The story of the healing of the leper is a wonderful story of Jesus' power over the destructive forces in this world. It comes at the conclusion of the first chapter. The first chapter of Mark is there as an introduction to who Jesus is. The first chapter of Mark has four healing miracle stories in a row, back to back.

In fact, there are five in this series. The fifth one opens up the second chapter, the story of the healing of the paralytic, who is lowered down to Jesus through the roof of a house. Jesus heals him, and then declares that he was healed because of the faith of his friends. It is a remarkable story.

So it is obvious. Mark, especially Mark, wants us to know that Jesus has come in order to heal. And that is brought home to us in this first chapter, back to back stories of healing.

In this fourth story of healing, the leper says, "If you will, you can make me clean." That is there to testify his faith that Jesus has the power over the forces in this world that are destroying life. "If you will, you can. You have the power to heal, to make me clean."

In the first chapter there is a progression of seriousness in the cases that are brought to Jesus. It begins with an unclean spirit, evidently a piece of cake. Then Peter's mother-in-law, who is ill, she's got the flu or something. Then in the third incident, they bring a multitude of people who have ills, and he heals them, and he casts out demons.

Now the fourth one, the really serious problem. In fact, leprosy would be the hardest test for any healer to heal. For people in those days, it is the most terrible, the most fearsome, of all the diseases that plague humankind, for which in those days there was no cure. So can he do it? That's the suspense. He can do common miracles, whatever that is, but does he have the power over the most terrible, the most frightening disease of the ancient world, leprosy?

"If you will," the leper says, "you can do it." Jesus reaches out and touches him, and heals him. Then he tells the man, "Go show yourself to the priest," because that was the law. The priest was required to certify that indeed there had been a cure, so the banishment of this man would be lifted and he would be restored to the community.

That's the story. And I want us to use that ancient story to say something about healing in our time.

First of all, "If you will, you can make me clean." That has served as an answer to the question, "Why do some people get well, and others continue in sickness and die?" In the ancient world, and for many religious people today, that reason is easy to come by. God wills it. God wills that you get well, or God wills that you not get well. "If you will, you can do it." So if it doesn't happen, it must mean that God didn't will it. There are many in our day who still think that way. You could call this the "reasoning of the pious," or the "reasoning of the religious."

But there are those who have another theory. If you measure their numbers by the number of books sold that advocate this position, you would say that their numbers are great, and growing. These are the people who feel that in large part the healing is up to you. As if they had said, "If you will, you can do it yourself."

One of the better advocates of this position, Bernie Siegel, wrote that runaway best seller some years ago, Love, Medicine and Miracles. In that book he discovered the link between mind and body. He explores the possibility of living healthier lives by holding to healthier attitudes.

He also gives good advice, incidentally, which I will pass on to you. He suggests that you be proactive when it comes to your health. Work with your doctor. In fact, he suggests building a "healing partnership," a partnership between the doctor and the patient. He says that you should stick it to the doctors, ask them questions, and make sure that they give you good answers. He tells the doctors to look upon patients as something more than just a scientific problem that they have to solve, but to see that they are human beings, with anxieties and fears, and to treat them, therefore, as a whole human being.

He recommends other things, too. For instance, bring in non-scientific resources in order to help the process of healing, like music. He recommends there be music in the operating room and in the recovery room, with a warning to use discretion. If a patient should wake up in the recovery room and hear someone playing a harp, he may wonder what happened to him.

He also wrote that once he was removing a benign tumor from a patient. It was minor surgery with a local anaesthetic. Which meant the patient was conscious during the surgery. The tape music piped into the operating room was Frank Sinatra, singing, "All of me, why not take all of me," which caused some anxiety on the part of the patient.

I wanted to share those anecdotes, because they are worth sharing, but have nothing to do with the sermon. Siegel's point is that you have a part in your healing. He is cautious, however, in claiming too much for this. A proper mental attitude will affect the process of healing, but it will not completely control the healing. He warns us that someday all of us will get a disease from which we will not be cured. So far there are no exceptions to that.

But with that note of realism, he talks about what he calls "exceptional patients." Exceptional patients are those who discover within themselves the power of healing. Some would say that healing is from God, it comes from above. Others would say that healing is in nature, and comes from within. It doesn't matter how we perceive it. The point is, that healing is there. It's either from above, or it is from within us, but it is there. It is the power of creation and new life, and it is at war with the power of destruction and death in this world.

That is the way the Bible talks about these things. There is a war going on between the power of creation and life, and the power of destruction and death. But it is the same thing, I suggest, that science describes, especially physics, as "entropy," the power in nature that is tearing things down. Eventually, it says, all things will wear down. Eventually this planet will die. It is inevitable, it is inexorable, this power of death that is in the creation.

But there is also evidence that the opposite is true as well. That there is a power in creation that is building up, recreating, renewing, and making whole. The power of creation.

We can see that in our life. We take it for granted now, because it happens with regularity, so as to become predictable. We can say to somebody, "You are going to get over this. You are going to get well. Just go home, take an aspirin, go to bed, get some sleep, you're going to be all right." We can say that predictably. There is no reason in nature itself for that to happen. It just happens that some people are going to get well.

But sometimes healing comes unpredictably. As when in a person's life, all we see is disintegration, and then all of a sudden there is integration. All we see is degeneration, and then there is regeneration. And we didn't expect it, so we say it was a miracle. Why it happened, we don't know. All we know is that we did not make it happen. It was a mystery, a gift given to us, and it is called healing.

So there is a power in the world that breaks down, and there is a power that builds up. And Mark wants you to see that that power of healing was incarnated, focused, and made effective, in Jesus of Nazareth. And that power of breaking down the creation, the power of death, was incarnated in the demons. And in every encounter with them, Jesus defeats the demons. They recognize who he is, they recognize who it is that has sent him. They run away from him, terrified of him, because he has the power to heal. He is the embodiment of that power in nature that creates, that makes whole, that recreates, and even resurrects.

The ancient creeds said, "In him the Godhead dwelt fully." What they meant by that was that in Jesus, the power of God dwelt fully, and the power of God is the power to create and to make new. In the Gospel of John, in the first words of the gospel, it states, "In the beginning was the Word." The Word is the power of creation. "And the Word became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, and dwelt among us." So we can see in Jesus the power of creation. The strongest power in the world is the power to create. That is the power we saw in Jesus. And that is why the leper says, "If you will, you can make me clean."

Now look at another detail in this story. It says, "Jesus, moved with pity, stretched out his hand and touched him." This is no insignificant detail. This is perhaps the most shocking part of the story for the people who heard it in those days, because it says Jesus defied the law, in this case, the Holiness Law. You can still read it today in Leviticus. It said to touch somebody with leprosy is to be cursed. The leper was to be isolated. No one was to come near him, not even the priests.

The story read as the Old Testament lesson today is an interesting parallel story to the healing of the leper, because it involves a leper. Naaman, the commander of the army of Syria, has leprosy. He hears there is a prophet in Samaria named Elisha, who has the power of healing.

So Naaman comes to Samaria, kneels outside Elisha's tent, and asks Elisha to heal him. But Elisha, who will not touch Naaman, not only will he not touch Naaman, he won't even come out to be near him, sends his servant with the instruction to go jump in the River Jordan seven times and you will be healed. Elisha would not come near a leper. But "Jesus, moved with pity, stretched out his hand, and touched him."

I think of the image of Princess Diana, visiting children with AIDS in hospitals around the world. Nothing endeared her more to the whole world than, moved with compassion, reaching out to the forgotten and the suffering of the world. And not only did she touch them, she picked them up, and she held them in her arms. She was royalty, who came to embrace the suffering of the world.

We believe that that is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. He sent his Son into the world to save the world. To accomplish that mission, he was filled with the power of God. He and God were one. The source of Jesus' power is from that relationship with God. Some would say that Jesus was supernatural, he came from heaven with all this power, like superman. He came down here with power that is not available in this world. Then he went back up to heaven, and we are stuck here with the human condition.

But Mark doesn't tell the story that way. In fact, none of the gospels tell the story that way, but Mark especially emphasizes that Jesus was a human being, a human being in whom God dwelt fully. A human being, who like us, got tired, and hungry, and impatient, and even angry, wrestled with his calling, but was faithful to it to the end.

So the implication is that none of us is going to be Jesus, but we are all called to be like Jesus, in all respects. Not only to follow him into discipleship, keeping busy doing good, but to follow him also into solitude, and keep quiet, and listen, and pray. For he not only healed the sick with the power that builds up the creation, he received that power through his relationship with the Creator, through quiet and through prayer. So maybe the secret of healing is to be like him, at one with God, or as close to being one with God as we can come, and to work at it with spiritual discipline.

Byron Janis was a world-class pianist. For the last years of his career he was fighting arthritis. With the kind of cruel irony that life sometimes imposes upon us, the arthritis settled in his hands. For years he continued to play with arthritis, keeping his disease a secret. But after a while he couldn't hide it. During that period he practiced five or six hours a day to keep his hands limber. Finally they became so swollen and sore that he had to quit. He retreated into his apartment in New York, and retreated into depression. He thought that his life was over.

Probably out of that despair, he stopped taking his medicine. Then discovered that he was feeling more alert and sensitive to what was going on around him. He felt better. Then began a transformation in his life. First of all he came to terms with his condition. He said for the first time he could say, "OK, I've got arthritis. I can accept the physical deterioration, but life is more than this." Then he began to consider the things that he could do now with his life. He said, "I could paint, I could write, I could compose, I could conduct." He wrote, "I can't control the fact that I have arthritis, but I can control the way I cope with it."

He tried out everything to improve his condition: chiropractors, acupuncture, hypnosis, meditation, diet. The whole carnival of cures. He tried them all. Nothing worked. That is to say, he wasn't cured, though he got some better. "What helped me," he said, "is something that surprised me. I can't explain it. But I developed a personal relationship with God. I think prayer is important. I think the belief in God is healing."

This story in Mark is told to encourage you in that belief. "Lord if you will, you can make me clean."

Byron Janis, incidentally, did get better. In fact, he played a benefit concert at the White House for the Arthritis Foundation. At that concert he made the first public announcement that he had arthritis. He said, "I still have arthritis, but it doesn't have me."

Healing is a mystery. We don't understand it. All we can do is to prepare our bodies to receive it. That's what doctors do. They do it with surgery, with medicine, and therapy. They prepare our bodies to receive the gift of healing.

And that's all you can do too. You can prepare to receive the gift through faith, through prayer, and through openness to the power in creation that heals.