The Other Six Days: The Healer of Galilee
A Sermon in The Other Six Days Series
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
November 21, 2004
Psalm 13; Luke 5:12-16

Psalm 130 ¶ To the leader. A Psalm of David. 1 How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 ¶ Consider and answer me, O LORD my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, 4 and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
5 ¶ But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 6 I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Luke 5 12 ¶ Once, when he was in one of the cities, there was a man covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground and begged him, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” 13 Then Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Immediately the leprosy left him. 14 And he ordered him to tell no one. “Go,” he said, “and show yourself to the priest, and, as Moses commanded, make an offering for your cleansing, for a testimony to them.” 15 But now more than ever the word about Jesus spread abroad; many crowds would gather to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. 16 But he would withdraw to deserted places and pray.

I. INTRODUCTION

How many of you have ever met someone with leprosy? I don’t imagine many of you have. In fact, it’s another way in which the Bible appears to be outdated to us.

We don’t encounter people with leprosy. We don’t have kings—except for those few monarchies left, and most of those monarchs (unless they’re the Saudis), don’t have a lot of power. It’s very rare to run into a shepherd these days. It’s rare that we make pilgrimages to other cities on foot.

II. THE TEXT

So we encounter a text that right off the bat can seem hard to relate to.

A man whose body is covered with leprosy comes up to Jesus and says, “If you choose you can make me whole.” Jesus responds “I do so choose”, touches the man and heals him. He is told to show himself to the priest but not to tell anyone what has happened. In spite of this, Jesus’ fame grows such that he is forced to flee to the countryside for some time away to pray.

III. AIDS

If we had to update the Bible. If it were our job to issue a new version where everything was updated—shepherds were now migrant workers, magi were stock market forecasters, kings were presidents, and Pharisees and Sadducees were Protestants and Catholics—we’d have to update leprosy to AIDS.

It’s the closest parallel: it carries with it a “social and moral stigma” [NIB, IX, 121] in the eyes of many. It isolates its victims. It is feared and misunderstood.

I was in high school when AIDS first appeared on the national radar. No one knew anything about it and rumors began to persist about it. Especially on how it was spread.

You could get it from toilet seats. You could get it from kissing. People were scared. One man was after he claimed to have had AIDS and spit at some police. He was charged with attempted murder. All kinds of people were really angry with Greg Louganis when he admitted he had AIDS. One person—I think it was that woman who pretends to be a psychologist on the radio—was so upset because he could have cut himself on the diving board and gotten blood in the pool and given everyone AIDS.

AIDS strikes fear into people. It makes people want to avoid those who are afflicted with it. And recently that’s a whole class of people, now ostracized, alienated, set apart. Quite a few actually:

Source: http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm

If we were to update our story and have Jesus healing people, it wouldn’t be lepers—it would be AIDS patients.

IV. HEALING

But what do we mean when we talk about healing?

Every Thursday night at 11 p.m. we have a healing service in the chapel. At the beginning of the semester we always have to explain that the service is not a faith healing service in which we ‘slay’ people by striking them on the forehead and pronouncing them cured of their ailments. Rather, what we do is pray for healing in its Christian context—a return to wholeness.

In fact, the word “health” and the world “whole” come from the same Old English root hal (from which we get the word “hale” too). Health is about wholeness and it doesn’t always have to do with being free from injury and disease. Indeed, it is possible to come to a place of spiritual wholeness and not be cured of a disease. In the same way, it is possible to be cured, but to never achieve any kind of spiritual healing. It’s clear to us, though, that Jesus not only cures but he heals as well.

So, how does Jesus heal? There’s a very interesting detail in this story that often goes overlooked. There are a number of healing stories in scripture where Jesus heals by speaking, by command, or by long distance (as with the Centurion’s servant) merely by decreeing the healing to have taken place. But it is not so in this story.

Jesus touches the leper.

In the Bible, the term Leprosy is used to describe a number of skin diseases, none of which is really close to the disease we call leprosy, or Hansen’s disease. But these skin afflictions were contagious and under biblical law, a leper was required to wear torn clothing, have disheveled hair, and whenever they came upon someone on the road, they were supposed to cover their upper lip and say “Unclean! Unclean!” That was so that people not afflicted with leprosy might avoid them.

And what does Jesus do? He touches the leper to heal him. That touch does so much. It shows Jesus’ willingness to take on the stigma of the leper (which prefigures his own crucifixion where he takes on our sicknesses and sin). And it also says something about the leper. It is a gesture affording fundamental human dignity to him, and rejecting the culture’s judgment on lepers. [NIB, Vol. IX, at 121]. In that simple gesture, Jesus restores the leper to healing and wholeness quite independent from the fact that he is also cured.

V. THANKSGIVING

This Thursday is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, not only because it’s the purest, truly American holiday, but also because it’s difficult to turn Thanksgiving into the kind of commercially exploited mess that Christmas has become.
Thanksgiving, too, reminds us of our most sacred Christian duty: to give thanks to God. We try to do that often—whenever we celebrate communion (Eucharist is just the Greek word for ‘thanksgiving’). But there is a deeper theological reality at work here.
At an interfaith meeting for social justice some time ago here in Washington, a rabbi came forward and said, “Instead of praying to God to ask God bring relief to the poor, we should pray prayers of Thanksgiving to God that God has already given us the gifts to address the crisis of poverty.”

The same thing could be said of AIDS—instead of praying to God that God will cure AIDS, we should be offering prayers of Thanksgiving to God that we have been blessed with creativity, with energy, with compassion, with resources—with a whole host of gifts to address this scourge.

As Christians we are called to lives of faithful Thanksgiving. We are called to be grateful for the grace God has already shown us—first, in granting us life, second in giving to us the promise of eternal life, and third, through the variety of blessings we are given as individuals and as a community. Called to give thanks not only in our speaking and our praying, but in our very deeds.

We live lives of Thanksgiving. We give thanks for everything that the Healer of Galilee has done for us: calling us out as a community, giving to us grace and mercy, sending his spirit among us to embolden us, to give us courage—bringing healing to us as individuals and as a people. We show thanks by reaching out, showing grace and mercy, comforting the afflicted, being agents of healing to others.
Christians cannot ignore the pandemic of AIDS. We cannot act like it is something that doesn’t concern us or something that doesn’t demand our response. Were Jesus with us would there be any doubt that it would be those suffering with AIDS he would be reaching out to? How then can we not?

That is our response in thanksgiving, that is our response to grace. That is how we make ourselves agents of healing. That is our witness to the Healer of Galilee.