Touch, touch, touch, feel

Have you seen the recent commercial for Kleenex? It has a woman going about her day and all the things she touches “touch snooze, touch cold, touch water, touch banana, touch, touch, touch, feel.” She eventually grabs a Kleenex and actually stops to feel the item. Here she is touching thousands of items everyday and only once takes the time to feel any of those items.

I think that is kinda how the hemorrhaging woman felt in our gospel text today. Yes she wanted to touch Jesus’ robe, but she also wanted to feel her body healed. For here she was, bleeding for 12 years, had gone to see every doctor, spent all of her money and probably had tried every cure known to man at that time. And yet nothing worked. Maybe there was some glimmers of hope during that time, the bleeding slowed or maybe even stopped for a day or two only to return again.

But yet because of her bleeding, this disease that she had tried time and again to cure but failed, she is now an outsider in society. The culture in which this woman lived there was a huge emphasis placed on being ritually clean, being right before the Lord. Being clean did not mean not being dirty, it meant being of a purified state in order to worship God and be part of the community. And there was different levels of uncleanness. You could be minorly unclean by say going to the bathroom or touching raw meat while cooking, but these minor offensives only took a washing of the hands to be made clean. There were however three offenses to cleanliness that were major enough to exclude a person from the community – leprosy, bodily discharge, and touching a dead body. In order to become ritually clean after one experienced such act, one needed to purify oneself for multiple days and prove that the offense had ended. In the meantime, if you were unclean you were excluded from the community, often cast out to the perimeter of the city, unable to participate in daily life and mostly ignored or avoided by the rest of the community for fear that they too would become unclean.

So here is this woman who for twelve years has been bleeding. And regardless of what she has done, the bleeding just will not stop. And as a result she has been shunned by society, cast off as an outside, as someone to avoid in case she is contagious, in case she get them ill as well. For twelve years she has been hardly touched, by family, friends or strangers. She is longing to be healed, both physically and socially. She is longing to be part of the human race again, to be someone who is able to fully interact with others. She longs to actually have some one feel her and to feel someone else. She longs for more than just touch.

For there is healing power in touch, Jarius knew this when he asked Jesus to come and lay hands on his ailing daughter. He begged Jesus to touch her, to feel her. And Jesus does just that. Jesus touches a dead girl (something that would have made him highly unclean) he takes the girl by the hand and he allows himself to be touched by the woman. And Jesus heals though his touch and others touching him. The woman is healed after twelve years of bleeding and the young girl is brought back to life. Both females have felt Jesus, they have felt his healing power, they have been healed by his touch.

And it is human nature to want to be touch, to want to held, and to feel yourself holding someone else. This is why babies enjoy being swaddled, they want to feel embraced. We receive a lot of information though the sense of touch. This is why young children like to feel different textures, why it is hard to walk when our foot has fallen asleep, since we cannot feel it touching the ground. But there is something magical, something spiritual in human touch. It can be a life source, it can give us energy when we are tired, break the down wall of emotion we have built up or even make us laugh if we are ticklish. Human touch can convey hate or anger through a slap, panic or terror through a tight grip of the arm, desire and passion through a gentle caress or sympathy and kindness through a hand on the shoulder. How long have you ever gone without human touch?

I asked this question to my bible study group and all of us could remember an occasion within recent history where we has gone a long time without a hug, a firm handshake or a hand on our shoulder. For me it was about a month after moving to New Haven. Yes I had Bob and I hug him multiple times daily, but when I came from the seminary community where I could not walk across campus without giving and receiving multiple hugs, to have only one person to hug was a huge change. After about a week of not hugging anyone I noticed and started to sort of kept track. No one at worked hugged me or even really touched me, which granted would have been a little odd since I had only worked there a week or two. I had no friends yet in the area so no hugs there, and our families live halfway across the country, so again no hugs. But then we went to church on Sunday, and this woman who I had only met a few times gave me this great big bear hug and it was in that hug that I felt God hugging me, I felt like I was hugging all the people that I wished to hug and couldn’t due to distance.

I believe we all have those moments in our lives when we just want to feel, we want to stop touching things and start feeling the warmth, the embrace, the power that is experienced through human touch. Even if you are a macho man and would never admit to needing a hug, I believe there are still moments when you want a hug. We want to feel that human connection, we do not want to feel alone.

But how does God touch us? I personally have never seen God or Jesus in the flesh and had heavenly arms wrapped around me. But yet I have felt God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. I have felt God, and I do mean physically, during moments of prayer, during joyful songs, during times of feeling at rock bottom. For God touches us in many ways. We are touched with the waters of baptism when it was poured out upon us. And when we dip our hands into the font to remember our baptism God is touching us with God’s presence. In the bread and wine of communion we not only taste but we touch, we feel Christ presence in our lives (even if that feeling is of the wafer being stuck to the roof of our mouth). And in the sharing of the peace as we shake the hands and hug our fellow worshipers we feel the Body of Christ. We are hugging and shaking hands both with ____, ____, and ____ but also with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So how do you feel Christ? Physically and emotionally?

“Touch in Church” By Ann Weems

What is all this touching in church?
It used to be a person could come to church and sit in the pew
and not be bothered by all this friendliness
and certainly not by touching.
I used to come to church and leave untouched.
Now I have to be nervous about what's expected of me.
I have to worry about responding to the person sitting next to me.
Oh, I wish it could be the way it used to be;
I could just ask the person next to me: How are you?
And the person could answer: Oh, just fine,
And we'd both go home . . . strangers who have known each other
for twenty years.
But now the minister asks us to look at each other.
I'm worried about that hurt look I saw in that woman's eyes.
Now I'm concerned,
because when the minister asks us to pass the peace,
The man next to me held my hand so tightly
I wondered if he had been touched in years.
Now I'm upset because the lady next to me cried and then apologized
And said it was because I was so kind and that she needed
A friend right now.
Now I have to get involved.
Now I have to suffer when this community suffers.
Now I have to be more than a person coming to observe a service.
That man last week told me I'd never know how much I'd touched his life.
All I did was smile and tell him I understood what it was to be lonely.
Lord, I'm not big enough to touch and be touched!
The stretching scares me.
What if I disappoint somebody?
What if I'm too pushy?
What if I cling too much?
What if somebody ignores me?
"Pass the peace."
"The peace of God be with you." "And with you."
And mean it.
Lord, I can't resist meaning it!
I'm touched by it, I'm enveloped by it!
I find I do care about that person next to me!
I find I am involved!
And I'm scared.
O Lord, be here beside me.
You touch me, Lord, so that I can touch and be touched!
So that I can care and be cared for!
So that I can share my life with all those others that belong to you!
All this touching in church -- Lord, it's changing me!