A
Sermon preached by The Rev. Dr. Steven L. Thomason at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on February 12,
2012.
The Scripture
Texts for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany Year B are:
Have
you ever been to the hospital to visit a friend or family member who has
developed an infection requiring them to be on isolation? The interventions
that sometimes require wearing gloves, or bulky paper gowns, or even masks, are
designed to prevent the spread of the infection by staff and visitors who might
serve as vectors of the disease, but these interventions also present a
challenge to the ever-present goal of offering tender, compassionate care to
the patient. Human touch is so important in the course of serving those in
need.
Sometimes
the fear of the disease can escalate to a point that the care risks becoming
impersonal or void of touch altogether. In all health care facilities, there
are levels of precaution based on the kind of infectious agent involved so that
the steps taken are appropriate for that bacteria or strain of virus. So a
staph infection in a skin wound would require contact isolation—gloves and good
handwashing, but rarely more, since the only way for another person to contract
the infection would be to come in contact with an open wound and transfer the
bacteria to an open wound in their own skin. Gloves and good handwashing are
sufficient in most cases.
But our fears of contagions can go viral themselves.
I remember in the hospice home, a place known for its tender care, when we
would admit a person with some infection that required some precautions, there
would usually be one or two staff members (an aide or a nurse) who would be so
anxious about the proverbial “staph” infection and its dreaded moniker as the
“flesh-eating” bacteria ready to strike out at casual passers-by, that their
irrational fear would lead them to go overboard in precautions, gowning and
donning mask, creating a coat of armor that rendered them less than effective
in delivering the compassionate care for which hospice is renowned. It was a
relatively rare incident, and one that was easily dispatched with a little
education, but it always highlighted for me just how easily we can fall into
tedious practices that have the unintentional consequence of alienating someone
who needs us. Our fear separates us from the very care and compassion we are
called to share.
Such was the dilemma for Jesus and others who might
have wanted to engage a person with a skin condition, but to do so required an
abrogation of the rules of conduct established in that time and in that culture.
The leprosy so named in the gospels was not the specific disease we know by
that name today, also known as Hansen’s disease, and is exceedingly rare in our
society. No, leprosy was really a general term to connote any affliction of the
skin that caused it to appear abnormal, or broken, and therefore potentially
infectious. So common conditions such as eczema and psoriasis—absolutely non-infectious,
but nevertheless angry in their manifestation—were included in the code that
declared their victims as unclean, and therefore untouchable.
It sounds harsh and unnecessary, but it was part of
their own “contact isolation” practices that largely correspond to our modern
notions of gowning and gloving. The difference is that, in our time, physicians
and epidemiologists are set apart to develop and enforce our rules grounded in
science; in Jesus’ time, it was the duty of the priests to enforce the “law,” which
were grounded in religious mores, and unfortunately such laws had become the
means by which certain people were relegated to being outsiders. And someone
who touched such an outsider was rendered unclean as well.
So it is a moment of truth for Jesus when this leper
comes to him and declares that if Jesus chooses, he could heal him. At one
level, such acts were contributing to Jesus’ notoriety, which he did not
desire, and he surely knew that to touch this man would render him unclean.
Indeed, he was forced to go into the countryside, because he would not be
welcome in the towns with this stigma of soiled skin in his own right, having
touched and healed the man.
But at another level, the man’s petition presented
Jesus with a greater challenge—one that struck more deeply in regards to who he
was and what he was working for. We are told that Jesus was “moved with pity,”
although that translation does not convey the full meaning of the Greek verb
used by the gospel writer. Splagchnizomai
literally means to be moved in one’s bowels—to feel a gut-wrenching
compassion for the one who is suffering. The bowels were thought to be the seat
of love and compassion, and so Jesus is moved by more than pity; he is moved to
the point of taking on the suffering of his condition with the man. Recall that
the word “compassion” literally means to “suffer with.”
So often, I think, we are prone to hearing the
gospels stories from the point of view of those characters who interact with
Jesus. That way, he can speak to us, he can touch us, he can inspire us. That
is a worthwhile approach, to be sure, but I wonder how the gospels also invite
us to step into Jesus’ shoes, and see what he sees, behave as if we are truly one
body with him, as though he might dwell in us and we in him. Isn’t that what
“taking up one’s cross” and “dying to self” is about?
My wife shared an excerpt this past week from a book
she is reading, Cynthia Bourgeault’s book on Contemplative Prayer, which I
think offers wisdom and insight into this paradoxical life to which we are
called. Bourgeault writes:
“[Jesus’]
idea of ‘dying to self’ was not through inner renunciation and guarding the
purity of his being, but through radically squandering everything he had and
was. In life, he horrified the prim and proper by dining with tax collectors
and prostitutes, by telling parables about extravagant generosity, by giving
his approval to acts of costly and apparently pointless sacrifice such as the
woman who broke open the alabaster jar to anoint him with precious oil; by
teaching always and everywhere, ‘lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth.’…
But he went his
way, giving himself fully into life and death, losing himself, squandering
himself, ‘gambling away every goft God bestows.’ It is not asceticism but tantra—love utterly
poured out, [or to use Shakespeare’s words,] ‘consum’d with that which it
was nourish’d by’ … [it is such radical
love] that opens the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is what Jesus taught
and this is what he walked.”[i]
Are you willing to love so recklessly that
compassion wrenches your gut until that which you thought was true dies, and
the real truth overwhelms you, fills your heart, brimful and broken, too? In
that moment, you will give yourself over to the radical promise of God’s gift
of YOU, just as Jesus did, fully into life and death, paradox that it is, and
love is utterly poured out.
Now I am a physician and a priest, so I will tell
you wear the gloves when you are supposed to, but do not let your heart be muted
by such precautions. You have much to give, if you choose.
It was the Sufi mystic Rumi, whose poetry often
contains the antidote for our proclivities to fear and immobilization and
distance from one another, who wrote about this fullness of life:
Love
is reckless, not reason.
Reason
seeks a profit,
Love
come on strong, consuming herself,
Unabashed.
Yet
in the midst of suffering
Love
proceeds like a millstone,
Hard-surfaced
and straight-forward.
Having
died to self-interest,
She
risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love
gambles away every gift God bestows…[ii]
With
this final line from Rumi as inspiration, Bourgeault concludes her thesis this
way: “The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to
show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is
itself the full expression of its meaning…the integral wholeness of Love
manifested in the particularity of a human heart.”[iii]
You have such a heart, bursting with goodness and
love, gifts given by God for your use, as you will. But beware, such gifts when
nourished will not be isolated; no, your gifts of goodness and love are dying
to be squandered in lavish compassion bestowed on those whose lives will be
made better for your having touched them.
And so the petition is directed to us from one who
is broken, hurting, in need of such a touch. Will we, like Jesus, respond
recklessly in love and say “I do choose?”
