THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

Wounded Healer

February 20, 2000
John M. Buchanan

“Sometimes a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice
were saying: ‘you are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you,’ and the
name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now: perhaps you will
find it later . ..We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. But 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. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.” (p. 143)

Paul Tillich
The Shaking of the Foundations

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

WOUNDED HEALER
February 20, 2000

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Psalm 30
Mark 1: 40-45

Dear God, your son reached across a wide space created by custom and culture and
religion one day, and touched a man no one else would touch, and made him whole. We
thank you for all the ways you touch us; with the beauty of the world and people to love
and music to sing and friends to care for and a church to belong te. So now touch our
minds and our hearts with your word of compassion and justice and love, in Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen,

At Massachusetts General, one of the great teaching hospitals in the United States, there is
an experimental program going on that is receiving a lot of national attention. In fact, it
was the subject of an ABC 20/20 segment. The experiment was organized and orchestrated
by the Mass General chaplains’ office when the medical staff asked for help. It seems that
increasingly, hospital patients, particularly those who are seriously ill and facing major
surgery, were asking physicians, nurses and other hospital personnel spiritual questiens—
questions about God and suffering and pain and healing and death and prayer. And soa
program was created to help medical personnel deal with their patients’ spiritual
concerns. Some patients were even asking doctors and nurses to pray with them which for
most was, and is, a difficult situation. Nurse Donna McKay, who works the night shift in
oncology says that it is in the evening, at night, after visiting hours, when family and
friends have gone and the hospital becomes quiet and patients are alone for the first time
all day, that the questions come—and the fear and the loneliness and the sense of isolation
and aloneness and the requests for prayer.

An anesthesiologist told ABC’s Timothy Johnson that after going through the program and
becoming a little more comfortable with her own faith, she gently introduces the subject
with her patients as she helps them get ready for surgery. She has learned to ask in an
unobtrusive, non-threatening way, and to respect immediately the patients who do not
want to talk about it. But most, she testifies, are not only surprised, but grateful to be able
to express themselves religiously to a doctor and many gladly accept her offer to pray for
them. ABC captured the intimacy and the power of her conversation and prayer with a
woman prior to breast cancer surgery.

Hospitals all over the country are paying attention. One third of all medical schools now
include courses on spirituality. At the University of Chicago, a unique program of
exploring the commonalties of religion and medicine brought Divinity School and Medical
School faculty and students together, under the inspiration of a wonderful Lutheran
pastor-professor, Granger Westberg, who died not long ago. Westberg wrote books which
became classics in the field: Nurse, Pastor and Patient, the inspiration for the Parish
Nurse movement which is growing rapidly among American churches and a form of
which, our Wellness Program, is part of Fourth Church’s ministry; and Minister and

Doctor Meet, which explored the common ground shared by religion and medicine. Not
all physicians, or clergy, for that matter, are enthusiastic about it, but Westberg, and
chaplains’ departments and creative medical school faculties and nurses who work the
night shift on oncology, know that the wall between medicine and religion is crumbling; in
fact should never have been there in the first place.

Health is something of a mystery. Is it the absence of sickness, the absence of physical
symptoms, the absence of abnormalities? Or is it a general state of well being which
includes mind and spirit as well as body? Were the Hebrews right when they used the
same word “Shalom” to express peace, wholeness, well-being, health and salvation?

However you define it, health, healing, wholeness, restoration is very much at the heart of
Christian faith and experience and history. In fact, it is the way the story of Jesus is
introduced to us by the first account to be written, the Gospel according to Mark. In the
first few paragraphs, as soon as Jesus of Nazareth gathers a few followers and begins his
public ministry, he heals a man with an unclean spirit—we might say mental illness, a
psychosis—then Peter’s mother-in-law who gets up from her sick bed and starts to make
dinner, and a man with leprosy. And it will continue. Crowds of people are searching for
him wherever he goes in Galilee because of his reputation as a healer, a reputation, by the
way, that he does not seem to want. He knows, apparently, the temptations which
accompany a reputation as a “faith healer,” a reputation so easily exploited at the expense
of sick people, a lesson television faith healers have not learned.

Nevertheless, Jesus Christ is initially defined in terms of the love and compassion and
power to restore human beings to wholeness and health—which sometimes means
physical healing and sometimes not, which is why, ultimately, I think, he did not want to
be known as a healer.

The incident in today’s text is fascinating, and important. It is about the overlap between
religion and medicine, the relationship between body and spirit and the love of the one
who takes human pain, physical and spiritual, very seriously.

The man has leprosy—which is the word Hebrew culture used for any skin disorder,
discoloration or eruption. It may have included Hansen’s Disease which is the official
name for modern leprosy, although some medical research indicates that Hansen’s—or
true leprosy—did not appear in Palestine until years later. In any event, Leprosy was
important and different from other illnesses because it was both a medical problem and a
religious problem.

The law defined people with leprosy as “unclean.” In the Book of Leviticus, Israel’s
purity code is defined in detail. Generally, things that look different or abnormal are
called “unclean.” When you get a strange skin rash you go to the priest who takes a look
and confers on you the taboo “tmclean.” You are thereafter banished from the
community; you had to wear torn clothing, let your hair hang loose so people can see you
coming and avoid you, cover your upper lip with your hand and cry out “Unclean,
Unclean,” whenever you approach another human being. You must live outside the
community, in a cave or an empty tomb which is appropriate, because in terms of human
social intercourse, your life is over. You are dead. You certainly are not going to touch or

be touched by anyone again; not your beloved, not your wife or husband, not your
children or parents. Unless, that is, your symptoms somehow disappear and then you
return to the priest who has another look, and if satisfied, prescribes a sacrifice and upon
its completion, declares that you are now clean and fit to resume your role in the
community, your life.

The law also prohibits your presence in the Synagogue and suggests that your disease is
God’s punishment for your sins—which makes you feel even worse. Furthermore, anyone
who touches you or is touched by you is also unclean.

To the extent that whatever was physically wrong was infectious, the system was effective.
Until fairly recently, the only way the world knew how to deal with infection was
isolation. I grew up in a time when measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, earned youa
visit from the public health department and a white quarantine sign—which announced to
the world that you were sick with measles—in bed reading comic books—for days—with
your mother treating you like royalty, bringing you gingerale and toast. The sign was
placed prominently on the outside of your house. I always thought the whole business
was pretty interesting—couldn’t wait til] we had our own quarantine sign which in time,
of course, happened. In the middle ages, plague victims were occasionally simply put out
of the house, or in some more extreme situations, placed together in a house that was
boarded up.

The tragedy—the tragedy for this desperate man who comes to Jesus—is that he may not
have been very sick physically. And yet he was dead.

So desperate was he that when he has the opportunity, he breaks with convention, breaks
the law, approaches Jesus and asks—now notice—not to be cured of leprosy, but to be
clean. What he desperately wants, what he profoundly needs, is to be restored to his
family, his community, his religion, his self, his life.

And notice what Jesus does.
“If you choose—you can make me clean,” the man says. And Mark reports:
“Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said, “I do

choose. Be made clean.”

That’s remarkable. Jesus breaks the law, too. Jesus is now unclean. Jesus has
deliberately taken into himself the man’s condition, his isolation, his illness.

And furthermore, Jesus has just done something only a priest can do, namely calling this
man clean.

And most dramatically, he has reversed the sequence. The priest needs to see the absence
of symptoms before he says clean.

Jesus touches a man with leprosy and says—“you’re clean.” Even with your leprosy,
you're clean. That’s radical. In the context of his culture it is revolutionary. Jesus calls

an unclean man clean. Jesus presumes to restore to full participation in the human
community a man the religious institutions kept out.

DePaul’s John Dominic Crossan says:

“That act deliberately impinges the rights of society’s boundary keepers and
controilers. Jesus acted as an alternative boundary keeper in a way
subversive to the established procedures of society.”(Jesus, A Revolutionary
Biography, p.82/83)

“Moved with pity” Jesus touched him, the text says, but many scholars are saying that’s a
mistranslation. What it really says is “moved with anger.” Anger at what, do you
suppose:? Could it be that Jesus is angry at religion that isolates, marginalizes, excludes a
precious child of Ged; religion that gets it backwards—instead of extending hospitality,
welcoming to the community—all, particularly the outcasts, religion that, in the name of
the God of all, somehow concludes that its function is to exclude and isolate and
marginalize? I think that made Jesus angry. I think that’s why he acted so courageously.
I think that’s why he abrogated the boundary making principle of institutional religion
and said in anger, “my boundaries are much broader, much more generous, much more
hospitable, much more inclusive than yours.” And yes, I believe, the ongoing propensity
of institutional religion is to do that, to exclude, to keep out, to invest institutional energy
in drawing definitive boundaries, to keep out those who are different, those who, by our
customs and traditions are unclean.

Jesus put this lonely, isolated man in a new place. It’s called God’s kingdom, where all
are welcome, where no one is a stranger, where boundaries are generous and broad and
full of windows and doors, for those on the outside, for whatever reason, to enter and find
welcome and hospitality and acceptance and restoration and wholeness. That’s what that
touch meant.

It is no accident that when Jesus called him clean—the man’s leprosy disappeared. As
Professor Paul Tillich put it so eloquently:

“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.” (The Shaking of the Foundation,
p-162-163)

Someone noted that what Jesus did for the man with leprosy is the reason we have the
church; that in touching this untouchable, this outcast, Jesus gave us a model for the
church and its mission and purpose.

In Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott writes:

“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 reom 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.” (p. 106)

The good news is that the healer has come, the “wounded healer,” to use Henri Nouwen’s
striking image: the one who touches the leper, the one who welcomes into the kingdom all
those on the outside looking in wistfully, the lonely, the isolated, the unloved, the
unwanted, the marginal, you and me when we are quarantined for whatever reason,
worried, afraid, anxious, guilty, sick in body and soul—reaches out and touches us.

The good news is that the healer has come.

Jesus Christ is his name. Amen.

PASTORAL PRAYER
February 20, 2000
The Reverend Carol Allen

Holy Lord God, source of life and light, in the beginning your breath and Spirit

drew forth the world and filled the earth with your creatures. At the last, your breath
shall gather us in, each in our time, to the shelter and mystery of your love. We turn
to you now, trusting in your grace.

O God, the days speed by, full of details and demands. Interrupt the regular rhythm
and routine of our schedules. Show us a glimpse of beauty in the world. Show us the
resiliency that helps the human spirit to endure. Draw us into silence and calm when
we pray. Set our thoughts on you, Heart of the Universe.

In the stillness of these moments, hear the aching of our silent sufferings and unspoken joys.
May the music of this service encourage and offer us a means of expression of these. With
minds cluttered and weary of making decisions, may this morning's worship offer renewal.
We long to grow in you, O God. May the prayers we pray be a means both of confession and
commitment.

O God, we try to be self-sufficient but fall short. We are tempted to fet numbers and dollar
signs become signs of success, to let entertainment take the place of worship. We try to claim
your power as our power to make ourselves healthy, wealthy and wise. At these times, draw
our eyes to the cross where we see your power at work raising Jesus from the dead. We
remember Jesus who waited tables and washed feet, who sought not to save himself but to
bring others into your caring presence, through his healing touch. Because of the power of
your Spirit continuing with us in the risen Christ, you give your forgiving and affirming love in
our moments of failure and loss of strength.

Through those moments when you meet us in our grief and restore us to hope, develop us into
a source of healing for others. Anoint our hands to hold, reconcile and mend the broken.

Bring comfort, healing and understanding to persons in our families or our communities who are
il. Be support for individuals or families facing trying times, upcoming surgery, or hard choices.
May new strength well up in those who have lost a family member or friend or who have lost
confidence or direction. Enter into the spirits of hurting children, O God. Remember the men
and

women unable to work. Watch over the elderly and all with failing strength. Use us to heal the
earth tortured by misuse and greed. Bring satisfaction to those throughout the world who
hunger

and thirst for food or for justice. May adversaries become allies in those places engaged in
conflict or victimized by war. May the building of peace become a valued calling.

We thank you, gracious God, for this congregation and for all who labor in and through it, and
for

your enduring loving-kindness; from womb to old age and beyond, we are carried in your strong
arms;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who taught his follower to say together when they pray: OUR
FATHER...

{sources of inspiration. Barbara Brown Taylor, Glen Rainsley and Diane Karay)