Just passing by this story in Mark’s gospel, there are three things that stand out pretty easily.  First, there is the miracle.  You can’t miss that.  A man who had been a leper for who knows how long -- and I guess the question would be, how long wouldn’t be too long to be a leper? -- is instantly and miraculously healed by Jesus.  This event in this particular six verses of scripture is the tallest skyscraper downtown.  You’re driving in from miles away, and you can’t miss it.  It overshadows almost everything else in the story.  But not quite.

There’s something else we should not miss here.  Hebrews 1:3 records for us what the ancient church fully believed about Jesus.  The words in that verse read, “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being (NIV).”  What that means for you and me is that, as we read the scriptures, every time we see Jesus do something, we see God in action and every time we hear Jesus speak, we hear the words God himself would have us hear.  In this particular story, when the gospel records that, “moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched” the leper, we have an exact representation of how the character of God functioned in that moment.  God, though it may at times appear to be different, is moved by pity to reach out and touch the untouchable.

It’s really hard for us to relate to leprosy.  There are still about a hundred people every year in the United States diagnosed with the disease.  I doubt anyone in this room has ever seen someone who had leprosy.  In New Testament times, it was the equivalent to what AIDS was in our society not too many years ago.  Leprosy is a neurological disorder that causes numbness, especially in the extremities.  It could even cause people to inadvertently abuse themselves.  Their hands and feet would oftentimes be damaged beyond repair because they couldn’t feel anything.  It also caused a disfigurement in the body because it could cause large, grotesque nodules to grow on the skin.  It was a very ugly thing to see.

Although we now know it’s virtually impossible to transmit the disease from person to person, back then people were so afraid that they would catch the disease that they ostracized those afflicted by it.  Lepers were cut off from society.  Disconnected.  Relocated.  It’s not been the first or last time in history that ignorance fueled prejudice. 

Spiritually, lepers were cut off because they were believed to be unclean.  It was assumed that anyone who had been afflicted by such a horrible disease must have certainly done something to anger God and leprosy was God’s punishment of their sin.  Again, they were treated then much like the first AIDS victims were treated by people in our own culture, here in the States, not that many years ago.  In many quarters, AIDS victims are still the lepers of our day.

There are still people, as well, who, in their religious ignorance, automatically associate physical suffering with the punishment of God.  Yet, the scripture says, “Jesus, moved with pity . . ..”  You can read it this way:  “God, moved with pity, reached out and touched” the one person no one else would have anything to do with.

Again, if you want to see Jesus, it might do us well to go to the places where the most broken and untouchable of society live.  It would be easy to make a case for the fact that we are much more likely to “find” Jesus there or “see” Jesus among those people than we are in many worship services on Sunday morning, where people oftentimes mistakenly believe that God’s presence can be conjured up by ratcheting up our emotions or speaking exactly the right words, or, frankly, just being in the right building at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.  As though we could conjure up the presence of God rather than just come into his presence, wherever we are!

There’s a third thing that ought to be very obvious in this text.  What I call the mystery of answered prayer.  Answered prayer!  A mystery?  “A leper,” the scripture says, “came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, Jesus, you can make me clean.’”  The leper, in essence, prays to Jesus for healing.  Jesus instantly and miraculously responds to the leper’s prayer. 

Here’s the question.  Here is the mystery.  Why does Jesus sometimes answer prayer like that and, apparently, more often, not respond at all?  Why is that?  Why do some people pray for healing and get it and others pray for healing and die slow, miserable deaths?  Why is that?  Does anybody know?  We can ask away, “Why, God?”  Jesus did, on the cross.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Matthew 27:46, NIV)?”  Don’t be surprised when you ask God “why?”, if you get the same answer Jesus got, hanging on the cross.  Dead silence.  Nothing.

Someone once asked Lyndon Baines Johnson when he was President about his religious life.  Johnson replied, “I pray several times a day.  I just don’t ever get any answers (Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965, Audioworks, 2006,)”  More of us than not, if we were telling the truth, would say the same thing.  We pray several times a day, and, like Jesus on the cross, all we get is the silence of heaven. 

Part of that is because our prayer lives never become more frustrating and fruitless than when we forget that God does not answer to us.  We answer to him.  And, our prayer lives get frustrating when we also forget that prayer is not about changing God as much as it is about surrendering to God.  Jesus, having cried out, “My God, my God, why,” later having heard nothing but silence, comes back to the moment of surrender and says, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:45, NIV).”  Sometimes, all you can do in the presence of silence is surrender to it.

There are three things that this text makes very self-evident.  The skyscraper miracle; you can’t miss that.  The picture of God’s pitiful touch; you can’t miss that.  And, the mystery of answered prayer.

But there is one more thing in this text that I had never seen.  I don’t know how many times I have read this scripture.  Hundreds, I suppose.  Have you ever noticed that?  You can read a scripture dozens and dozens of times, and then one day, you read it again, and something is there you’ve never seen before.  Well, that happened this week.  I’d never seen it in this passage.

After Jesus healed the leper, he told him very specifically to do one thing and not do another one.  He did say, “Go do this.”  Jesus said to the leper, “Show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.”  This is very important.  This man would have been well known in the community, being a leper.  For the priest to see evidence of the man’s healing would be tantamount to getting the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”  This man who had been cut off from all contact with humanity would finally have a life again.  Once the priest said he was clean, he could re-enter society, get a job, get married, have a family and worship in the temple with everyone else.  It was very important for him to show himself to the priest. 

This is what I’d never seen before.  “After sternly warning him, Jesus sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone.’”  Show yourself to the priest, but don’t tell anyone else in the world what happened.

How in the world is this guy supposed to do that?  This man has just had a personal encounter with Jesus in which his life was miraculously and instantaneously changed forever and Jesus says to him, “I’ve healed you, but you can’t tell a soul.”  And, what is the first thing this guy does?  The scripture records that he “went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.”

How often do we beg God for clarity in moral situations?  We don’t want any more gray areas, any more abstracts; we want clear, black-and-white, absolute certainty about a moral situation.  “God, tell me what to do!”  “Tell me what not to do!”  And, we never get that clarity.  This man has clarity beyond clarity.  “Do this.  Don’t do this.” 

Yet, with no gray areas whatsoever, the very first thing he did was disobey Jesus.  “Don’t tell a soul,” Jesus commanded.  And, the former leper goes out and proclaims it freely.  He couldn’t keep his mouth shut about what Christ had done in his life!

So, how come we can?

Have you ever had a personal encounter with Christ that was so life-changing that, even if Jesus specifically told you, in terms no one could question, you couldn’t tell a soul, the very first thing you would have to do is tell the next person you met?  That’s what this guy did.

It’s kind of like being in love.  Have you ever been in love?  It’s Valentine’s Day, right?  When you’re in love, you can’t keep it a secret.  When you’re in love, it’s Valentine’s Day every day.  Right?  When you’re not in love all the flowers and the chocolates and the wining and the dining in the world won’t make up for it.  There is no Hallmark card in the world that can tell the person you don’t love that you really do love them and make them believe it.  But, when you love someone, when you’re really in love with someone, try to keep quiet about it!  It’ kind of like Percy Sledge’s used to sing.  “When a man loves a woman, Can't keep his mind on nothing else.  He'll trade the world for the good thing he's found.  When a man loves a woman, spend his very last dime, tryin' to hold on to what he needs.  He'd give up all his comfort, sleep out in the rain, ff she said that's the way it ought to be.”

Now, some men have slept out in the rain because she said that’s the way it ought to be, but not because they were in love with other.  In this particular case, the guy’s saying he’s so in love that if his woman said, “Sleep in the rain,” he’d sleep in the rain!

Jesus had just healed this man and said, “Don’t tell a soul.”  What would you do, even if Jesus said, “Don’t”?

Maybe the better question for all of us is, what have we done?  You see, witnessing is this, and not much more.  Evangelism is this, and not much more.  It is having a life-transforming experience with Jesus that is so radical and so unmistakably real that you can’t keep from telling others what Jesus has done for you.  Has Jesus ever touched any of us like that?

You’ve heard me speak about our experience with adoption.  When I was preparing this message, it was one of the things that came back to me, because it’s something that lives with me literally every day as evidence of the touch of God on my life.  We had spent our very last dime on doctors.  We had gone to the limit of what insurance would pay for, peered over the edge, and realized there was nothing more we could do, that we could afford, to have a baby.

In 1984, we decided to pursue adoption.  We chose to pursue adoption through Buckner because we didn’t know where else to go and they came to us most highly recommended.  We knew the horror stories.  That people who wanted to adopt an infant oftentimes had to wait years and years.  So, it was really a surprise to us one night.  We had a bunch of friends over at the house doing what we’d now call “hanging out” when the phone rang.  It was our caseworker from Buckner, calling from Dallas.  I’ll never forget what she said.  I will never forget, as long as I remember my name, when she said, “You can come to Dallas tomorrow to get your son.”  We didn’t have anything in the house for a baby.  We didn’t have a blanket, we didn’t have a crib, we didn’t have a diaper.  We didn’t even know until that night that it was going to be a boy instead of a girl.  We didn’t know until that night we were going to get anything.

We dropped everything.  The next day, a couple of friends drove us to Dallas, because they literally did not trust me behind the wheel of a car, I was so worked up.  We got our baby, and we went home.  It was late when we got home.  It was dark outside, but the house was all lit up.  Family and friends had come from everywhere and brought blankets and formula and diapers, a crib, had set it up, ready to go.  Someone had even rented one of those portable marquees and put it in the front yard.  It was one of those big, ugly yellow flashing signs that said, “Nothing like a baby boy to fill your house with joy.”  I cannot imagine Jesus saying to me, “Here’s the baby you prayed for.  But don’t tell anybody.”  For the last 20 years, I’ve been saying, “I have two sons.  And, God did it.  There’s no other way.”

Can you imagine, as sick as he was, and as near death as he was, Phil Berry getting a new liver, less than a week from death, and Jesus leaning over the side of his hospital bed and saying, “Okay, Phil, I’m going to give you a new liver.  I’m going to give you the chance to spend the next 20 years with your family.  I’m going to give you the chance to walk every one of your daughters down the aisle at their weddings.  I’m going to give you the chance to hold your grandchildren.  But, you can’t tell anybody I did it.”  Can you imagine?  Would Phil have disobeyed Jesus?

That’s exactly what Jesus did to this guy.  He heals him from leprosy, and then he says, “Don’t go tell anyone.”  Then, the strangest thing happened.  The same thing that always happens.  Something was so powerful in his life, and he told people about it so freely, and he pointed to Jesus and said, “He did it,” that the crowds so overwhelmed Jesus he could no longer go back into town unless he was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, because the crowds would have overwhelmed him. 

Which is the way it always works in church.  The places in this church that are growing the most are the places where God’s hand is touching lives and changing lives, and there’s standing room only crowds in those places, because word has gotten out:  “Look what God’s done in my life.”

I’m absolutely certain people don’t respond as much to invitations to church anymore as they do to invitations to meet the life-changing Jesus.  Through the centuries, without question, if one person has a life-transforming experience with Christ and shares it freely, there will come a time when there’s not room to hold everyone.

The question, then, this morning, is this.  Have you ever had an encounter with the living God that was so life-changing that, even if Jesus said, “Don’t tell a soul,” you would have to disobey, and tell everyone you saw?