Sermon: Touching the Untouchable in Ourselves & Others: The Healing Power of Compassion

September 2, 2023 - Undelivered Sermon

From the Gospel of Mark 1:40-42:

Footnotes from BibleGateway.com:

• Mark 1:40 The Greek word traditionally translated leprosy was used for various diseases affecting the skin.

• Mark 1:41 Many manuscripts: Jesus was filled with compassion.
  

When I read scripture on Sundays, I always spend my Sunday morning coffee time pouring over it again and again, trying to understand its essence and meaning so I can bring more to it than just reading letters off a page. It’s an important part of my own spiritual development to wrestle with these verses and try to understand both what they meant in the context of the times in which they were written, as well as what they mean to us in the modern world today.

During my research for the reading on July 30th, I read the verse from Mark and was fascinated by one minor footnote on the word “leprosy.” As I pondered it, the idea quickly turned into today’s sermon. It might seem somewhat odd to give an entire sermon on a disease, but hear me out and you’ll understand why I found it so interesting and hope you do too. At first, this sermon may sound like a combination of a science lecture and a history lesson, but I promise I’ll eventually get to the spiritual point!

As it appears in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the Gospels of the New Testament, the word "leprosy" has been a subject of much discussion among scholars. In the original Hebrew, the term used is "tzaraath," which gets translated into English as “leprosy,” and is even used in modern Hebrew to describe the disease of leprosy. However, the symptoms and implications of "tzaraath" described in the Bible do not align completely with the medical understanding of leprosy. In the biblical context, "tzaraath" could affect not only people but also clothing and houses, which is not consistent with our modern understanding of leprosy as a disease caused by a specific bacterium (Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis).

So, while the word "leprosy" has been used in many English translations of the Bible, it's important to understand that "tzaraath" likely referred to a variety of skin conditions, not necessarily the specific disease we know today as leprosy. The exact nature of these conditions isn't known, but they could have included a range of infectious and non-infectious diseases, such as psoriasis, fungal infections like ringworm, or other dermatological conditions.

In addition, "tzaraath" was seen as a spiritual or moral affliction, often associated with sin, as much as a physical disease. A person who had this affliction was considered ritually impure and was isolated from the community until a priest declared them clean.

I’m really intrigued by the societal implications of this. It essentially meant that a priest could declare anyone to be suffering from “tzaraath” in a bid to control, take revenge, and punish. It’s part of the Hebrew Bible's view of God that He was a God of retribution and punishment. So it could actually be in the New Testament that Jesus is absolving these people not of a physical disease but of a religious pronouncement they had received! Still showing compassion, but the healing may have been social and not physical. Still very impactful on the person’s life, and still in line with the view of Jesus as a rebel and changer of societal structures.

This isn’t entirely different from modern evangelical Christianity in America and other Orthodox religions around the world, which seem to pick and choose a lot of the rules by which people should live their lives. Members are condemned when they don’t follow these rules. Leaders espouse that this “control” they exert is critical to members’ eternal life, but often their earthly lives become repressed and restricted as a result, and not very fun. Here are a few quotes from people who left such religions to give you an idea of their experience:

These concepts of “tzaraath” and religious control seem very alien to us in the United Church of Christ, where we are encouraged to bring our questions and our doubts to the table, to engage in our own searches for God based on our own intellect and conscience, but to do so in community, supporting one another on the path. In the UCC, we are made responsible for diagnosing, treating, and curing our own “tzaraath,” and there is no one responsible for doing it for us; only those who will show the same compassion to us that Jesus did to the “lepers” of his time. We do this by walking the same path with those who suffer, lending them a compassionate ear, and holding hands in moments of darkness. We do not fear them or run away from them or isolate them based on any medical or spiritual pronouncement of sickness or inadequacy; we touch their hearts with our words and our presence, and we touch them and embrace them to comfort them.

As a young gay man in the 80s and 90s, I witnessed one of the greatest episodes of tzaraath of our times: the AIDS crisis. Gay men – who were already discriminated against and hated by many – suffered both from a horrible disease, which at the time was a death sentence, as well as stigmatization and marginalization by many in the medical community as well as the world at large. I was shocked and horrified as I watched the new documentary about Rock Hudson and saw how he sought treatment for AIDS at the American Hospital in Paris in 1985. His life at that point was characterized by both those who followed the path Jesus laid out and tried to get him medical help while showing him the support and compassion he needed. But it was also characterized by a French system of bureaucracy that wouldn’t let his doctor treat him at the American Hospital and wouldn’t transfer him to the hospital where the doctor could treat him because he wasn’t a French citizen. A plea to his supposedly dear friend, Nancy Reagan, to get the White House to intervene was met with indifference. According to a staffer at the time, her response was:

"I SPOKE WITH MRS. REAGAN ABOUT THE ATTACHED TELEGRAM. SHE DID NOT FEEL THIS WAS SOMETHING THE WHITE HOUSE SHOULD GET INTO AND AGREED TO MY SUGGESTION THAT WE REFER THE WRITER TO THE U.S. EMBASSY, PARIS."

At the same time, by no coincidence, her husband, the president, was proposing to cut $10 million from government research funding for AIDS. As both the French and American medical systems and his own government failed him, he was forced to return home to die. Except he couldn’t get any commercial airline to fly him back to Los Angeles. So he had to spend a quarter of a million dollars (about $700,000 in today’s money) to charter an Air France 747 to fly him home with only 10 people from his entourage on board.

This was how Rock Hudson, one of the most beloved and powerful stars in Hollywood, was treated. Imagine how the hundreds of thousands in the country who died from AIDS without that privilege and power were treated – especially in the beginning.

Yet, there are also stories of hope and of those who brought Jesus’s love to those suffering with the biggest “tzaraath” of the 80s and 90s. In 1981, Molly Cooke, a San Francisco physician, was pregnant with her first child. Given how little was known about the risk of transmission, she was understandably fearful of taking on patients with AIDS. Yet she remembered saying to her husband, Paul Volberding, an oncologist who would help to shape San Francisco General Hospital's response to AIDS, “If not us, who? What's the justification for saying someone else should do this?”

Jesus taught us that whether our “tzaraath” is physical or spiritual, it is not an opportunity to marginalize, punish, abandon, or control others… it is an opportunity to show others His love, to give them our support. To walk the path with them, to treat them with dignity, to not judge them, to love them unconditionally as He loves us. I challenge you – as I challenge myself - to seek out opportunities in your life to do this. “If not us, who?”. Amen.