Mugged by a Hug - Advent, Day 10

December 12, 2006 by djackson.

Advent Readings:  Isaiah 5.13-25, 1 Thessalonians 5.12-18, Luke 21.29-38

La Vega School District in the Waco area has suspended a kid because he groped his teacher.  The student was four years old.  The offense was a hug.  The official indictment read, “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment”.

This paranoia has poisoned our churches as well.  I remember a pastor who boasted to me that at his church no one ever touched anyone.  Sounds like a friendly place.

In four separate letters to local churches Paul commands the use of the “holy kiss.”  Of course, that kind of thing risks abuse, all the way from sexual harassment to simple halitosis.  Still, it seems that for early believers a modicum of physical contact appropriately expressed Christian community.  Security at the price of sterility lost out to love at the risk of lechery.

I find it fitting that one of Paul’s spiritual-smooch commands appears in the readings for Advent.  After all, the Incarnation is all about our Lord’s willingness to shoot the class-five rapids of real humanity.  A body that can touch can cleanse lepers and raise the dead.  It can also feel the scalding slobber of Judas’ kiss and sweat blood in a lonely garden.  The door of incarnation admits the full range of human experience, and the risen Christ yet bears the scars of Calvary.  I’m not much of a hugger myself, but even I can understand that some illusive avatar is insufficient for the needs of sinful flesh. 

So touch someone today, though preferrably not a kindergarten teacher in La Vega.  Jesus comes in the ambivalent mode of human skin and seeks our touch in the least of these our brethren.

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