Kilmorack and Erchless Church

Sunday 11th February

 

Prayer

We bring you our worship, eternal One, because we do recognise something of the beauty of your holiness, even amongst all our confusion and imperfection.  We bow down before you because we do glimpse something of your glory, even in our very ordinary lives.  We lay our burdens at your feet, because we have heard of your great love, which will cleanse us of all our fear and guilt.

We do not come claiming that we have deserved your mercy, but because we have discovered that we need it, and that life becomes much better we accept your grace and trust in your ways.  So we are bold to confess our sins to you: those words and thoughts and actions that have not been worthy of those who seek to be followers of Christ, and we are confident in your forgiveness, which can renew us and set us free.

Bless us now, we humbly pray, as we bring our worship and celebrate your love.

Bless us now, and inspire us, as we listen for your word to our lives.

Bless us now, and equip us, to live as your people, redeemed and renewed.  Amen.

Introductory Story

A drunk man was stumbling through the woods, and he happened to come upon an outdoor church Service, where a preacher was baptising people in the river.   As he staggers along the preacher notices him, and sees what a terrible condition he is in.  So he walks up to the man and says, “I can see that you are in a bad way my friend, so let me ask you this – are you ready to find Jesus?”  The drunk looks at him and says, "Yes, I am."

The preacher is thrilled so he grabs the drunk man, takes him down to the river and with a loud prayer, dunks him in the water.  Then he asks, "well brother, have you found Jesus?"   The drunk replies, "No, I haven't found Jesus."   The preacher is a bit shocked, so he decides he’d better try again.  He dunks him in once more, a little longer this time.   Pulling him out of the water again, he asks, "now, have you found Jesus, my brother?"  The drunk again answers, "No, I haven't found Jesus."

By this time the preacher is at his wits end, so he dunks him again - this time holding him down until he begins kicking his arms and legs. Then he pulls him up.  The preacher again asks, "For the love of God, have you found Jesus?"  After first wiping his eyes and catching his breath, the drunk says to the preacher “no. I haven’t”, before asking him, “are you sure this is where he fell in?"

Finding Jesus, it’s what we are all about.  We remember him and we proclaim him and we honour him every week, in the hope that we can find him and discover more of him and become more like him. 

But where to look, that is the question.  And it is a good question, because when we read the gospels, we find that he was rarely where we might expect a good man and a religious teacher to be, certainly not where we might assume the Son of God would turn up.  Almost invariably he is found in the kinds of places and with the kinds of people and doing the kinds of things which surprised and even shocked people.  Our gospel story today is certainly going to bring us an example of that.  So if we hope to find Jesus, we start with the bible, and we take our directions from there, and we are ready, always ready to be surprised at where we might be led.  Are we ready to find Jesus?  No need to go looking in the water, but every reason to turn to the bible.

Bible Readings

Some of the passages we have been reading in recent weeks from 1 Corinthians have been a bit complicated and I’ve taken time to explain the background to help us to make sense of them.  The words which we come to this week however are simple and timeless.  If we are serious about what we believe, then we ought to take it seriously, and if we are prepared to put in a lot of effort on other things, we should certainly be ready to put in a lot of effort to get this right.

1 Corinthians 9: 24 - 27

24 Surely you know that many runners take part in a race, but only one of them wins the prize. Run, then, in such a way as to win the prize. 25 Every athlete in training submits to strict discipline, in order to be crowned with a wreath that will not last; but we do it for one that will last forever. 26 That is why I run straight for the finish line; that is why I am like a boxer who does not waste his punches. 27 I harden my body with blows and bring it under complete control, to keep myself from being disqualified after having called others to the contest.

From Mark’s gospel we continue a series of very short stories from the start of Jesus ministry, as people gradually discover who Jesus is and what he has come to do.  At Capernaum Jesus has surprised those worshipping in the synagogue by healing a mentally disturbed man by his command alone.  He has also cured Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever.  He has now moved on to other towns.

 

Mark 1: 40 - 45

A man suffering from a dreaded skin disease came to Jesus, knelt down, and begged him for help. “If you want to,” he said, “you can make me clean.” Jesus was filled with pity, and reached out and touched him. “I do want to,” he answered. “Be clean!” At once the disease left the man, and he was clean. Then Jesus spoke sternly to him and sent him away at once, after saying to him, “Listen, don't tell anyone about this. But go straight to the priest and let him examine you; then in order to prove to everyone that you are cured, offer the sacrifice that Moses ordered.”  But the man went away and began to spread the news everywhere. Indeed, he talked so much that Jesus could not go into a town publicly. Instead, he stayed out in lonely places, and people came to him from everywhere.

Sermon

A man suffering from a dreaded skin disease came to Jesus…  The dreaded skin disease is translated in older versions of the bible simply as ‘leprosy’, though we now know that it might not always have been what we now define as leprosy, a chronic infectious disease caused by a type of bacteria, Mycobacterium leprae.  I’ve said before that I know far more than I need to about this because one of the elders in my previous congregation left to go and work at the ‘Lalgadh Leprosy hospital’ in Nepal, and I was privileged to be at many talks Graeme gave explaining the disease, its causes, and its effects.  Suffice to say that it spreads most easily in poor living conditions, is highly infectious, and even today is cause of deep shame and often leads to terrible isolation for the sufferer.

We can only imagine that in New Testament times the fears and the isolation would have been even worse.  No one wanted a person showing signs of leprosy anywhere near them or their community.  So we read of a man with leprosy who leaves his lonely place and boldly approaches Jesus, and try as we might, it is hard to imagine how miserable his life must have been, or indeed how damaged he might have been mentally, never mind physically, by all that he had been through.   We have no idea what the man knew about Jesus which led to this approach, or how many others he might have approached before, only to be shouted at and rejected once again.  He had no right to imagine that Jesus owed him anything, or that he would put himself at risk by coming close to him, but for some reason, we might call it desperation, he makes his pitiful request.

He approaches Jesus and he says – “if you want to, you can make me clean”.  He didn’t question the idea that Jesus could make him clean, but he clearly questions the idea that Jesus might want to do this for him.   The response may not surprise us but would have shocked those who were just starting to understand how radically different he was, “ Jesus was filled with pity, and reached out and touched him. “I do want to,” he answered. “Be clean!”  We are specifically told that he reached out and touched him, the very contact people would have dreaded and been appalled by, the very contact which the man must have so badly longed for, and so badly needed.

 

I said last week that we are in the season of epiphany, which is all about how people came to discover who Jesus was and what his mission was.  It was hard for people to discover that because what was being revealed was so different from anything they had expected, and the stories we read in this season always have an element of shock to them.  This one certainly does.  And the season of epiphany is all about taking us back to that place where we discover again who Jesus was and what his mission was, and perhaps along the way gain some new insight which we had never picked up before.  In a way that can be even harder for us, not because what we read is so shockingly new, but because it all seems so familiar. The outcome here might have shocked its original hearers, but there is no shock for us. This is exactly what we have come to expect from Jesus.

So to get the power of this story and the challenge of this story, we might wonder what it would look like in our time, with our social issues and taboos.  We might wonder what it would look like for us to do what he did.  We might wonder who are the people in our time who are most despised, who are the people in our time who are most feared, who are the people around us we might instinctively want to avoid, and what does it mean for us to be the body of Christ for them?

Those are big questions of course, but it is in attempting to answer them that we start to move towards some of the conclusions which we might still find shocking and difficult and challenging.  It is in attempting to answer them that we start to make fresh discoveries about who Jesus was and what his mission was.  It is in attempting to answer them that we get new ideas about what it means for us to be his followers.

In this little story we get a brief and simple illustration of the whole mission that Jesus was setting out on.  He did not become contaminated by the contact with the diseased man, rather the diseased man became clean by his contact with the holy man.  Instead of both being diseased, both were now well!   

This is different from the normal way of things, different from what we expect, from what we fear.  When a healthy person touches a diseased person, the healthy one would normally catch the disease rather than the sick person catching a dose of good health.  If Covid has taught us anything it has surely taught us that!  Yet faith in Jesus Christ turns our expectations on their heads.

Throughout his life, and perhaps most clearly at his death, Jesus comes into contact with those who had been infected with fear and violence and rage and guilt, and rather than making him frightened and angry, those others were instead touched and changed by forgiveness.  This love, this love which we call the love of God, this powerful love which shines out from the person of Jesus, is strong enough to withstand contamination from every kind of hatred, and is strong enough to transform every kind of evil.  Because of this love, and his complete faith in it, he was able to touch lepers and to drink with tax collectors and to eat with prostitutes, and always to bring healing and help.  And when we know this love in our lives, when we have complete faith in it, there is no one we need fear and no one we cannot help.

We are all diseased in some way, none of us perfect.  Things have happened to us all on the way through life that has meant that we get more defensive, we find it harder to trust, we get anxious about losing what we have, we fear what more blows the future may bring.  Perhaps, like the leper, we too sense that if the answer is to be found anywhere then it is to be found in Jesus, and perhaps there are moments we too are moved to call out, in one way or another, for him to help us.

The whole story of the gospel is that in Jesus, God has taken the risk of coming into contact with people like us, people who are hurt and damaged and who are therefore likely to cause hurt and damage.  And the outcome is not that he is polluted by us, but that we are made clean by him.  God does not hide himself from us, but comes to us with a desire to cleanse and to heal and to make us new.  It is the story that we celebrate, because it tells us that we can always call out to him, and that he will never let us down.  Then it becomes the story that we live, as we reach out and touch those we might otherwise chose to avoid, and bring this powerful love to bear on their lives.

The man who had been healed, we are told, “went away and began to spread the news everywhere”.  Good news too can be infectious, and it can spread.  May we be ready and willing to infect others with such good news.

Prayers

Praise and thanksgiving we offer to you, the eternal creator of all that is, for you forgive our sins and you heal all that goes wrong in our lives.  You are our redeemer, saving us from the destruction that we would create, healing the divisions that threaten us.

So we pray for your church: which is often broken by divisions and separated into factions.  We pray that we may yet learn to overcome the suspicions that our history has created, and discover new unity, new trust in one another, as we learn to trust you more.

We pray for the troubled areas, where misunderstanding and fear lead to hatred and war.

We pray for societies broken by violence, nations torn apart by war and greed, that we may rediscover our humility, and learn to live peacefully together.

We give thanks for the wholeness that you offer through a loving family life, where love and acceptance heal many hurts.  And we pray for families where love is difficult, and relationships are pressured, and for all who are separated from loved ones.

We pray for all who are treated badly because of their illness or their race.

We remember all who are disfigured or disabled.

We pray for lepers, for those living with Aids, for the mentally ill.

 

May your healing be found in many unexpected places, and may we be part of your healing work.

We give thanks for your saving love, and for all who have been healed and restored in your kingdom, all who now rejoice in the fullness of life.  May we, in time, come to share with them in health and wholeness.

Almighty and ever-living God, your son Jesus Christ healed the sick and restored them to wholeness of life.  Look with compassion on the anguish of the world, and by your power make whole all peoples and nations; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever, Amen.