Sermon: "Touching the Untouchable"

5th in the "The Healer at Work" series.
Delivered February 3, 2008 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

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The time is 1,000 years before Christ. Instead of being in the Holy Land let's consider Northern India at that point in history; 1,000 years before Christ. We are in a village in Northern India, a mother and her child are walking into the night to collect food from different upper caste families. She can't turn down anything that's offered to her even if its spoiled, because that might offend the people giving it and then she would not be able to come to them again and beg off more food. Now the reason why she has the right to come to this household is because earlier in the day she has provided them a service. What she did was she came earlier in the day with a basket and she cleaned out their latrine with her hand and loaded up the basket and carried the basket on her head, because that's what tradition required her to do; carried that basket leaking on her head out of the village to dump it near her village. She has to do this. She feels humiliated. She feels weak. She feels sick. She feels despised. She tries to clean herself, but never really can. She has cried. She has vomited. She had pleaded not to do this job, but ultimately she had to accept the fact that this was her fate and the only way she could provide for her family. It's a horrible part of ancient history, but it's a practice that still goes on today 3,000 years later. It's very illegal, but it happens.

They call these people the untouchables. In the tradition of Northern India they are considered subhuman people. They call themselves the Dalits, which means the oppressed. Now, how can the gospel, how can Christ touch these untouchables? Philip Prasad, a Dalit himself and a Presbyterian missionary has been preaching the gospel to the Dalit people for a number of years. And over the years he has noticed that there is a strong response among the Dalit people about Jesus. The part of the gospel that touches their hearts inevitably comes at the end of the gospels when Jesus is betrayed by Judas and people spit on him and beat him. Inevitably what they say is, "Ah, here is a man who is a Dalit just like us" because people spit on him and people beat on him. The connection has been such that the majority of the Dalit people are now Christians; the majority. About 50,000 a year or more for years have been becoming Christian through the ministry of Philip Prasad, as well as other people. Christ has touched an untouchable people.

Every culture has untouchable people. It might not be as startling a picture as this group of untouchables, but its very real. Every culture has a group of people that we consider somehow inferior, that we keep our distance from. We see their problems and we know that we are superior to them and want to stay safe from those people. Now sometimes it's an oppressed people where the society is at fault and causing this distance. Other times it's decisions these people have made. They could have lived differently but they made the choices that have led to them being isolated. But either way they are untouchable.

In Jesus' time there were untouchables as well. They were people who were distant, cut off from normal society and we are going to read about two kinds of untouchables today, as we watch Jesus in this series of "Jesus, the healer at work", as we watch him, we are going to see Jesus the healer heal the lives of two different kinds of untouchable people.

Let's go to the 5th Chapter of Luke. I am going to read Verses 12 to 16 and then jump over to another passage and go to Verses 27 to 32. In between is a passage that I preached about last fall, about a paralytic. We will skip over that and just the passage before and after. So we are in Chapter 5 of Luke beginning at Verse 12.

"While Jesus was in one of the towns, a man came along who was covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he fell with his face to the ground and begged him, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean." Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" And immediately the leprosy left him. Then Jesus ordered him, "Don't tell anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them." Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed."

Let's go down now to Verse 27:

"After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. "Follow me," Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him. Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and 'sinners'?" Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

Let's pray: Lord we thank you for this your word and we pray that you open our eyes and our hearts to whatever you want to do in our lives. Speak through your word, for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

We are ending our series of watching Jesus as a healer at work. We have been looking at his actions more than long sections of his teaching and here this section we are looking at today begins with Jesus cleansing a man who had leprosy. Now the word here that we translate leprosy or skin diseases meant all kinds of serious skin diseases, not just leprosy. If you caught any kind of skin disease that spread, you became ritually unclean. You had to leave the community and you were isolated and then if it wasn't too serious a disease and healed, as soon as you were healed you were able to go to the priest, show that you had healed and then you were allowed to reintroduce yourself to normal family life and normal society. But when you caught something like leprosy, you never did heal. And so, that meant that you were physically untouchable. You were socially alienated for the rest of your life. And this was by the law of Moses. And part of that was because of the infectiousness of these diseases that they had these barriers put up. Maybe it was also given to be an image of how sin consumes us and alienates us. It's hard to know all of the reasons, but the fact is this was in the law and so if anybody touched someone who was unclean they became unclean as well and they would have to be isolated until they could prove that nothing had changed, that they were healthy and they were reinstituted in to fellowship. So if you touch something unclean you became unclean as well. So families would come and drop off food, but could never touch the person in their family. They would drop it, move away, couldn't even pick up the plates that they used. It was total separation. Wives, fathers, husbands, mothers, children; it didn't matter, isolated.

And so while Jesus is in one of the towns, a person who has one of these diseases comes to him and he says, "Jesus, if you are willing you can make me clean. You can solve this." And Jesus replies to him, "I am willing. Be clean." And the man becomes clean; healed of whatever had been afflicting him for how many years. Now what's important to notice here is remember this is an untouchable person, but Jesus decides when he heals them to reach out and touch him. He could have done it some other way. Jesus could have stepped back and said, "Hold on, you're unclean. Gather together a few of your friends. All of you now be healed." He could have done it that way. He chooses not to. Jesus moves in close to the person who cannot be touched and touches him, but instead of Jesus becoming unclean, the person becomes clean. The person is healed.

Jesus is concerned at more than just the person's physical healing. He is concerned about their emotional healing as well. This is someone who hasn't been touched since he came down with this affliction. And Jesus reaches out to restore him, to make that connection again with him and on top of that Jesus is also concerned about his social healing, because he tells him to go talk to the priest, because by talking to the priest he can be shown to be clean and then can be reconnected with his family and with his normal life. So Jesus touches the untouchable person to bring healing.

Now today we have the medical ability to deal with leprosy and most of the other skin disease that were probably included in those words that afflicted these people, but there are still people now today who are untouchable because of disease. It wasn't that long ago that people with AIDS were considered that way, because we didn't know how readily it was being transmitted. We didn't know whether a sneeze could change the lives of everyone in the room. And so, we isolated these people physically. Now that we know better about the transmission of the disease, it's better, but we still emotionally sometimes isolate people like that, because of the gravity of their disease. Even though we know better, emotionally we sometimes view them as untouchable. How can the gospel, how can Christ touch untouchables like that? Not only to help bring physical healing, but to bring emotional healing and to bring social healing reconnecting people properly to their community and their family.

We go down now to Verse 27; a different kind of untouchable. Here we are dealing with the morally untouchable, those who are socially outcast because they are immoral. These people have made some decisions. They weren't born this way. They didn't have to be this way. They chose to be this way and now they are isolated. They are tax collectors. Now why were they isolated? Well, they are tax collectors. That's enough reason for a lot of people. But it was much more than that. They were tax collectors for a foreign power: for Rome. They worked for the Romans. They were collaborators. There was political suspicion that always surrounded people like this. They were sometimes considered traitors by other people, and they dealt with Gentiles. Gentiles had a lifestyle. Non-Jewish people had a lifestyle where they would do things that would make you unclean and untouchable and then by hanging around with them they became unclean as well. So they were even ritually unclean sometimes in the minds of the people around them. But the worst part of it were these are people who chose to get rich at the expense of their own countrymen; a great moral failing.

And so, people took a strong stance and kind of isolated these people. They had to hang around with their own kind because good people, respectable company didn't hang around with folk like that. Now the Pharisees, one of the main religious groups at this time in Israel, the Pharisees were a group that viewed themselves as kind of being the conservative power in the society, that they believed the scriptures and they wanted to obey it and they would try to work out how do you obey the scriptures down to the final bits and parts of the law. And they were so zealous about it that you couldn't even be a good Pharisee unless you were kind of independently wealthy, because to obey everything required a lot of free time.

And so these people were really working at being righteous and they are really upset at what Jesus does, because Jesus deliberately enters the world of these sinful people. And so in Verse 30, what do they say to him? "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?' This does not fit the pattern of what a righteous person does. Jesus replies to them by going back to his mission statement. It came up in Chapter 4 and it comes up again here. He talks about himself being a healer and a physician. A physician has got to get close to a sick person to heal them. It is not something you can do at a distance. He has come to call sinners to repentance, not just to hang around with righteous people. This is what he has been called to do. Tearing down the walls between clean and unclean, normal folk and the untouchables, to be the clean person who reaches out to the untouchable.

Jesus was called to touch the untouchable. He didn't expect his message to work long distance. He did not see Levi and tell him to gather his friends, bring them in the house and Jesus didn't stand outside and yell through the door, "Hey folks, you are not clean yet, but you can be. God loves you. You've got to make some changes." He didn't do that. Jesus walked through the door and he spoke from the inside. He touched the untouchable. Now it's easy to judge the Pharisees; what narrow-minded people are this? Come on, everybody can tell that the Pharisees are wrong here. But is the church really that different sometimes? I think about the time when I was in college. It was right at the end of a period of time when the churches all over the country, different churches, were excluding young men from their worship, because they had long hair. They didn't care what their hearts were like. They didn't care what they believed. It was just disrespectful to have long hair. Now, I had hair down to my shoulders at that point. Believe it or not I have a picture from my driver's license in that era. When I went and got my driver's license I had my hair cut off because I was going in to Tiger Band and I had to have short hair for that. The guy looked at me and looked at my driver's license and cut off the picture and said, "Someday son, you are going to want this picture." And it was true. People with long hair were not welcomed. It wasn't respectful. It wasn't what a godly man did. Now these are the same churches that have Jesus on the wall with long hair and a beard? Come on, one and one is what? I couldn't believe it and that was the character of some churches, conservative, Bible believing churches.

Now today we don't make that mistake, but maybe we are making other mistakes that we are just not even aware of. The church can be part of the problem. I think about who would be the real untouchables, morally untouchables in Baltimore. I think of the people who made the "Don't Snitch" videos. If Jesus called one of the ringleaders of that group to follow him and that person's heart was soft and responded "Yes Jesus, I will follow you. I will turn" and he gathers together his friends to have a great party and Jesus goes in to West Baltimore to eat with them, bling and all, just think of the music he might listen to there. Touching the untouchable does not come naturally. It's not a natural habit. We need to work at it. It's a missionary thing. It's thinking like a missionary and we are missionaries now, because we are no longer identical to our culture around us. We've got to deliberately cross barriers, deliberately reach out. We've got to take chances of getting dirty sometimes in order to touch the untouchable.

Now inevitably in relating to the culture around us we are going to fall in to one of three categories in my mind. Missionaries when they go and serve in another country inevitable find their place in one of these three categories. Now, we are not talking about identically, but we kind of gravitate to one place or another and two of them are traps in my mind. The first category: Pharisee. It comes out of passages like this: this label the Pharisee. This is the person who disrespects the culture around them, because they know that they are superior and that they are better. There is a lot of fear in this position, because you've got to keep yourself safe and separate. You can't touch the untouchable. My main responsibility as a Pharisee is to keep myself clean and we think we are safe if we are in the company of other people like us. So what happens is Pharisees form virtual monasteries. It doesn't have any walls on it, but we make sure that our lives are lived in such a way that we are always surround by Christian people. We are safe from being tempted. We are safe from being defiled and being made unclean. And so we live within this little world never crossing the barrier, never going outside the wall and from that monastery we condemn, we judge people from a distance and we are apathetic about their real needs and are just concerned about the inside. That's the first, the Pharisee. It's a trap.

The second category I call "going native." You respect the culture in this category, but then you end up believing the culture. You accept it all. This happens a lot on the mission field. You find people who come to the mission field and they come and they are wide open to the culture around them, but they don't know who they are personally. They don't really know what they believe. We saw some young missionaries come; they came from Christian churches, but were not necessarily Christians themselves. They come, the look at Zen Buddhism and Shintoism and they love the history in Japan and everything else like that and at the end of 18 months they have converted and are now Buddhists by their confession. They were willing to join. They were willing to respect, but then they bought it all up, because they didn't know who they were when they came. Going native they hang around, they join, but instead of us changing them, the group changes us. We end up getting drunk with them and end up sleeping around with them, we end up using the same language as them, we end up judging the same people they judge, accepting the same people they accept and making the same excuses. We have gone native and we never speak a word about living differently. We never speak a word about how Christ could make it different, because that might break the relationship. And so, we become untouchable with them; going native.

The third category: being a change agent. This is what Jesus chose to do. You respect the culture around you and you accept the people in that culture without losing yourself in the bargain. It's what Jesus did and its what every effective missionary does. You join them. You accept them. You love them even though you see the seriousness of the problems they have in their lives. You can see the seriousness. You can know it can be different and still love them and accept them and draw close, but when we draw close and have the courage to draw close, we also have to have the courage to say no to some things. We have to have the courage to speak out against some things. Jesus was willing to join people. He didn't have to have clean religious people around him, but when he did join them, think of some of the things he said. He confronted people. Now I am not saying that we should always do it that way, but we have to know that there are times that we say no and we say something to the people around us; hard choices, courageous choices. But we are called to enter in to those situations and touch the untouchable to bring cleansing and healing. Jesus joined tax collectors at a party, but he never became like them, but he entered to offer the grace of God to them so that they could become children of God.

So which one are you? Are you a Pharisee? Are you a native or are you a change agent? Our vision of being a church without walls, moving people towards Christ where we live, work and play is a strategy that depends upon change agents. It's Jesus' strategy. It's what he did. It's what we are called to do. To enter some situations, to touch some untouchable lives.

So how does the gospel touch the lives of the untouchable? Not by getting a louder speaker system, not be getting a stronger radio station, but by having people who will enter in to the lives of broken untouchable people. That's how the gospel, that's how Christ touches lives. To be change agents; people are going to have to know themselves. We can't go native, because that doesn't help anybody. To touch the untouchable and be change agents, we've got to know who we are. We've got to be growing disciples. We have to know the scriptures. We have to have habits of study and prayer. We have to have some victory in our personal lives over sin. We've got to have some of those basics there to know who we are as we reach out. And then we are called from that position to be change agents. People like Philip Prasad who discover, as he did with the Dalits that the gospel can connect with anybody's need. The gospel can connect with the need of the untouchable.

We discover that as we reach out, but we discover one more thing as well as we reach out as change agents. We discover that we are untouchable too. Philip Prasad was an untouchable himself. We are untouchable. When we touch people's lives honestly and authentically, we are going to realize in new ways that we are broken. We are going to go in to situations and know that we don't have all of the answers. We are going to go in to situations and people are going to reflect back to us with a critical lie and we will know that we are not living all the answers. We are untouchable too. But there is good news. We are pointing to the one who does have the answers, because we are untouchables who have already been touched by the only one who has real answers and that is Christ and that's the good news. Christ touches the untouchables so he touched us and that changes everything and then we can touch the lives of other people and watch the healer, watch the master physician as he heals another life by using us. Untouchable, broken, imperfect. Touched by Christ so that we then can touch the life of another.

Let's pray: God, we thank you for your word and we ask now open our eyes to what we need to hear, our hearts so that we might respond to whatever you are saying to us individually for we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

We come to a table here that's a table for untouchable people. Although, he was God, Jesus didn't consider equality with God something that he had to grasp, but he gave it up and took upon himself the role of a servant, became human and suffered and faced death, even death on the cross and why did he do that? He did that because he entered in to the life and the sphere of the untouchable people so that God's grace and power could change that forever and take those who are untouchable and alienated and separate and bring them in to God's own family. That is what we celebrate here; the grace, the love, and the incredible sacrifice that God gave in Jesus Christ. Let's pray.

Lord, as we come to this table, soften our hearts. Lord we thank you that even though we are untouchable, even though we have real problems and weaknesses, that we can come, because that's why you came to earth to save people just like us. And so, Lord, make us sensitive to that, strengthen our faith and grant us joy in your presence, as we celebrate your goodness. For it's in Jesus name we pray who taught us to pray: Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not in to temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.

© 2008, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org