Healing in the Time of Corona Virus - Epiphany 5B

 

Healing in the Time of the Coronavirus: Part 2

“your homecoming will be my homecoming-”  - e. e. cummings

 

Dianne Connelly, in her book, All Sickness is Homesickness, reminds us of Saint Augustine’s conversion, his moment of awareness which he described with language of God, of Lord, of beauty and awakening to creation. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” he wrote in his Confessions. Connelly herself, as she pondered his assertion, writes, “I opened to my own homecoming, a collective human homecoming. If all sickness is homesickness, then all healing is coming home, and like Augustine, I can bring forth into life whatever has been missing. I can call into being an opening for which there are no words. I can begin to dwell in the poetry of existence.” [ All Sickness is Homesickness, p xvi] “A collective human homecoming” as Connelly describes it echoes the poet e.e. cummings, “your homecoming will be my homecoming.” The healed and the healer are both made whole and free once again.   

 

We find Jesus literally going home with Simon and Andrew, with James and John tagging along, where they find Simon’s mother-in-law in bed with fever. [Mark 1:29-39] As we carefully make our way through a Pandemic, if and when we venture out at all, we either find our temperature being taken, or as I checkout at Safeway, all the employees have badges stating what time that day their temperature was taken. Any sign of fever means I cannot enter the doctor’s office, or the employee gets sent home. In this story it all happens after the five of them left the synagogue where already he had healed a man possessed by and unclean spirit. Seemingly with out hesitation, Jesus “took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.”

 

In the synagogue, Jesus had simply issued orders, telling the unclean spirit to leave, and bringing the man back to himself, back home, and back to the synagogue community. Now it is touch. Jesus lifts this unnamed woman up, and suddenly she is brought home to herself to do what she does – which is to serve others. Is it reading too much into this little three sentence vignette to suggest that this serves as a metaphor that embodies the message, the Good News, he was sent to deliver: come home to God’s Kingdom which is ‘at hand,’ it is near enough to touch, here let me touch you, lift you up so you can embody just what living in my father’s kingdom means – serving one another, serving all others.

 

And by all others, oh my! At sunset, we are told, all who were “sick or possessed by demons” were brought to the door of the house. All the people of Capernaum were there. The whole city! “And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.” Right there. All night long people were being brought home to themselves, to their true self. Evidently there was a lot of homesickness in Capernaum. Think of all those homecomings! All those people of the city once again living in the “poetry of existence.” Now we are left to imagine, did he touch them all?

 

In this Time of the Corona Virus, when we are not to touch anyone outside the household, not even relatives, can we even remember what being touched is like? Let alone imagine him touching all those people of the city outside the door of Simon and Andrew’s house! Homesickness was great in Capernaum. Do these stories in the synagogue and outside the house of Simon and Andrew help us to feel our own homesickness? Our own yearning to be whole once again?

 

Getting in touch with our own homesickness, we remember that nearly that 26.7 million fellow citizens of the United States have been positively infected, and of those, 456,000 have died of the Corona Virus. Rendering literally millions upon millions of others, friends, family and co-workers, who have experienced unimagined loss and new kinds of homesickness themselves.

 

With numbers like these, standing at the door, is it any wonder that we are told that, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” Yesterday had been the longest day of his life up to that moment. It is no stretch to imagine him thinking, praying, “Is this what it means to be God’s Beloved?” His four amigos hunt him down. “Everyone is looking for you! What are you doing out here?” How can he tell them? What words are there to describe that will make sense to them that he needs time-out to go home himself. To his Father’s household – the household of graciousness, mercy and abounding steadfast Love. After last night, he thinks, I needed a homecoming myself. I need to recharge, refocus. How does one describe what it is like to go home to God? What words are there?

 

Instead, like Simon’s mother-in-law, he knows after some time alone that he has been lifted up, and he sets out for the next town to continue to serve others. “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” Where, if we were to keep reading the rest of chapter one, he stretches out his hand and brings home one more person – a man with a skin disorder whom no one else would dare to touch. Jesus touches him. That is what he came to do. To touch others and bring them home, to themselves, and typically he tells them “you can go home now,” isolated as they have been from others. The  word spreads about him. He can no longer enter a town. He stays out in the country. Still,  people come from “every quarter” to see him, to be with him, to be touched by him. He touches them and sends them home.

 

And here we are, so many of us untouched, millions of us, at the door, or out in the countryside, fearful of touching, fearful of being touched, until it has become to seem almost normal. We forget. We forget that we are homesick for life as it was just ten or so months ago. When we could gather together week by week for corporate worship. Corporate, from the Latin 'corporatus', which is the past participle of 'corporare,': 'to form into a body,’ from 'corpus' which means 'body'. We gather week by week to hear Jesus say, “This is my body….” “Do this in remembrance of me….” He forms us into his body. Ave, verum corpus: Hail, true Body!

 

We just want to be with him. Together, his true Body. Really, we just want to be touched by him. Touched by anyone from his “Body.” We are homesick. And the beginning of healing, of coming home, is to speak it, to say it: we are homesick. When we say it, “I am homesick.” “We are homesick,” our collective human homecoming begins.  We know more about him than we think. We know he is the Risen One. We know that he is with us and in us night and day. We know that his kingdom is at hand, so near that we can reach out and touch him. Like he goes out early in the morning to pray, prayer is how we touch him and he touches us.

 

We need to remember. We are the Body of Christ. Ave, verum corpus! We are those people who allow him to lift us up so we, like Simon’s mother-in-law, can get back on our feet and find ways to touch others, serve others, bring others home once again. We remember, we are those people who vow to sustain the virtue of hope in a world that often provides scant evidence that such hope is justified. But we are those people, the Body of Christ, who believe that the falseness of this world is ultimately bounded by a greater truth – that the one who sent us here will return for us at last to bring us home – all of us, every last one of us – to the household of God’s eternal Love. Your homecoming will be my homecoming, he seems to say. Healing means to return us to the poetry of existence.

 

Still, we ask ourselves: did he really touch all those people? And when we gather like this, even in this virtual Live Stream world, we remember, yes. He did. And we know this because we can remember a time when Jesus touched us. This story is meant to help us to remember that time that Jesus touched us and lifted us up and brought us home once again. He reached out, took your hand, lifted you up, and suddenly you were free, you were whole, you were loved, and you were home once again. Remembering this makes all the difference as we make our way as a body of his people through the relentless fear and loneliness of this Pandemic. We are not alone. For he is always here. And if he is here, we are at home. Now. In His Body. Now. And forever. Amen.