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Finding the Heart of God
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15 February 2009 Inside the Capitol, directly underneath the Hall of the House of Representatives is the Hall of Columns, home to a portion of our nation’s collection of statues. In that hall is a particular statue. This statue isn’t of some military hero, like Lafayette, or a former president of this country or any other country. This statue, created by Marisol Escobar, is a gift to the Hall collection from the state of Hawaii. A similar statue is found at the State House in Hawaii. It is a statue of Father Damien, the Roman Catholic priest from Belgium, who was ordained in 1864 in Honolulu. For seven of the next nine years, he watched many of his parishoners being shipped to the leper colony that was established in 1866 on the small island of Molokai.[1] Actually, to say that the colony was an established community is elevating its status. There were no amenities: no buildings, no shelters, no potable water. The first arrivals found shelter in rocks and caves, or built rough shacks of sticks and dried leaves. Sometimes those arriving by ship were told to jump overboard and swim for their lives. Others pulled themselves along a strong rope run from the anchored ship to the shore. Then the crew would throw into the water whatever supplies had been sent. Either the current carried in the supplies, or exiles swam out to retrieve them. [2] “Ambrose Hutchinson, a veteran of half a century in the colony, describes an incident in the settlement’s early days. ‘A man, his face partly covered below the eyes, with a white rag or handkerchief tied behind his head, came out from the house that stood near the road. He was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with a bundle, which [Hutchinson first mistook] for soiled rags. He wheeled it across the yard to a small windowless shack.... The man then half turned over the wheelbarrow and shook it. The bundle...rolled out on the floor with an agonizing groan. [It was a man,] lying there helpless. After a while the dying man raised and pushed himself in the doorway; with his body and his legs stretched out, he lay there face down.’”[3] Damien lived on Molokai for the next sixteen years, making coffins, digging graves, hearing confessions, offering daily worship, building a home for boys and another for girls, constructing chapels.[1] Early on in those sixteen years, Father Damien also made a decision. In contrast to his Yankee contemporaries, those boundary-keeping puritanical missionaries of our Congregational forebears, Damien embraced his parishoners. He dined with them, he cleaned and bandaged their wounds and sores. He placed communion bread upon their battered mouths, and put his thumb on their forehead when he anointed them with oil. Then in December 1884, Father Damien noticed severe blisters on his feet–but there was no pain; he had contracted leprosy himself.[3] It is said that those on Molokai embraced him with the same care he had shown them, proclaiming, “Now you are truly one of us.” Damien died in 1889 among those he came to serve, and today is claimed as the patron saint of those with HIV and AIDS. Of course, we have no idea whether the man with leprosy who is the subject of today’s gospel reading would now be diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. In biblical times, the label ‘leper’ was a catch-all term applied to anyone with an apparently-contagious skin condition, another reminder that just as the Bible isn’t a history book or a science book, it would never make it as a substitute for the Journal of the American Medical Association either. That’s not its purpose. The Bible tells us something about God, and that’s precisely what Mark is telling us in the healing stories. In Mark these “stories are symbols of the power of God that lives in Jesus.”[4] The phrase “if you choose” makes that connection between Jesus and God’s power.[4] Of course, Jesus chooses to cleanse the man with leprosy. Like Father Damien nearly two millennia later, Jesus touches the man as well. Then Jesus tells the man to show himself to the priest, the person who has the authority to reconnect the outcast individual with the community. So the man, once ritually and culturally relegated to the margins of his culture, now has access once again. He is cleansed. The circle that once kept him on the outside has been redrawn to include him. At various points, different people are on the margins outside the circle–people with skin conditions, people with mental and physical disabilities, people of color, women, children, those with HIV/AIDS. The point is not to catalogue the contemporary equivalents of those pushed outside the circle to the margins of our culture–but we must be alert to them. As Jesus’ followers, the point is to take a closer look at how Jesus responds when confronted with that reality. That he is moved with pity is a prettified translation of the Greek. The reaction is more visceral. More accurately, Mark reads that Jesus felt his stomach turn. In other words, we will not be comfortable in those confrontations. But then...then Jesus stretches out his hand and touches the man with leprosy. As long as they do not touch, Jesus remains “clean.” As long as they do not touch, Jesus remains inside the circle; the man remains outside and “unclean.” But Jesus makes it clear that his response is a choice. To bring this man from the outside edge of human society, away from its functional center, Jesus touches him. In that touch, he takes upon himself the man’s uncleanness. “We imagine that Jesus’ touching the man makes him just like us: a person unaffected by superstition.”[5] But we conveniently ignore the hate mail people received for integrating neighborhoods, or ministering to those with HIV/AIDS, or even now, joyfully affirming our GLBT sisters and brothers into the full range of Christian life and ministry. And even though we gloss over the impact, Mark subtly notes the change: Jesus can no longer go into town openly; now he stays out in the country. In a full 180, it is Jesus who is on the margins; the man who is cleansed is free from the stigma that once governed every aspect of his living. It’s a discomforting message, not all tidied up in a glib theology that says “believe in Jesus and you will no longer be a social outcast.” Instead, today’s scripture afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. It reminds us that Jesus’ followers are called to extend the circle to include the leper, not as an academic exercise, but to touch those who are excluded, to take on the stigma of exclusion, so that community may be restored to the individual. Maybe, just maybe, when community is restored to the individual, we also find the heart of God. *** [1] http://www.aoc.gov/cc/art/nsh/damien.cfm,, The Architect of the Capitol: Capitol Complex, “Father Damien”. |