Thursday night we had a wonderful and amazing event at our church. Over 25 people gathered together for fellowship, food, and fun. We had people of all ages – babies crawling around, preschoolers squealing for joy, teenagers running up and down stairs, parents and grandparents and friends.
As I sat there eating with everyone, I got to thinking about something. It felt just like a family reunion. It felt just like all of us gathered there were a big old happy family. Babies got passed from person to person. Teenagers pitched in and helped clean up. Adults took turns wiping the faces of little ones.
Both of my parents come from bigger families, and so these types of gatherings are something that I am very familiar with. Especially all of that face wiping! When I was little, I remember my mom, or my grandmas, or an aunt here or there spitting into a napkin to wipe a face clean. How many of you have had that done to you? How many of you have done it to others?
You know, spit is an intensely personal thing, and we don’t normally think of it as that clean – but I myself have spit on a napkin to wipe the face of my neice and nephew. I don’t know where the impulse to do so comes from – or why we do it, but it works! Spit can clean a face, a kiss can heal an ouchy. Hands can wipe away tears from faces and the pain that goes along with them.
But it’s only amongst family that we do those sorts of things. It’s only among the people we really and truly care about that we are willing to swap these sorts of bodily fluids. It’s only for our brothers and sisters that we are willing to get down and dirty and personal.
In the book, “Touch” Rudy Rasmas recounts to story of an orthopedic surgeon who for years performed surgery on all kinds of patients. As he tells the story he says, “Some of them, to be blunt, stank. When these people came to my office before and after surgery, I’d treat their medical problem, but I got in and out of the examining room as quickly as possible, and except for the medical examination, I avoided touching them. About a year ago, I was reading the Gospels about Jesus touching lepers, lame people, blind people, and all kinds of sick people. My heart was shattered. Those people He touched were the same kinds of people who come into my office every day.” (page 51-52)
This surgeon saw the people around him just as patients. They were clients that were to be dealt with as quickly as possible. In his eyes, it was easier not to see them as people who needed a healing touch, harder still to see them as brothers and sisters that he would go the extra mile for. Until he was reminded of how Christ treated those who were sick.
We have one of those healing stories in our gospel reading for today. A man is brought to Jesus who is deaf and who because of his deafness has problems speaking. In these times, any physical or mental deformity was seen as the direct result of the person or their parents sin – it was a punishment from God for their disobedience. And when people understand disabilities that way – it makes it a whole lot harder for that person to be fully accepted into a community. It becomes harder for others to see them as a human being. It is harder for that person of find love and care.
But Jesus takes one look at this deaf man and leads him off to one side. And Jesus gets up close and personal. I want you to really picture this for a second. He sticks his fingers into the man’s ears. He spits into his mouth! And he cries out, “Be Opened!” And the man can hear! He is healed! All because Jesus was willing to get close enough to him to spit in his face.
That’s the thing about Jesus. He doesn’t treat anyone differently because of who they are. He doesn’t shy away from people who look strange, or who talk funny, or who might smell bad or were born in the wrong family. He takes them by the hand, and he treats them like a brother or a sister. He isn’t afraid to touch them. He isn’t afraid to love them.
Philip Yancy said that, “Jesus moved the emphasis from God’s holiness (which is exclusive) to God’s mercy (which is inclusive). Instead of the message “no undesireables allowed,” he proclaimed, “in God’s kingdom there are no undesirables.” None of us are unworthy. None of us should be shut out.
That is a very hard message to follow. As we have already heard in our passage from James this morning, it is something that early Christians struggled with. They showed favoritism between the rich and the poor in their congregations. And they probably did amongst other people as well. They knew they were supposed to love everyone, but like we talked about last week, they were hearers of the word and not doers. Like the orthopedic surgeon, they would rather love from a distance than get up close and personal with someone. It was better for the poor man to sit at their feet, or to stand in the corner, than to take the place in the pew next to them.
Now, I know that this is a fairly welcoming congregation. I have seen us really treat one another like a family. We are willing to help out, we are willing to pitch in where we are needed. But how do we respond when strangers come into our midst? Or perhaps a better question – how willing are you to go out into the world into the parts of town and neighborhoods and cities where the strangers are?
In that same book, Touch, Rasmus includes an exercise that I want to share with you this morning. I want you to take out the slip of paper that was handed out with the bulletins and really think seriously and prayerfully and honestly about how you would answer this question. I want you to either mentally note, or if you have a pencil or pen handy, go ahead and circle, the descriptions of the people that you wouldn’t feel comfortable touching and sitting next to on a Sunday morning…
…few minutes…
Now, there are a few people on this list that make me uncomfortable. There are definitely people on this list that I wouldn’t go out of my way to touch – much less spit into a napkin to wipe their faces clean. But simply knowing that Jesus would, makes me want to change – makes me want to be better. Makes me want to love them, because Christ first loved me.
Remember that orthopedic surgeon? He heard about how Christ loved other people and he committed himself from that day on to giving big, long hugs to every person – especially the smelly ones – that come to see him.
The church that Rudy Rasmus helped to revitalize in Houston is probably the opposite of the church we hear about in James. It is a church where the homeless and drug addicts sit next to people wearing thousand-dollar suits and who are rising in the corporate world. And he writes that “unconditional love isn’t just good theology or church theory. It’s our practice, and we are very intentional about it. We teach our people to make it a point to reach out to every single person who walks in the door…”
He tells the story of a woman named “Neighbor” who carried everything she owned in a shopping cart. This woman came to church “every time the doors were open,” and she often did some covert panhandling at Sunday services. But after two years of this, she went up to the pastor and said, “Pastor Rudy, my name is Carolyn. Don’t call me ‘Neighbor’ anymore. You can call me Carolyn from not own.” Because the people in that church cared for her, reached out and touched her, her heart melted as she began to trust them. And she let them into her lives. She took off her mask of anonymity. “Carolyn would tell you that God has surrounded her with people who accept her just as she is. They didn’t try to fix her, they didn’t demand that she get cleaned up, and they didn’t expect her to respond quickly. They just kept loving her day after day, week after week, and they let her respond in her own good time.”
That is what church is all about. Loving people. Sharing the grace of God with them. Seeing them through the eyes of Christ. Bringing healing and wholeness to their lives by getting up close and personal. We can’t do that if we see one another as strangers. We can only do it if we recognize that we are all children of God – brothers and sisters in Christ – and if we are willing to get a little dirty rubbing against one another- and if we are willing to spit in a napkin to help make someone clean.
Amen and Amen.
In the way things do happen with this extremely talkative group (which was only boys by this point), we got to talking about “illegal immigrants” (I’m trying very hard to encourage folks to use the term undocumented… many of them actually did come here legally but circumstances have prevented them from going home, renewing visas, etc.) and “terrorists.”