Let’s just start with the part we’re not going to like about today’s Jesus story.

On second thought…maybe we’ll start by checking in with ourselves first.

Here we are.  We’ve come to church to encounter the holiness of God.  We love the place we’re in…the spaciousness of the sanctuary, the clean lines of design that give it an open feeling; the beautiful colors of the windows that scatter and change the morning sunlight moment by moment; we love the altar table and the cross just where it is and the arrangement of the chancel furnishings.  We love that this space is ordered and predictable and lovely.

This is where, for the most part, we have the most reasonable expectation of encountering the holiness of God during any given week.  We come here for quiet; for respite from the demands of the world; to hear good news instead of all the other things that pass for news these days.  We want to see our friends, say our prayers and be out in time for brunch/lunch.

We come here to be taken away from the miseries of the world.  To be comforted, encouraged, to find stillness, and order in the chaos.  We do not come to church to encounter misery, but to forget all about misery.

And just when we could have left behind the messiness of the world, closed those doors at the back of the sanctuary, and let the psalm take us to that place where joy comes with the morning – all clean and pure and bright and hopeful, we get to the gospel.

Those Jesus stories just never keep us where we want to stay.  And now this one has taken us outside the sacred space of church, and outside the comfort and security of city and town, into a leper colony.  The people who live here are as good as dead.  They are dead to their families…the children have been told that they have gone away, and won’t be coming back.  I suppose the local rabbis have removed them from the rolls to reduce their apportionments, and the medical establishment can do nothing more than isolate them to prevent the contagion of their disease from spreading.  People are afraid of them, and are taught not to touch them, not to go near them.  It’s not hard to avoid them.  They are so far outside the normal boundaries of social life that no one goes near them unless they mean to.  They are, literally, the walking dead.

And that’s where Jesus is – before we’re even into chapter 2 of Mark’s gospel, Jesus is with the lepers.  Apparently on purpose.  And worse yet, one of these walking dead ones has forgotten his place.  He has forgotten the rules of his social contract with the community.

He has walked right up to Jesus and said, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”  Now the right thing to do here, as almost everybody invested in the systems and structures of Jesus’  day would admit, is to send the leper away and remind him of his place and get away from there as quickly as possible to a more respectable, safer place.

Mark really started this gospel out respectfully enough.  He began by saying that he was going to tell us about Jesus, the Messiah, the son of God.  Surely he’s going to give us Jesus on a throne, exalted and dressed up in fancy robes and crowned with glory and shined up and ready for our adoration and worship.  We are going to get Jesus in the middle of heaven, at the center of ordered, beautiful religious practice and ritual.

And those who have been cast out to the margins by the religious rules of the day are where they belong.  This is God’s will.  It’s what the scriptures say is right for them.  It’s for the good of the community that it be this way.  It preserves the purity and historical integrity of the faith to keep these Levitical laws just the way they’ve always been.

Jesus just won’t do what we would have him do.  He insists on showing us not our image of the Kingdom of God … but the real presence of the Kingdom of God.

Mark is showing us what we are meant to see.  As preacher Fred Craddock puts it, "All the way to the cross Jesus will be trying to get those who think 'where the messiah is, there is no misery' to accept a new perspective – 'where there is misery, there is the messiah'."

If we notice how Jesus responds to this misery, then we begin to have a clue about two basic questions of our Christian faith:  “What we can we expect from Jesus?” and “What does Jesus expect from us?”

In this miserable place, with the might as well be dead ones, Jesus is moved.  Some texts say he was moved by pity – but many scholars agree that the word really should be “anger.”  Jesus was angry – indignant – upset with the miserable situation.  He responds to the indignity of the situation with empathy, with presence, and without fear.  He touches the untouchable one.

And when the leper is restored by Jesus presence, by his touch, Jesus sends him back to the community that has ostracized him.  But notice that Jesus then becomes the outcast.  He is left outside, in the wilderness.

The truth is, we can easily find ourselves on the margins, too.  There are circumstances of misery that can easily, and for reasons beyond our control, leave us with problems that most folks just don’t want to deal with.  And a lot of folks stop coming to church when they encounter problems, because they get the sense that church folk just don’t want to deal with them.

But Jesus is not afraid of our problems.  We do not have to – nor should we – check our problems at the door of the church.

Job loss, foreclosure, substance abuse, divorce, financial reversals, a terrible grief, depression, anxiety – any of these situations can make us feel unfit to be in church.

Which brings us to what Jesus expects from us.  Jesus expects us to live this story.  He expects that when misery comes into our lives, we will have the courage to challenge the community:  “if you choose, you can restore me to community life.”  And he expects the community to take up the challenge.

Whenever we read these so called miracle stories, we have a tendency to dismiss them as irrelevant to modern life.  The holiness of God is too distant to reach us…and we are stuck in habits and practices that play at being church and have no real power – or at least that is our fear, and the charge leveled against the church by some.  But I have seen something else.

Willa Cather has written that “The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

Yesterday, just yesterday, my perception was made finer and I saw in the midst of that which is with us always the real power of healing that occurs in the practices of the church.  Specifically, we have been struck in this congregation recently with too much loss and grief.  We have had many funerals.  I think perhaps six church funerals since the beginning of January.

We have celebrated the lives of saints of the church about whom we could easily say they had completed their course in faith.  We have celebrated others whose lives were cut too short by disease and illness.  We have embraced grief upon grief as we encountered losses that were just too much to even comprehend.

And we have done it while we were living with our own questions.  Why?  What purpose?  How?  How do people go on?

There are at least two ways of seeing what we have done.  One is to look at it as the work we do the prepare and host funerals in this place.  The other is to be given the grace to see that there is healing power in that work.  There are countless details.  The staff, especially the custodians, work hard ahead of time and behind the scenes.  But then the community gathers.  Church people come, taking time away from your own lives, you come to speak words of comfort to the bereaved families.  You comment upon and genuinely enjoy the photos.  You offer your voices and presence in the sanctuary as we share in the prayers of comfort and commendation and hope that are part of the funeral liturgy.

And some of you are in the kitchen.  Because part of what restores us to life and community is shared table fellowship.  There is nothing particularly unusual about anything we do.  But it is a miracle every time.  People often comment about what I do at funerals.  But I have been watching what we all do – what the gathered community does together.

We touch people at the intersection of death and life – and we love people back into life.  We do it by showing up; by baking cookies; by making punch; by arranging flowers; by using tablecloths; by setting up tables; by making coffee.

Here’s what I see when I look at what we’ve done here over recent weeks.  I see that we have made it true:  Where the misery is, there is the Messiah.  I admit to a certain weariness myself in dealing with all of this.  But watching this community work together begins to heal me, too.

The ministry of the church at the time of death is something to behold.  But that’s not the only place this church works at the margins of life to heal and restore.  We have a Job Seekers group, a divorced and separated group, a grief recovery group, fellowship opportunities for older adults living alone, youth group, young adult groups, a reconciling ministries group.  We are not, no matter what it may look like, just playing church.  By embracing one another in the broken places, we are being healed.

This is church.  Each of us with our miseries…gathered in the presence of the Holy and in the midst of a community that is willing to touch us.  Look what Jesus had done now – here.  With us.
Wow.