I've been thinking about how doctors and nurses must use gloves in order to touch us. Skin on skin contact endangers us. Our noble bodies are contaminated. To touch is dangerous, even if our design is to heal another. The danger of healing touch reveals how broken our sense of touch is. To touch is to risk harming or being harmed. To touch requires faith.
But touch is broken for more than bodily reasons. The human heart has broken human touch. Human lips are meant for covenant touch. The lips of one friend or one sibling or one lover touch the body of another as an act of neighbor-love. Kisses are given as a tool from God to offer a settled sense of blessing, strength, intimacy and true love to another. But, the human heart can misuse kisses and trash them. Wickedness enslaves kisses and forces them into actions they were never meant for. Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. So many of us still limp and wheeze and bleed from the trauma of mistreated touch.
Our message this past Sunday raised the question, "what does it mean to touch Christianly?" Jesus touched the sick. He touched children. He touched and received the touch of the scandalous. Jesus touched the mundane and made the ordinary sing as if it was a sacrament.
Edenic touch (that is, touch as it was created in the garden of Eden) served neighbor love. Recovering the noble purity of human touch forms part of what Jesus does by His life, death and resurrection. Jesus is redeeming human touch. He is preparing those who follow Him to touch the way inhabitants of heaven will touch. Heaven does not offer us virgins for our lusts. Heaven kills our lusts and makes virgins of us all. We will touch there and be touched as if we were original, pure and whole.
A missional church offers neighbor love. Neighbor love requires close human proximity. Close human proximity includes and requires the redemption of the way we touch or refuse to touch.
To touch will require us to settle into being human. Being human is what we were created for.
i kind of want to go hug our little 98 year old neighbor now... : )
ReplyDeleteThe comment about virgins really rang true especially in a time that it is so important to understand our brothers of different faiths. The love of God is so much more than the tangible gifts that even could be possible in heaven
ReplyDeleteI have a little friend I see at work who was 3 when he first came to us. It took him 6 weeks before he would let anyone touch him. It is so sad that in our fallen world touch has become so perverted. At yet, it is also touch that heals, touch that builds relationship. Thank you for your sermon, and for calling our attention to how easily we push aside something because it has become perverted and we don't want to risk, to be vulnerable.
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