teaches Biblical studies at DePaul asks the toughest questions and proposes clear common
schse answers that people often don't want to hear. For instance, about this incident he asks “What actually
would one have seen?” His answer is “not much.” But then he presents a very interesting and helpful
xplanation that gets at the meaning of the incident. He points out that medical anthropology and comparative
_-hno-medicine distinguishes between “curing a disease” and “healing an illness.” Illness is something
patients experience. Disease is an abnormality in structure or function.

“Disease,” he says, “is between my doctor, me and a bug. Illness is between my neighbor and me.”

“The leper who met Jesus had a disease (say, psoriasis) and an illness, the social stigma of
uncleanness, isolation and rejection. And as long as the disease stayed or got worse, the illness
would also stay and get worse. But - what if the disease could not be healed, but the illness
could somehow be healed?” That’s what Crossan thinks happened. . . “Jesus healed the illness
by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracization.” [p. 80-82]

Whatever happened to the man’s skin, Jesus healed his illness by subverting religious and social custom.
He touched him and restored him to the human community: reached out and embraced him, physically pulled
him into a new community that does not reject, ostracize and exclude, a new community he called the
Kingdom of God, a kingdom into which you and IJ are invited and which we, as his people, are called to exhibit
to our world.

Professor Crossan writes,

“A cure for AIDS is absolutely desirable but in its absence, we can still heal the illness by
refusing to ostracize those who have it, by empathizing with their anguish, and by enveloping
their suffering with both respect and love.” [p. 81]

It's what the motion picture “Philadelphia” is about. Tom Hanks is a hot young lawyer who, shortly after

winning a case for one of his firm’s most important clients, is fired, he thinks, because his partners have

scovered that he has AIDS. Denzel Washington is the attorney he hires to sue his old firm. The movie, I
thought, could serve as a commentary on our text. When Hanks is called into a partners’ meeting to be fired, he
is seated across the room, separated from his partners —- with whom he has played hand-ball, taken showers —
by a huge expanse of conference room and table. They deny that it is because of his condition but privately
articulate all the stereotypes and misunderstanding and misinformation about the disease and how itis
contracted — and in the process sound like the cultural boundary keepers and controllers Jesus challenged.

When Hanks goes to Washington’s office to ask him to take his case there is a subtle sequence. Washington
expresses the quintessential homophobic, macho stereotypes — and when Hanks, shortly after they have shaken
hands, says simply, “I have AIDS,” Washington physically withdraws, walks to the corner of the room and
virtually, though unconsciously, wipes his hand on his pant leg.

In the motion picture, Hanks’ disease takes its inevitable course, but his illness is healed by other people...
who, to some critics, seem too good, too loving and accepting to be real, but to me suggested that there are
alternatives, that God’s Kingdom is always present even if somewhat hidden and that we can — all of us — be
citizens of that Kingdom by respecting and including and welcoming and affirming all of God’s children. In
“Philadelphia” Tom Hanks’ family shows that kingdom in a way one wishes the church would. Hanks is
welcomed, loved, affirmed by brothers, sisters, father and mother, who hug him and kiss him. In one
particularly important scene he cradles and feeds a bottle to his sister's new-born infant.

A few days after seeing the motion picture, I read an editorial in The Presbyterian Outlook, a journal I read,
about a young twenty-year-old man, a Christian, a Presbyterian in fact, who committed suicide. The newspaper
article had reported the young man’s story by illustrating from his personal diary. He was gay. His family

‘lieved, because their church told them, that homosexuality was wrong, a sin, worse yet, an abomination to
‘God. The young man accepted his church’s and family’s judgment, received psychotherapy and when that
didn’t work, went to a series of Christian counselors. He and his parents talked and prayed and in the

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meantime he chronicled his struggle in his personal diary. He prayed to God for saving and healing. His diary
reveals how hard he tried. Sometimes he shared his battle with God:

“I’m sorry. You are so good to me and then I act like this. I could be good and obedient if I
wanted to but I don’t. I want things my way. I wonder if you'll send me to hell for this.” At the

close of this entry he writes, “Bye, I wish I could write love. But that would be dumb cause how
could [love you and act the way I do?”

David Steele, a Presbyterian minister who wrote the editorial, goes on...

“The ideas his family perceived to be the teaching of their church became an obsession, at least
for son and mother. He was a terrible simmer. God could not love him. Fifteen days before he

jumped off an expressway bridge into the path of a semi, he wrote, ’For with God nothing will be
impossible,’”

At his funeral his mother recalls the minister said something like,

“Bobby was gay. When you get caught up in the gay lifestyle, that's where you end up.”
His mother no longer attends her church. [The Presbyterian Outlook, January 24, 1994]

Jesus, moved with pity — or was it anger — stretched out his hand and touched him.

“The essence of Christianity,” Scottish scholar, the late William Barclay said, “is to touch the
untouchable, to love the unlovable, to forgive the unforgivable.”

As the churches in our country, including our own, continue to struggle with issues of human sexuality and
sexual orientation, and who can belong and who can be ordained and what the Bible says and what the Bible
means and what God’s will is and what Jesus would do, may we simply remember this story and our dear Lord,
the one who was crucified for challenging the moral certainties and the social structures and the religious
exclusiveness of his day. May we remember, for Christ’s own sake, him stretching out his hand in pity — and
perhaps in anger ~ and touching a man with leprosy. ;

It is a deceptively and radically subversive story Professor Crossan warns. It is also intensely personal.

There are some of us who feel unclean, unacceptable, untouchable — all the time; persons who for one
reason or another, not confined to sexual practices, have been rejected by family or friends or community, and
who have concluded that they are unclean in God's sight. And I have concluded that many of us, maybe even
most of us, sooner or later have those feelings, at least occasionally; feelings that there is something we have
done or something about us that is unacceptable, unfit, unclean. And I have concluded that all of us have
theological problems with a love so amazing, inclusive, so strong, so challenging, that its impetus is to include

not exclude, to gather in particularly those everyone else wants to keep out; a love which has no conditions but .

wants only to be received.

Who doesn’t know about that? I think it’s part of the reason we come to church — to hear good news; to be
challenged ourselves to exhibit God’s Kingdom, but also to hear that it is for us too: that Jesus Christ reaches
out his hand to touch you and me. The essence of Christianity is to touch the untouchable, love the unlovable,
forgive the unforgivable, and sometimes that means you. . . me.

I started to come to those conclusions about us and about the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ, sitting in a
scholarly lecture being delivered by the late James McCord, former President of Princeton Theological Seminary
and one of the best theologians we have produced. It was on some imposing topic like “Grace and the Moral
Imperative,” and it ranged widely through the disciplines of literature, philosophy, theology, touching on the
major historical crises of the twentieth century. It was at the end, McCord was winding down, and he said
something like. ..

2/13/94 —i—

“IT never know how to get out of a lecture like this. So let’s sing a hymn... a hymn that lifts wp
the Gospel message in the very face of the world’s trauma and tragedy which have a way of
becoming our own personal traumas and tragedies.”

And I assumed he would cite one of the great German chorals by J. S. Bach or Martin Luther, or one of
Calvin's great Geneva Hymns. | was surprised, although I no longer am, when he cited the old spiritual and it is
how I propose you and I end this exercise in pondering this amazing story — about this amazing man.

“There is a balm in Gilead

to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead

to heal the sin-sick soul."

2/13/94 —Ss—