A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

February 23, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Quarantined

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

“Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.”

Mark 1:41a (NRSV)

We come here this morning out of our solitariness to be together and, together, to be with you, O God. Come be among us. Touch us with your love and open our hearts and our spirits to you and to one another and to those from whom we are isolated and separated and to those we most dearly love. Startle us, O God, with your lively persona: in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Are you old enough to remember quarantine signs? There was a time not so very long ago when quarantine was what happened to a household in which a child had one of the traditional childhood diseases: several varieties of measles, chicken pox, whooping cough. When you were diagnosed with one of these maladies, it was reported to the public health department, and an official came to your house, knocked on the door, conferred with your mother, and then took out a little hammer and some tacks and nailed a large white quarantine sign to your doorpost, where everybody could see it. The sign announced to the world that someone in that house was not only sick but was a danger to the rest of the community. The sign was there to warn people to stay away, which they did mostly. I always thought the whole business was fairly interesting and couldn’t wait to be quarantined and have one of those wonderful signs on our house, which, of course, in time happened.

I don’t mean to make light of those childhood diseases. People died of them. Thankfully they are no longer the threat to children that they once were, at least in this country. The story is different in Third World nations. I mean only to signal the concept of quarantine as a cultural response to perceived danger, enforced isolation as a social phenomenon, even though in my own case it was only a minor and temporary inconvenience. In fact, my memory of quarantine is of several days in bed reading comic books, being treated somewhat like royalty, ginger ale and buttered toast delivered to my bed while my buddies at school struggled with long division and diagramming sentences.

Quarantine was, for me, benign. It was not always so. It is not always so. One of the most effective and most harsh forms of social control is found, of all places, in Amish culture. It is called the Ban. A person who breaks a rule, breaks covenant with the community, is banned or shunned. No one is allowed to have anything to do with him or her. No talking. Old friends simply act as if you are not there. Spouses and family are expected to do the same. No talking, no touching. You go through the motions of your life, doing what you always do, and the people you love most act as if you are no longer there, act as if you are dead, which in a way you are. It is very effective.

In the Middle Ages, during dreadful times of the plague, quarantine was tried as a desperation measure to protect the community from infection. Plague victims or persons suspected of being infected were placed into a house together. The house was boarded up, sealed shut. Food and water were handed through a space in a window.

In Jesus’ day, in Palestine, the disease most dreaded, most feared, and least understood was called leprosy. Its modern name is Hansen’s disease. In its extreme and advanced stages, it is disfiguring—and so, very frightening. About the only thing society knew to do with people who had leprosy or were suspected of being infectious was to get them away from the community, isolate them, quarantine them, and thus came about leper colonies, which still exist in some places even today. In Jesus’ day, however, the community response was to separate the individual, to cast him or her out, out of home, community, synagogue, marketplace, to live alone or with other sufferers, some place away from the community, in caves, for instance, and sometimes in the empty tombs. That was particularly appropriate, because if you had leprosy, you were virtually dead. The Levitical law prescribed that you wear torn clothing and let your hair hang loose in order to warn others to stay away. When you happened to encounter another person, the law prescribed that you cover your upper lip with your hand—a gesture that addressed the matter of contagion—and call out “Unclean! Unclean!” That, by the way, is what you are called in the religious law, which is also the civil law. It’s all there in the book of Leviticus, chapters 13 and 14. It’s called Israel’s Purity, or Holiness, Code, and it makes fascinating reading. All of life is arranged around the concepts of clean and unclean. Some of it makes a great deal of sense in terms of health and hygiene, and some of it does not. Things that are different, phenomenon that are frightening and not understood, are often designated unclean. A skin blemish or rash, for instance, might be nothing, or it might be the first indication of leprosy. So you went to the priest, who took a look and then decided whether or not you were unclean.

The worst part about it was the isolation. One day you are alive, living in your community, in your home, with your neighbors and family, doing what you do. The next day you’re alone, out in the countryside, hoping your family will leave some food out somewhere for you. You are totally isolated. If, by chance, someone happens by accident to touch you, that person became unclean, as well. So no more touching, no more holding the hand of your beloved, your wife or husband, your son, your daughter, your babies. No more pats on cheeks, no more gentle caresses, no more embraces. In a very real way you are dead.

And so one of the most dramatic moments in the life of Jesus of Nazareth happens at the very beginning of the story, when one day a man with leprosy does something entirely inappropriate and altogether illegal and approaches Jesus and speaks across the terrible isolation of his quarantine and begs for help.

“If you choose, you can make me clean.”

Mark reports, “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him and said, ‘I do choose. Be made clean.’”

I suppose it’s because over the years I have known so many people who live a kind of quarantined existence, a personal isolation, sometimes imposed by others, but as often as not, self-imposed—isolated by guilt over something they’ve done, some betrayal; isolated by anger at the one who betrayed, the community that disappointed, the institution that failed; isolated by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority taught in childhood and reinforced over the years by unsatisfactory and failed relationships with employers, friends, spouses, lovers. I suppose it’s because I’ve known so many and continue to observe that the isolation and the consequent loneliness it produces is no stranger to most of us that this single sentence has become so powerful and profound and beautiful almost beyond description: “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.” Reached across a thousand years of religiously enforced isolation and quarantine and in that physical touch brought the man back into the community, back to his humanity, back to his loved ones.

Did you notice the sequence? Jesus doesn’t heal him and then touch him. He touches the man with leprosy. He takes into himself the man’s condition and isolation. And in that touch, the man who still has leprosy is made clean. “Even with your leprosy you are clean,” that is to say. And the revolutionary effect of it is that Jesus presumes to restore to the human community a man the religious law has said is unclean, unfit.

If you read the footnotes at the bottom of the page, which students of the Bible are taught to do, you will discover that “pity” is perhaps not what moved Jesus to touch this man. Historians and scholars are always discovering ancient texts, some of them older than the texts used to translate our version of the Bible, and some of those ancient texts say it wasn’t pity at all that moved Jesus—it was anger. “Moved with anger he stretched out his hand and touched him,” some of the ancient texts say. Isn’t that interesting? Anger at whom? Anger at the man for having leprosy? Obviously not. I think it was anger at religion, at the whole system, anger that all religion could think to do with this man was to exclude him, condemn him to live outside the community. I think it was anger at the propensity of religion, even his own religion, to divide the human race between the chosen and the unchosen, clean and unclean, holy and profane, good and evil. I think Jesus was angry and clearly stayed angry at a religion that isolates and marginalizes the different, the outsider, the sick, the challenged, a religion that gets it all backwards, somehow concluding that its role is to divide and exclude and build boundary walls around the righteous and literally damn all the rest to hell.

In the new book God: A Brief History, John Bowker observes the tendency of religion to take its founding ideas, which are good and reconciling and redeeming, and then add to them, not always faithfully—“thus the cross of Christ can be displayed on a Crusader’s blood-stained tunic, and ‘jihad’ meant to be a costly effort in moral submission to the One (God) can come down to September 11.” True religion, Bowker concludes, “draws the lesson of love out of authentic spirituality” (See Context, 15 February 2003).

So I think it just might have been anger that moved Jesus, and urgent hope that whatever followers he had might know their own calling to be reconcilers and restorers and lovers, not dividers and excluders, that his church—his very body on earth, Paul called it—might be known for its hospitality, its welcome, its willingness to open its arms and doors, its structures and its table—which is really his table—to all those who are in any way and for some reason quarantined.

I think it was anger and hope and love for this isolated man, which you and I are hard-pressed to imagine—a love so amazing, so inclusive, that it could only be the love of God.

I think what Jesus does for the man with leprosy is the reason why we have a church.

Now I’m a lifelong Presbyterian, and I know that touching is not a huge priority in this tradition. I know lots of churches where right in the middle of worship they pass the plate and then people walk around shaking hands and hugging. But I also recall the Presbyterian elder who told me, in another congregation, that if we started doing that he wasn’t coming or at least wouldn’t come until after that part was over, that he came to church to worship God, not hold hands. And Garrison Keillor, who must be following the lectionary these days, did a wonderful monologue from Nashville last Saturday night and had great fun describing how people from Lake Wobegon come down to Nashville and while they are there visit Pentecostal churches where the preacher comes right down into the auditorium and throws his arms around people to heal them. These are people, these Lutherans, Keillor says, “who start to feel uncomfortable if you come closer than forty-four inches. They don’t want to be healed by someone laying hands on them: they prefer pharmaceuticals, they wish everybody would behave as they do up north: instead of whooping and hollering and putting your hands above your head, you sit very quietly with your hands in your lap and wait for it to be over and then go downstairs and have coffee.”

I heard Jim Towey, Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, tell the story recently of his experience with Mother Teresa. Towey was a short-term volunteer in Calcutta working with the homeless and dying, and he ended up staying for several years. One time he asked Mother Teresa what was the worst disease affecting the homeless? AIDS? Tuberculosis? And she said the worst disease, the worst disease in the world, worse than AIDS or tuberculosis, is loneliness.

And I thought about a remarkable motion picture and the novel by Louis Begley on which it is based: About Schmidt. Schmidt is a sixty-six-year-old, recently retired actuary for an Omaha insurance company whose life work is summarized by a pile of his discarded files on the way to the shredder, a pile he discovers on a visit to his old office. He’s spent his life predicting the life expectancy of his company’s customers, and now he faces his own mortality. And he’s alone. His wife has died unexpectedly. His daughter lives far away and wants nothing to do with him—and furthermore is marrying a young man who simply doesn’t measure up to Schmidt’s expectations. He’s alone and, in a tragically comic portrayal by Jack Nicholson, utterly and profoundly lonely. Begley, the author, said that the great theme of the movie is Schmidt’s “frightful and lifelong loneliness.” One day, sorting through his mail, he opens an appeal from an international children’s aid fund, which says that for $22 a month he can help an orphan in Africa and that he can actually write to the child. So he writes the check and starts to correspond with Ngudu, a six-year-old Tanzanian orphan, and tells the child about his marriage, his wife’s death, his daughter’s wedding, about his solitary life, his loneliness. At the end, after he has returned from the wedding and is sitting alone at his desk sorting through his mail, he finally names his terrible loneliness, his quarantine: “I’m a failure; I’ve never made a difference to a solitary human being,” he thinks to himself. And then he sees an envelope postmarked Tanzania. It’s from a French nun at the orphanage. She’s writing for Ngudu, to say thank you to his generous American friend, and there is wonderful picture Ngudu drew and wanted him to have. The picture Schmidt unfolds is of two stick figures, an adult and a child, and their arms are outstretched to each other as if they’re holding hands. And for the first time, tears appear in his eyes and run down his cheeks.

He stretched out his hand and touched him.

Sometimes we isolate and quarantine ourselves. Sometimes we are alone, shut out or shutting others out. Sometimes we conclude that nobody cares about us and that we matter ultimately to no one. And into our aloneness comes one who stretches his hand across all the barriers and empty spaces to touch us and restore us and to give our lives back again. Jesus Christ is his name.

Amen.