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Sermon for Epiphany 5 – February 5, 2012
Years later, the man recalled the room in which he sat alone. “It was quiet,” he said. “The late evening sun crept through the curtained windows.” For the first time in weeks he was at a piano, his fingers skimming the keys. It wasn’t long before he experienced what he called a personal revival: “I felt at peace,” he said. “I felt as though I could reach out and touch God. I found myself playing a melody, one I’d never heard or played before, and the words just came into my head.”
These are the words: “Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired. I am weak. I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light. Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.”
It was August of 1932 and 33 year old Thomas Dorsey, a prolific gospel hymn writer and choir director of Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, had recently come home from St. Louis where he had been the featured soloist at a large revival meeting.
Sitting in a quiet room at the piano, lightly fingering the keys, his mind raced back to all that had happened in just a few days. Back to how he had kissed his wife Nettie, who was pregnant with their first child, goodbye in their little apartment on the South Side; back to the urgent telegram he had received just after finishing his performance in St. Louis. “I ripped open the envelope,” he said, “and pasted on the yellow sheet were the words: ‘Your wife just died.’”
As anyone receiving news like that well knows, the whole evening took on an surreal quality for Dorsey. “People were happily singing and clapping around me,” he remembered, “but I could hardly keep from crying out.”
Immediately he headed for home, and when he got there he learned that Nettie had given birth to a boy. “I swung between grief and joy,” he said. Yet that night, the baby also died. Dorsey buried the two together in the same casket. After making it through the visitation and the funeral service, he withdrew into solitude and despair, cutting himself off from family, friends and even music. “I felt that God had done me an injustice,” he remembered. “I didn’t want to serve him anymore.”
It was then that a friend reached out to Dorsey and arranged for him to be left alone in a music room with a piano. And it was then, with the late evening sun creeping through the curtains, that “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” was composed, a song translated into 32 languages; called the greatest gospel hymn of all time. Dr. King’s favorite. “I am tired. I am weak. I am worn. Take my hand, precious Lord.”
Thomas Dorsey would say that his songs “lifted people out of the muck and mire…and gave them hope.” When do we need hope the most but at those times when we’re stuck in the muck, mired in the mire? When we’re weak; when we’re worn; we cry out, “Take my hand, Precious Lord. Let me stand.” At those times we cry out, often without words, to be touched.
“Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever…He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”
She is far from the only one lifted up by the Lord. Scripture is filled with instances of people restored to wholeness, usefulness and service through the power of touch. “One of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came,” Mark will tell us in just a few chapters. “And when he saw (Jesus), fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”
And, remember, on the way to the little girl’s side, in one of Mark’s so-called “sandwich” stories, a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind Jesus “and touched his cloak. For she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’” She did and she was.
Touched and being “made well,” released from physical, spiritual, emotional bondage; restored to a condition of wholeness, redeemed in relation to God, to self, to others. This is the precious gift of the Gospel; this is the story of salvation.
A story which is often told without any words at all. Jesus says nothing to Simon’s mother-in-law. He takes her by the hand, lifts her up, and the fever leaves her. He says nothing to the woman with the flow of blood, speaking to her only after she has touched him and been healed. And, when he works his way through the sobbing crowd at the side of Jairus’s daughter, the first thing he does is take her by the hand; then he speaks to her.
He knew what we’ve only recently discovered; that the experience of being touched has a profound and lasting effect on the health of the body, mind and spirit.
Back in the 1950s, a psychologist named Harry Harlow noticed that monkey infants, reared in individual cages for reasons of disease prevention, developed much more poorly than did their counterparts raised with their mothers.
Harlow noted that the mother – or a mother substitute - represented a “secure base” that the infants needed before they would begin to explore their environment and that monkeys that were denied maternal contact of any kind ceased to explore. In fact, further research revealed that even when the laboratory conditions enabled the infants to see, hear, and smell, but not touch their mothers, they still did not grow as the others’ did. Only the sense of touch established the necessary “secure base” for normal development.
What is most memorable from these ground breaking studies is Harlow’s discovery that infant rhesus monkeys preferred surrogate mother objects; they clung to wire frames covered with terry cloth and ignored the bare wire frames offering a bottle filled with milk. We need food to survive but we need touch to thrive.
Later studies with human infants only reinforced these findings. Twenty some years ago, the University of Miami Medical School found that premature babies who were massaged for 15 minutes three times a day gained weight 47 percent faster than others who were left alone in their incubators, the usual practice in the past. The massaged infants also showed signs that their nervous system matured more rapidly and they became more active and more responsive than the other babies. Eight months after their hospital discharge, the massaged babies did better than the untouched infants on tests of mental and motor ability, as well as holding on to their advantage in weight.
As one developmental psychologist put it: “Research is suggesting that touch has an importance over and above other expressions of affection.” Well, with all due respect to those in the lab, you hardly need to conduct a series of controlled experiments to realize that.
If your child is sick, do you tell him to feel better or do you pull him onto your lap, even if your lap may later suffer unpleasant consequences? And if your friend is filled with grief, do you tell her that everything will be all right, or do you surround her with a hug, even if your shirt will get a little soggy? And, when you’ve found that special someone, do you spend your time reciting romantic poetry, or do you extend your hand, however tentatively, hoping for an answering, responding touch? “If you’re in love, show me!” Liza Doolittle sings to her clueless, verbose boyfriend, Freddie in “My Fair Lady.” “Don’t wait until wrinkles and lines pop out all over my brow; show me now!”
Take my hand, we say to our beloved; show me I’m precious; tell me we belong together. Take my hand, our children say to us; show me I’m safe; tell me I’m loved. Take my hand, we say to our Lord, let me stand; raise me beyond survival to fullness of life. Raise me so I may return to your loving service.
How do we know that Simon’s mother-in-law is fully healed, that she is restored to wholeness? She is lifted up out of her bed – the same verb will be used later in Mark to describe Jesus’ resurrection – she is lifted up and begins to serve those around her. The word translated “serve” is the same as that used by Jesus when he says that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”
Jesus does not command her service, notice; she just offers it. She is touched by God – as she is – ill with fever, tired, weak and worn; she is healed; she is made whole – and she serves; not because she has to but because she wants to. Because she understands what life in the kingdom is all about, something Simon and the rest of the disciples won’t get until much later.
Life in the kingdom is about the precious hand of God reaching out to us as we are, in our struggles, in our incompleteness, in our sorrows. Life in the kingdom is about being lifted up, set back on our feet; on the path of health, on the way to wholeness. Life in the kingdom is about our readiness to then lean down and offer a healing touch to someone else stuck in the mire.
As in the healing of Simon’s mother in law, life in the kingdom is filled with moments of wonder.
In his book, “Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery,” retired Dr. Richard Selzer of Yale University Medical School describes standing by the side of a bed where a young woman lay, as he put it, “her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve to one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on…to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.
“Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously?” Dr. Selzer’s reverie is interrupted from the bed: “Will my mouth always be like this?” The young woman asks him.
“Yes,” he replies, “It will. The nerve was cut.”
She nods, and is silent. But the young man speaks.
“I like it,” he says. “It is kind of cute.” As Dr. Selzer described the scene, “Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I’m so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works…I hold my breath and let the wonder in.”
Yes, what wondrous love is this; love that can take the most unlikely shape; that can be seen in all sorts of lights in all sorts of places: in a music room, the evening sun creeping in through the curtained windows on a sorrowful man; in a nursery, the overhead fluorescents reflecting off the incubators in which the tiny infants are gently massaged. In a hospital room, the lamplight casting shadows on a wry mouthed young bride; in the living room of a tiny house, the desert sun shielded from the side of a feverish older woman, shown the way to service in the kingdom.
What wondrous, hopeful love this is; the touch of the precious Lord.