Here ends the Gospel reading.

I do not claim any great knowledge of medicine, but if you asked me to name the oldest diseases known to humanity, I would place bets that one of them, at least, is the "tree people" disease.

Although the name might suggest that this is a disease shared by people who live in trees or who have a special affinity for trees, such is actually not the case. No, this is a disease that can strike people of any age living absolutely anywhere. The parts of the body it usually affects first are not the limbs (as the name might suggest), but the eyes. For in this disease one person looks at another and sees that person not as a real-live flesh and blood human being, but as a tree. A living object, but one incapable of feeling or thinking, hurting or caring.

I say that it is a very old disease because, as I read the Bible, this disease first began to manifest itself as early as the Garden of Eden. You may recall the story. God had created the first man and the first woman, and had placed them in that garden to care for the earth, to live in community as helpers, partners for one another. Things had been going along quite well until, that is, they both ate fruit from the one tree in the garden God had forbidden them to eat. Then everything changed.

When God came looking for them in the cool of the evening, instead of rushing out to meet their Creator, they hid, suddenly ashamed in their nakedness. When God confronted the man saying, "Have you eaten from that one tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" the man looked at the woman who, until now, had been his helper, his partner, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and he said, "This woman, this woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." He looked at her, and he saw a tree. In that moment the signs of this disease first began to manifest themselves.

Now it would have been good, of course, if the disease had stopped with the man and the woman—but the Bible tells us it didn't. It spread and multiplied like an epidemic, not only affecting their immediate descendants, but also everybody who came after them.

In the 8^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus encounters a man who is suffering from the tree people disease. Actually, when this man first approaches Jesus he is totally blind and he cannot see anything. But Jesus lays his hand upon him and anoints his eyes with spittle, and the man for the first time in his life opens his eyes and he’s able to see. He has received the gracious touch of a gracious Lord!

But despite having received that touch, his vision is still not clear. For when Jesus asks him, "What do you see?" He replies, "I can see people, but they look like trees walking about." He is on his way to wholeness, on his way to healing, but the work of God in him is still not complete.

If truth be told, there are many of us who, like this blind man, have been touched by God, but still struggle with this disease in our own lives. Certainly we know it in our relationships with those closest to us, our family, our friends. Not long ago I attended a program at a high school in my community, in which teenagers and parents (although not those related to each other) were divided into small groups, sent to classrooms, and asked to take turns honestly answering aloud questions drawn out of a hat. I must confess that I rode away from that evening deeply troubled by the ways in which youth and parents alike see one another as trees.

"My dad," said one girl, "simply has no feelings. He wouldn't know an emotion if it hit him over the head." "My daughter," said another, "is one of the most narcissistic people I know. Frankly, if I fell down the steps and died, I don't think she would lift a finger to help." What was painfully obvious to me was that both parents and youth longed for a relationship that was more meaningful, more genuine, more compassionate than either was receiving. Yet somehow they seemed incapable of offering it—even to those they loved the most.

The disease, of course, is also a common one among spouses and partners. Two people start out life madly in love with each other, seeing only the best in the other, thankful that God has given them the gift of life with another created in God's image. But over time and through many differences and difficulties, their vision begins to change, so that increasingly they find it difficult to see the good in the other, though the bad is readily apparent. More and more, as they look at each other, what they mostly see are trees.

But of course, our personal relationships are not the only ones affected by this disease. Our societal perspectives are, too. Story after story in the daily news give witness to the rampant nature of this disease in our own land. Stories about racial profiling and the rising popularity of hate groups among the young; stories about gay and lesbian persons who have been dragged about on the back of cars or beaten or worse because of our inability to see them as beloved children of God; stories about women whose bruised and battered limbs testify to their tree-like treatment at home; stories that question whether we are really willing to see the poor in this time of great economic growth and prosperity, or will continue to treat them as if they are blighted trees on an otherwise lovely landscape.

Tex Sample is a seminary professor who has long urged mainline churches to acknowledge that we have not always been as welcoming as we might be of what Sample calls "hard living people"—people who have abused alcohol or other drugs, who have uneven employment records, or who have a history of violence in their lives.

In the introduction to one of his books, Sample tells about an encounter he had that awakened him anew to the reality of this disease in his own soul. Sample was in Indianapolis, where he and an African-American pastor friend named Mac Jones had just finished speaking at a conference at a local park. They needed to catch a plane back to Kansas City in 45 minutes, they were at least a 30-minute drive from the airport, and were briskly heading toward a waiting taxi when a street person interrupted their progress. Sample writes:

"He was tousled, bleary-eyed, and seemed to be in the sobering up stage of a stiff drunk. Wearing the baggy slacks and plaid shirt of a thrift store—all in wrinkled disarray—he also had on a dark gray, well-traveled overcoat that appeared to be stained with drink, vestiges of food, and some evidence of recent nausea. I didn’t want to deal with him, Sample confesses, so I simply slowed a half step and let Mac move directly into the man’s path.

Brother, said Mac, Have you eaten lately?

No, Reverend, I haven't and if you could just spare a little change. It would....

No, Brother, interrupted Mac, you need to eat something. You need some food, You come on and get in our cab, and we'll take you down the street to a place where we can get you something to eat."

"The three of us," Sample writes, "loaded into the cab, stopped at a fast food place, where Mac and I bought him a five dollar meal, and we left him there to reach our plane successfully. I have thought about this story many times since it happened," he adds, "because I remember how differently Mac treated the man I wanted to avoid. You see, to me he was a wino; to Mac he was a brother."

It’s all too easy for us—even those of us who have known Jesus’ first touch—to see those we encounter on our daily walk not as brothers and sisters, but as trees. Yet our Gospel story tells us that Jesus wants better for us and from us. Even more importantly, it tells us that Jesus can heal us.

If we, like this blind man, will admit that our vision is distorted; if we will confess our own inability to heal ourselves, and seek Jesus’ healing, then our gracious Lord is more than willing to reach out and touch us another time, as he did that half-sighted man at Bethsaida, and to give to us that clarity of vision that only comes through him.

Several summers ago I spent a week in California, teaching a seminar for pastors. One of the participants was an African-American woman named Yvette Flunder, pastor of City of Refuge church in San Francisco. City of Refuge, as the name implies, is a congregation that provides a safe haven for many of those "hard living" folk Sample describes: people who have serious problems with alcohol or drug abuse, people who have AIDS, people who are homeless, people who have difficulty finding a welcoming church environment because of their sexual orientation.

At the end of our week together, Yvette took me and several other seminar participants on a tour of San Francisco in her car. Yvette’s tour, however, did not begin at Fisherman's Wharf, or frankly, at any of the usual tourist spots. It began a few blocks from Union Square in the center of the city where Yvette showed us the large former union hall and warehouse her church had purchased as a place of worship and a center for its many social service agencies. The tour then proceeded through Tenderloin, one of the poorest areas of the city, where Yvette spotted one of her church members, and told us about his story. When we drove through the Golden Gate Park, Yvette made sure we not only saw the beautiful gardens there, but also that part of the park where runaway and homeless teenagers from all over the nation gather to live because of San Francisco's year-round temperate climate.

At midpoint in our tour, Yvette took us way up Twin Peaks, one of the highest points in San Francisco, where you can look out and see the entire city in one sweeping panorama. It was there that Yvette stretched out her large brown arms and said with obvious pride: "This is my city, folks. And I love it." And there was not a question in our minds but that she did. Yvette loves all of that city.

Now, I have to tell you, I had been to San Francisco before. I had taken the typical tourist's tour of the city and I thought I had seen that city, but after Yvette's tour, I knew how partial my vision had been. Through her loving eyes, the scales began to fall from my eyes and I began, for the first time, to really see.

What Jesus wants to do is to help us see the world and all of its people through his loving eyes. Long ago, on a hill outside Jerusalem, he stretched out his arms on a cross of wood—a tree—and he said, "This is my world, friends, and I love it." He calls us to love it every bit as much as he does. We cannot do it on our own. The disease is too old, too deep rooted, too much a part of us. But the good news of the Gospel is this: that which we cannot heal, Jesus can. That which we cannot cure, Jesus can, and through his second touch, the scales can begin to fall from our eyes, so that those objects we once thought were trees walking about, come into focus as beloved children of a gracious God.

Leonora Tubbs Tisdale: I’ve long been drawn to that biblical story because I think it rings true to our lives that for most of us, one touch isn't enough. You know, we need that touch of Jesus again and again. So it sort of leapt out at me, to tell you the truth.

Talbot: What do you think the essential difference is between cold and compassionate hearts?

Tisdale: Well, I think part of it is God's work in us and our openness to God to change our vision. We can get very set in how we see and not want change, but I think God offers it to us if we will seek it.

Talbot: So a receptivity there. You know, you offer a solution in your message. That which we as human beings cannot completely heal or cure, Jesus can. When did that moment occur to you?

Tisdale: Oh, I think it often comes to me through prayer. If we really pray for our enemies as Jesus taught us to pray, if we really pray for the world as Jesus taught us to pray, then I think our vision becomes clearer.

Talbot: Through prayer. Now there’s got to be something about North Carolina, your homeland, and your family and growing up. What do you think those seeds of compassion were for you?

Tisdale: Oh, I think it was being reared in a family of compassion, in a church that taught me compassion and that opened me to the world. I am deeply grateful for my heritage in faith and in family in that regard.

Talbot: Opened you to the world. Your daughter, Leonora, who is now a freshman at Gilford College.

Tisdale: A sophomore, actually.

Talbot: She has that vision, doesn't she? Service to others?

Tisdale: Yes. I hope both of our children do. And I certainly see that in her commitment to peace and justice issues and to her desire to serve in the world, and to my son’s openness to the world around him and willingness not to buy into other stereotypes but to see the world on its own terms out of a faith perspective.

Talbot: Not to buy into other stereotypes. What do you mean?

Tisdale: Oh, I think constantly we are pressured, and I think our teenagers are especially pressured, to see people through other lenses and to discount them through other lenses or to diminish them through other lenses. And frankly I think it takes courage, a courage of faith, courage of conviction to refuse to buy into that.