“The Human Touch” (Mark 1:40-45)
August 31, 2008
Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor
Deaconess Judy Hoshek of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in an article in Christian Century recounts the story of an older woman in her congregation who said to her, “I live alone, and I love it when somebody passes the peace and gives me a hug.”
In another issue of the same magazine which has as its by line, “Thinking Critically, Living Faithfully,” there is a lengthy news report on hugging in the church. In the report Margaret Paloma, a sociologist at the University of Akron, is quoted as saying the church provides a safe place for human contact in a society in which more people are living and playing alone. She says, “it’s part of a need we have as human beings, and it isn’t easily satisfied in our culture.”
The article says it has always been there in the black and Latino and Pentecostal churches, but it is now finding its way into the mainline churches. “The bottom line,” states the article, “in many mainline churches is that once people try hugging, they like it.” We see it in the Lutheran Church and Baptist Church, and although they are not mentioned in the article, I can testify and tell you by the relationship I have had working in the Presbyterian Church for the past three years, it is there too, in the Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterian Church I served would come alive with handshakes and hugs, especially in the contemporary service, when we passed the peace and greeted one another. I use to kid them, that “the chosen frozen” were thawing, and I don’t think it had anything to do with global warming.
To me, it is a matter of reclaiming and affirming outwardly, our inner connectedness in Jesus Christ. We are brothers and sisters, bonded together in a community of caring in Jesus Christ, and the outward expression of this, be it a handshake or a hug, is in the human touch.
I think what is happening is that deep down, there is a longing, spiritual to its core, to be connected, and whether it is through a warm handshake or a hug, the Spirit through human touch, just as Jesus touched the people he healed, is ministering and healing that ache within us, and whether we recognize it or not, the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, is being used by God in the proper way for which it was designed, to be a vehicle of God’s caring.
While still pastor of the First Baptist Church of Greater Toledo I was called to the home of one of the most faithful members of the church. This member was one I would call, “the quiet in the land,” an early church phrase used to describe the work of those anonymous Christians who served in the name of Christ without thought of the need for recognition. Sue, this member, had been part of a volunteer cleaning crew at the church and for years cleaned the bathrooms, including the toilets, at our church.
I had been called to her home because she was dying. Her husband answered the door and led me to the back bedroom. In the room with her was a deaconess of our church, who was also a long time friend of Sue’s.
Sue lay in the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her friend sat on the edge of the bed next to her. Then unfolded before me one of the most remarkable scenes I have witnessed. Sue’s breathing was labored and her head moved from side to side. The friend stroked Sue’s hair and then she leaned down, moved her legs onto the bed and lied down with Sue, holding her, continuing to stroke Sue’s hair. Sue drifted into restful sleep and the all embracing arms of God.
Human touch is a sacrament, making real in finite form the way it is God lifts us into eternity. It is with a touch. It is with an embrace. To be held on earth is to understand what it is to be held by God at the entrance to eternity. Every human touch is potentially electrified with the healing graciousness of God’s Spirit ministering to us not just through our mind and spirit, but our bodies, as well.
We all need that touch, like the hug given on Sunday morning to that older woman in the Lutheran Church. In that moment when our hands reach out to shake or our arms embrace to hug, for that moment the sphere of our awareness is on one another, and in that awareness we are given the perspective in which we can begin to understand in an eternal sense what it means that God in His mercy and love has that same kind of focus on us. What we give in that moment helps us understand what is unceasing with God. He sees us. He knows us. He loves us.
Somehow we have ignored this. We have sought for God in the intellect and studied theology. We have focused on the ethereal and gone on retreat. But what we have often ignored is the very physicality of our relationship to God. God uses the physical world to communion with us and bring us to Himself, and something as simple as a handshake can be part of meditating the graciousness of God’s love toward us.
I have been thinking a lot about this as I have been preparing to come to Chicago and serve as your supply pastor for the next three months. I have been thinking about what we can give to one another. I have been thinking about what I can bring to you. Three months isn’t a very long time. It is one season in a year. It is one quarterly report. I figured up that there has been 264 quarters to my life. I am going to spend the 265 quarter with you.
What can we do? The most basic and elemental answer, and at the same time the most gracious and life affirming response we can offer, is that during these three months, we can become present to one another. We can touch each other’s lives. We can learn each other’s stories, and it all begins with a human touch when following this service we shake each other’s hand. Grace is mediated when in that handshake we begin to become known to one another.
It is a miracle what can happen during these next three months. We who were strangers to one another now get to see each other as God sees us, as real persons, person’s filled with uniqueness and opportunity, person’s with stories to tell, confessions to be made, dreams to be shared, all starting when we pause, and for that brief moment, let he or she who was a stranger, become known to us in a name and a handshake.
In a way it is like we have all gone off to camp together or we are on a three month retreat together. Remember how you would go off to camp when you were a child and that first day might have felt like the loneliest day of the year, but by the end of the week, when your parents have come for you, you prolong as long as you possibly can getting into the car, because you don’t want to leave all the friends you have made. Or, at Green Lake, you go for a conference, knowing those only from your church, but by the end of the conference, you are literally hugging the people you have met from across the country.
That is how I hope our time together will be. Along the way, I am going to do some preaching, some teaching, some visiting, but I also hope, along the way, you might introduce me to your Chicago. Let me see what turns you on to this great city. Take me to the places that you enjoy. Let me see through your eyes that which confounds you and disturbs you, but also that which gives you delight.
A few years ago there was a movie staring Jack Nicholson entitled, “About Schmidt.” It was about a man forced to retire from his job and who then faced the death of his wife. Everything that brought purpose to his life was shattered. A broken and empty man, he locked the door to his house, took off down the road, alone on the highway.
Finally, after several weeks he returned home, still a broken man. He goes to his desk and starts to pen his mail. Then he sees it. He holds a piece of open mail in his hands. His head is bowed, and tears begin to stream down his cheeks. He is coming alive again. Life is coming back into him, be it, through tears. What happened?
Slowly the camera goes to the piece of mail in his hand. The background is that a number of years ago Schmidt had begun sending $25 a month to an orphan in a third world country, an orphan whose name had been given to him when he answered a television children’s relief ad. The letter is drawn by the young orphan. It shows two hands reaching across an ocean, he and the orphan, holding on to one another. That human touch, though only in a drawing, is what brought the tears and begins the process of healing in his life. The power of human touch, mediating the grace of God.
It is that same touch we give to one another, that we take to the world. Remember the leper in the Scripture this morning. The sequence is important. First there was the touch and then the healing. It is the way it works in our life, as a community of faith, and it is the same way it works when we enter the world to serve. First there is the touch.
To be a leper was to be an outcast. It was to be considered unclean and untouchable. Lepers were never touched, yet it was while the man was still an outcast Jesus touched him. What we need to ask as Christians is who are the outcasts today and how might it be that Jesus’ hands become our hands when we touch them. Oh, to be touched while you are still unclean, while you are still on the outside, while you are still a sinner, while you are still looked upon with suspicion. That is what Christians offer the world – that touch before they are saved, that touch before they are made whole, the same touch with which we embrace and welcome one another into our midst.
About a year ago a book was written about the inner conflict in Mother Theresa’s own soul. She knew anguish. She had doubts. She felt the spiritual absence of God’s presence. Yet, we still see her as a saint. We see in her a faith that transcended the dark night or dark season or dark decades of the soul. Why? Why do we still recognize her as a saint, a daughter of God, one in whom God’s love was so transparent? Why, because we see her touching the poorest of the poor, running her hand gently across the cheek of a dying child, lifting into her arms the dying leper.
We know in seeing those scenes, there is a God of Love, and we know, in our bodies, the temple of the Holy Spirit, we are capable of that same touch whether it is laying beside a dying friend, or beginning to know one another as pastor and people in the simple act of a handshake, or holding a body born of crack addiction, or putting our hand on the shoulder of someone everyone else has decided to make an outcast. This is who we are, conveying God’s grace in a human touch and I am delighted to share that life with you for the next three months.
A year ago Sharon and I stood in the Sistine Chapel and stared up at Michelangelo’s great painting of creation. You all know it, especially the sixth day which portrays God’s creation of humankind. It shows God and Adam, each reaching out to the other, each with an arm extended, each with a finger pointing. We know, without being told, this is the moment of creation, when those two fingers touch.
How magnificent that Michelangelo conceived to use touch to convey the giving of life by God. He knew in that portrayal we would all understand because in our own lives we understand the significance of touch and how it is that to be touched, even by a handshake, is to know we are alive. People, whenever your hand reaches out to someone and your hand touches the hand of that other person, or when your arms open and you embrace another, that act of creation, that act of giving life continues.
You become with God a co-creator of His universe. God continues His act of creation through your touch. The touch we offer one another. Amen.
