Kristin and I spent our Christmas ‘vacation’ weathering a stomach virus with Kristin’s family in St. Paul. We went to St. Paul under the assumption that the virus Kristin’s sister had the week before had passed out of the house; we couldn’t have been more wrong. Once Kristin got sick, we all knew that our time was coming, and it was a pretty miserable three days for all of us.
By the time our third day of watching each other get sick rolled around, I began to notice a really curious thing. Our entire family – Kris and me, Kris’s sister and her husband, and my in-laws – moved gingerly around the house, keeping our distance from each other and generally avoiding any contact whatsoever. On Friday morning Kristin and I realized we hadn’t kissed each other since she’d gotten sick on Tuesday. Even after the virus had come and gone, we were still dancing around as if everybody in the house was infectious and the virus was still with us.
It’s hard to feel safe in a house of sick people. I felt most sorry for my father-in-law – he was the last of us to get sick, and he had to wait three days for the virus to hit. It’s not a comfortable thing to be in a house filled with guests who might possibly give you a stomach bug along with your dinner, and even though we laugh about it now, it’s not the kind of experience that engenders a lot of trust between housemates.
Of course this gave me an opportunity to think about life in the house of faith that is the body of Christ. We live together in tightly-knit communities of faith – and sin is an infection that we simply cannot avoid in our life together. Unlike illness, which for most of us is an occasional occurrence, the effects of sin are constant and ever-present in us.
Knowing this, don’t we often do as much as we can to protect ourselves? We keep our distance, avoid spending time with the ‘wrong’ people, and focus all of our energy on our own well-being. All to no avail, because within humanity there is nothing that can protect us from sin and its symptoms. We may take preventative measures to keep ourselves from feeling all of the consequences of our sins – but doing so leaves our communities sterile, distant and antiseptic, cold and as lifeless as a morgue.
In the first few chapters of Mark’s gospel, Jesus moves through the countryside, healing the sick and casting out demons. He seems unconcerned by the fact that the people He’s healing are ‘unclean,’ – He’s more concerned with healing those who need healing, regardless of the danger to Himself or the scandal He causes. Jesus wades knee-deep into the miasma of those sin-infested lives and gets right to work. There is no quarantine for the Christ – He refuses to hold Himself back from those who need His touch, and in healing these sick, He teaches us something about our own sickness: we are not so infected with sin that He cannot bear our company or share our burdens.
I still get nervous when I’m around the sick, and I doubt that we’ll ever forget our miserable Christmas holiday. But I’m profoundly grateful that Christ can handle what I cannot. I’m forever in awe of my Savior, who was willing to take my sin-sick soul as His own even though it cost him His own life. I pray my sin is not contagious, that the things I do and leave undone do not affect the lives of those around me, but I trust even more deeply in the healing power of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. May your sin be healed in His touch as well.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Scott
No comments:
Post a Comment