The Touch of God: A Sermon

In my October 11 sermon for Restoration Anglican Church from Matthew 8:1-4, on the healing of the leper, titled "The Touch of God," I talked about Vinicio Riva, the prophet Isaiah's New Creation vision, the Purity Laws of Israel, and Moana.

I also talked about "touch deficiency syndrome" on account of COVID19, Lore Wilbert's book Handle With Care, and the ways in which Jesus touches our broken bodies—broken by illness, broken by shame, broken by age and violence and burnout—and heals them, thereby enabling us to feel at home again—with ourselves, with others, with God.

What do we do with the fact that our physical contact may become, these days, vehicles for sickness, not healing; for estrangement from friends, not for closeness; for death, not life? Is there anything we can do to reflect the healing touch of God that we see at work in Jesus?

I believe there is, and I suggest three practical things in my sermon that we might do to embody the healing touch of God.

Here is how I describe what I think is going on in Jesus’ healing of the leper:

“Jesus reaches out his hand and touches him. And in touching him, Jesus makes himself ritually unclean. He chooses to banish himself, as it were, from the temple. He knows this. Everybody watching knows this. Nobody can now touch Jesus either.

Yet Jesus willingly chooses to become an outsider in sympathy with all the outsiders of Matthew 8 and 9 like the centurion solider, the hemorrhaging woman, the dead girl and the demon-possessed.

But what the crowds don’t yet know is that Jesus himself is the true temple. The presence of God in Christ has become ambulatory again.

This one-man tabernacle travels from town to town, making himself approachable, rather than inaccessible, touchable, not untouchable. He’s a temple made of flesh, not of stone—of flesh that could be wounded, but flesh also that could heal our wounds.”

You can watch the sermon here: