How to Love God:
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| Pastor Steve Ranney |
Physical Touch
Mark 5:25-34
After
seeing in Luke 10 that the one thing that God longs for from us is that we love
Him with all of our heart, soul, strength and mind, we have been looking at how
to love God using the five love languages described for us in the book “The
Five Love Languages” by Dr. Gary Chapman. So far have we looked at Words of Affirmations,
how to say to God how much we appreciate what God has done and is doing for us,
Quality Time, spending time with God, Gifts and what is on God’s list. Last
week we looked at the language of Acts of Service and how we can love God by
caring for the people that God loves. Today as we conclude this series, we look
at the final love language of Physical Touch.
Now,
I know the first thing you are thinking, is “since God does not have a physical
body like us, how can we touch God?” Well, I know it was two weeks ago, but
remember our passage from Matthew 25. Jesus described for us the way that we
could serve him, by caring for the people that He sends into our lives. In the
same way, Jesus would tell us that if we want to speak this love language to God,
we do it by offering that physical touch to the people that God loves.
There
are all kinds of illustrations of the importance of physical touch for us as
human beings. For example, a woman named Rene Spitz observed and recorded what
happened to 97 children who were deprived of emotional and physical contact
with others in a south american orphanage. Because of a lack of funds, there
was not enough staff to adequately care for these children, ages 3 months to 3
years old. Nurses changed diapers and fed and bathed the children. But there
was little time to hold, cuddle, and talk to them as a mother would. After
three months many of them showed signs of abnormality. Besides a loss of
appetite and being unable to sleep well, many of the children lay with a vacant
expression in their eyes. After five months, serious deterioration set in. They
lay whimpering, with troubled and twisted faces. Often, when a doctor or nurse
would pick up an infant, it would scream in terror. Twenty seven, almost one
third, of the children died the first year, but not from lack of food or health
care. They died of a lack of touch and emotional nurture. Because of this,
seven more died the second year. Only twenty one of the 97 survived, most
suffering serious psychological damage.
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| St. Mark Presbyterian, Memorial Day |
While this is an extreme example, there have been times in my life when I have felt starved for appropriate touch. I can attest that there was a void in my life. I was single, and while I had many friends, they were not the hugging type. I really missed being touched by people. Now I need to add a word of caution. There are appropriate ways to express brotherly and sisterly affection through touch and in appropriate ways. In my church in Colorado there was a man who went around hugging people, but if you watched carefully, he rarely hugged the men and seemed to think that a younger women were more in need of hugs than any one else. A group of women in the church called this to my attention as one of the pastors as well as the fact that they had devised a way to keep track of him and intercept him. But even though there are people that seek to misuse this form of expression of Christian love, it still can be a powerful thing.
Tony
Campolo tells the story of walking one day down Chestnut Street in center-city
Philadelphia and encountering a homeless man who was approaching him on the
sidewalk. This bum was covered
with dirt and soot from head to toe.
There was filthy stuff caked on his skin. His beard hung down almost to his waist and there was rotted
food stuck in it. The man was holding a cup of
McDonald’s coffee and the lip of the cup was already smudged from his dirty
mouth. And as he staggered towards
Tony, he seemed to be staring into this cup of coffee. Then, suddenly, he looked up and
yelled, “Hey mister! Ya want some coffee?”
As
Campolo writes, “I have to admit that I really didn’t. But I knew that the right thing to do
was to accept his generosity, and so I said, ‘I’ll take a sip.’” When Tony
handed the cup back to him, he said, “You’re pretty generous, aren’t you,
giving away your coffee?” And the
old man looked him straight in the eye and replied, “Well, the coffee was
especially delicious today, and I figure if God gives you something good, you
ought to share it with (other) people.”
Upon
hearing this, however, Campolo became a little cynical, and thought to himself,
“Oh, man. He has me really set
up. This is going to cost me five
dollars.” So Tony said to him, “I suppose there’s something I can do for you in
return, isn’t there?”
The
homeless guy thought about that for a second, and then said, “Yeah! You can give me a hug.” (“To tell you the truth,” writes
Campolo, “I was hoping for the five dollars.”) So the bum put his arms around
Tony, and Tony put his arms around the bum. And then Campolo realized something, “He wasn’t going to let
me go!” Here, people were walking
by on the sidewalk, staring at them.
And Tony, all dressed up in a suit and tie, was hugging this dirty,
filthy bum. And he was
embarrassed. (From http://pastorkropa.wordpress.com/tag/tony-campolo/)
Embarrassed or not, Tony touched God that day.
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| St. Mark Presbyterian Bunny Breakfast |
In
our passage, we have a woman who because she is has a medical condition finds
herself on the outside of society. For twelve years she has been pushed to the
fringes of society. She was considered ceremonially unclean according to Jewish
law, which meant that she could not participate in the Temple rituals. The
worst part of this was that people would avoid contact with her, because if a
person were to touch her skin, they would become temporarily unclean for temple
worship. She found herself, cut off from her community and cut off from her
God. She was desperate, willing to spend all that she had to be cured, yet that
had not worked. In fact, the passage says she got worse. Now Jesus was in town
and his reputation had gone before him. Surely, he could heal her, if only she
could get close enough. To touch him, not even him, but the tassel, a knotted
string, that an observant Jew was to fix to the corner of his clothing to
remind him of his obligation to the Law. She was probably after one hanging on
the back of his garment. He would never have to know. That was the plan anyway.
There
was something powerful in her touch. In her isolation, she was reaching out to
God for healing and through her faith, she found it. Immediately she was
healed. Jesus knew what had taken place and he does something that we might see
as strange. He could have just let her fade back into the crowd, but for some
reason, he stops and calls attention to what happened. To the casual observer,
it would seem that he wanted credit for the healing. After all, what good is a
miracle if no one hears about it. This, however goes against what Jesus
regularly did after healing someone, especially in private, he told them not to
tell anyone. Why would Jesus want to make a big deal about this one? Leon
Morris in his commentary on the Luke version of this story, points out that
this woman’s condition had to have been know to the community, and if she were
truly going to get her life back, the community would need to know that she had
been healed. Thus, Jesus makes sure that her healing is complete by making sure
that everyone knew that she had been healed.
As
I think about this event in Jesus ministry and the power of that touch, both
for the woman and for Jesus, it strikes me that can happen regularly as we
gather for worship. We come to this place and at times we feel like we are on
the outside. We look around and imagine that God must love others more than us.
We feel like we are on the outside looking in. We want to reach out and touch
God, to feel that healing power flow into us, but how do we do it? I have good
news for you today. God has already touched us. Through baptism God has claimed
us as His own. If you have been baptized, you have felt the embrace of God
claiming you. Each time we celebrate that sacrament we are reminded of his
touch in our lives.
But
it does not stop there. There are times when we need to reach out and touch
Jesus, just as the woman in our Scripture passage did. That is what we are
doing today. Each time we pick up that piece of bread and that cup, we reach
out to Jesus, we touch him. In that touch we feel his love for us. We see what
we are worth to Him. Then, He turns to us and says to us, Daughter, Son, your
faith in me has made you whole. Go in peace, knowing that my love for you and
your love for me has healed you.
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| St. Mark Presbyterian, Caregiver's Luncheon |
Today,
I invite you, beloved of God. Come. Touch. Be healed.
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