Good morning! In the last three days, I’ve been across the country and back, visiting our son Jesse in North Carolina for a couple of nights. I thought I was something of a fanatical college basketball fan, but I have to tell you those people around Chapel Hill…are obsessed! The entire county glows with the light blue of the Tar Heels!

We’re toward the front end of a series from the gospel of Mark called “Following Jesus.” As I have spent time in Mark this week, I realized that I really love what we’re doing.

We’re sitting with this text, as far as we know the earliest of the gospels and as far as we can tell, influenced by some of the people who were the very closest to Jesus. And we get to simply read and reflect and ask God to show us more about how to follow Jesus in our lives, by following Him in this text. Remember that in the early part of this gospel, we’re learning more about Jesus by who he is and by what he does…than by what he says. After we read, I’m just going to make four observations on following Jesus.

Read Mark 1:35-45

In Psalm 5 it says

“In the MORNING, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the MORNING I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.”

In Psalm 88 the Psalmist writes

“But I cry to you for help, O Lord; in the MORNING my prayer comes before you.”

 I always wanted to be a person who just automatically “binged” awake in the early morning. Some of you are that kind of person. I always wanted to just pop awake about 4:30 or 5:00 AM, jump out of bed and have a leisurely time of solitude and prayer with God long before the world woke up. Fat chance. If the alarm clock hadn’t been invented, I’d be asleep right now! But apparently Jesus was different than me.

“In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place and there he prayed.” Or a bit more literally, “While it was so exceedingly early it was still night time…,” he went to a quiet place and prayed.

Three times, and only three times in the gospel of Mark, Jesus prays. Always and only at crucial times.

The First is here, as Jesus begins his ministry and starts to draw attention. He prays.

The Second is in the middle of his ministry (chpt 6) just after his huge miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 (the only miracle mentioned in all four of the gospels), Jesus withdraws to pray.

And the Third near the very end, chapter 14, Jesus goes off alone in Gethsemane to pray. Always dark. Always to a quiet place. Always alone.

Every time, as Jesus’ life and ministry begin to unfold in critical ways, he prays, he seeks connection with his heavenly Father before anything else. He starts with God.

It’s a great reminder. Start with God. When I was starting down the trail that lead out of business and towards ordination (in the Presbyterian Church), at an early point I had someone ask me: “Are you comfortable with Reformed (capital R) theology?”

Well…I had no idea. I assumed that Reformed (capital R) had to do with the Reformation and therefore with the Protestant Church in general, which wasn’t totally wrong. But I had no idea that Reformed referred to a particular tradition embodied in churches like the United Church of Christ (Congregational), the Reformed Church of America, and the Presbyterians. I didn’t know that “Reformed” was a particular way of looking at theology that traced its roots to people like John Calvin and John Knox, nor that it most importantly emphasized this one thing: “

Always start with God.” There are things about our tradition I’m not as drawn to, but I really like this: “Always start with God.”

And so when we experience God’s grace and forgiveness, freely given…we start there, and then respond by trying to live our lives well for Christ. Not the reverse. We don’t try to live well and thereby earn God’s grace, it’s an oxymoron.

Or, when we want to know ourselves, to know who we are and why we’re here, we begin first by looking at who God is, and then figuring out who we are. We don’t start by looking at ourselves and then figuring out who God is.

I just read a funny little book by Walker Percy, a Southern writer who trained first as a medical doctor. The book is from the 1980’s, and it is called “Lost in the Cosmos: (subtitle) The Last Self-help Book.” At the very beginning, Percy asks a question: “How can you survive in the cosmos, about which you know more and more…while knowing less and less about yourself – this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 pschotherapists and 100 million fundamentalist Christians?” The quote, and the book, are Percy’s quirky way of asking, with no little satire, “How can you figure out who you are if you’ve taken God totally out of the equation?”

The Reformed tradition of Christianity says “Always start with God.” In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus models it out for us: Start with God. He does it in the most intimate of ways, by connecting with God in prayer. At every important time, Jesus goes in the dark, alone, to a quiet place…and Prays. If we’re going to follow Jesus, we need to be people who go to God first…we need to pray.

Second. Now, I know this happens with you, Jesus goes off to pray, and the first thing that happens is – he’s interrupted. Does this not happen to you?!! You finally make time to pray, and you can instantly find a million things to do that are suddenly very interesting, cell phones are beeping, you’re distracted by something, you remember something you were supposed to do yesterday.

Jesus is interrupted by Simon (Peter), who else? Peter has been in Capernaum with Jesus. He’s seen people healed, including his own mother-in-law. And he has seen this welling up, this spectacular response that people are having to Jesus. So Peter finally figures out where Jesus has gone to be alone, bursts in and says “Jesus…let’s go! You are #1 on the celebrity meter in Capernaum! We need to fan the flame, keep people stirred up, it’s great, let’s get you back in front of them, we need some pictures and you need to start a Blog!”

Same impetuous Peter. Remember the Transfiguration story that Todd read earlier, on top of the mountain when Peter says “Jesus, let’s stay up on the mountain forever!” And Jesus says “No, Peter, we need to get back down and get to work.”

HERE, Peter says “Let’s keep you up on the pop charts and build a power base here in Capernaum.” And Jesus says “No, Peter, we need to get out of here and get to work.”

In neither instance is Jesus much concerned about elevating himself, nor about strategizing or building power bases or getting publicity. And even though in a moment he will heal another person, Jesus doesn’t seem concerned with building up some spectacular healing ministry either. His healings seem to be about individual people, and his marching orders are to get out of the city, out into the villages and call people to God.

Do you see what happened? Peter sleeps on it and says “Let’s focus in on healing in Capernaum.” Jesus prays on it and says “Let’s expand out with the Good News.” Jesus always seems to be stretching people, always seems to want to stretch us. And notice that what happens here is that Jesus prays, and then moves out.

Prayer-time compels action. That might stretch some of us. We can start thinking that either we’re contemplative people who pray and listen and cultivate our inner life or we’re activists who head out amongst people and minister. No. The two go hand in hand. In fact, they are inseparable.

Jesus prayed. Then he moved out into action. If we are going to follow Jesus, we need to be people who pray—and who act.

Third, Jesus heads out with the message into Galilee, and he’s interrupted again, this time not by Simon Peter but by a man with leprosy. The man was asking for help.

I mentioned Walker Percy’s book “Lost in the Cosmos.” In one part of it he imagines a radio communication between a marooned spaceship from earth and an alien life form. The more the alien voice finds out about the spaceship’s predicament, the more insistent it is with the question: “Have you asked for help?” And in exasperation, the people on the earthship finally transmit back “Help? What help? We don’t ask for help.”

We are people, in general, who don’t ask for help. Now, that may all be cute if you’re talking about men not wanting to ask for directions or whatever. But as a culture, we don’t ask for help. Most of the time we don’t think we need it, which is maybe one of the pitfalls of a materially affluent culture. Or we self-help. But we don’t let people in when things are difficult. And we don’t ask God for help. It is far easier, far safer to follow the advice that says “God helps those who help themselves.” George Gallup says 80% of born-again Christians think that phrase comes from the Bible. It doesn’t. It comes from Benjamin Franklin. This man with leprosy…is asking for help.

If we are going to follow Jesus, we need to be people who ask for help.

Fourth. The rabbis had a term for people who contacted leprosy: “the living dead.” It sounds like a horror movie, and if you or someone close to you began to show signs of leprosy, it was horrible. The “living dead.”

Leprosy was by all accounts a horrible disease, or perhaps a family of diseases. Caused by a transmittable bacteria, one thing that it does is destroy nerve endings and people begin to injure themselves because they can’t feel pain, especially in the extremities. Something as simple as getting a sliver, or maintaining your balance by subtly shifting weight on your feet becomes an introduction to blisters and infection when you can’t feel anything.

The Old Testament has lots of explicit detail about how to deal with a leper and the community. And if you think it sounds a lot like how the modern world has dealt with people with HIV/Aids, you won’t be far wrong. Often, it was automatically assumed that people contacting leprosy had sinned and that God was punishing them. When someone had leprosy, the Old Testament book of Leviticus lists the procedures to follow:

• wear torn clothes.
• don’t cut your hair, and let it cover over your face.
• stand at a distance of 50 paces from other people.
• if someone were approaching, you must yell out “unclean, unclean.”
• you were to live alone, outside of the normal community.

Now, on occasion, provision was made for people to go to worship…but only if they were hidden off at the side behind a screen.

Leprosy was a sentence. You lost your health. your identity. your occupation. your habits. your family. your friends. your worshipping community, all stripped away. No wonder the rabbis called lepers “the living dead.” Is it any wonder that a man in such a situation would be desperate, would beg, would kneel at Jesus’ feet? Is it any wonder that when Jesus heals him, he couldn’t for the life of him obey Jesus and not tell anyone about it?

Jesus restores…everything. Returns him to life. Jesus is filled with compassion, reaches out his hand and touches someone who is untouchable and says “Yes. I will, I choose to, I want to.”

This creates a difficult conflict for me. I love this story, I love this compassionate heart of Jesus welling up, and I see so much pain in the world I want to make a “rule” for healing out of this story.

• Does Jesus always say Yes?
• Is he always moved by compassion? Does he always desire healing?
• Does he always desire physical healing?
• And if so, why does it only happen sometimes?

I don’t know.

• Why here and not there? I don’t know.

I have had prayers answered, I have experienced and seen healing and I do believe that Jesus is still in the healing business. When I pray for people, my “default” prayer, without more specific guidance, would be to pray for healing. Sometimes God does that. Sometimes it’s dramatic. Sometimes it’s slow. Sometimes it looks differently than we ever imagined. Sometimes there is a far more important kind of healing that is going on than what we wanted. And sometimes, if we’re honest, we can’t see it happen at all.

In this case, though, Jesus does what the rabbis of his day said was on par with a resurrection…he heals a leper.

Now, notice that there are two important parts to what Jesus does with this man:

• He heals him of a disease, of leprosy. Astounding. The story could have stopped right there and been amazing. But it doesn’t.
• He tells the man to go and show himself to the priest, as the law of Moses commanded. Jesus knew that without that, the man may be healed physically…but not restored to his culture, his work, his family, his friends, his faith community. For that he must show himself to the priest for examination, to offer sacrifices and receive the pronouncement as “clean.” Jesus does not seem interested in being a famous miracle man. But he is interested in this one man, and in bringing him wholeness…not only physical healing.

Dr. Paul Brand is a man I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, a physician who grew up and worked for many years in India and later in the United States, specifically with people who had leprosy. As drugs were developed in the mid-20 th century that could arrest the deterioration of leprosy, Brand spent years experimenting and perfecting techniques for tendon and muscle transfers that could restore damaged hands or feet.

That allowed patients to have the capabilities of going back to earning a living. But no employer would hire people with other obvious scars of leprosy. Brand’s first patients returned to him upset, unable to find someone who would put them to work. They wanted him to reverse the progress they’d made so they could at least return to begging.

So Brand learned to rebuild noses, restore the ability to blink, replace eyebrows and other more cosmetic things that allowed not only healing but also restoration to the community. It was a ministry of wholeness, a very powerful ministry.

That’s what Jesus did for this man with leprosy, only more. And it’s what he wants to do for us. Knock down the barriers and provide healing that can cleanse us, restore us to relationship with him, and community with one another. It’s what he did in his life, on the cross and in the resurrection.

And it’s what we get to be involved in. This is our calling, to be involved in kingdom work that moves people to wholeness.

So we introduce people to Jesus.

We become teachers who teach for transformation, not a paycheck.

We become businesspeople who employ folks in meaningful work.

We become counselors who help people identify barriers to wholeness, attorneys who serve and seek justice.

We work at home and love people in friendships. always pointing people towards the wholeness and restoration that Jesus brings.

Kingdom work has an awful lot of expressions. If we are going to follow Jesus, we need to be people who engage in this ministry of walking people towards wholeness.

Mark packs a lot of things into these 10-11 verses: praying towards action, asking for help, healing for restoration & wholeness, the call to minister, but let’s not forget where we started. It started with Jesus. And Jesus started by praying. An awful lot came out of one simple prayer time in the dark. Let us pray.