A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Mark. A leopard came up to Jesus and asked him, kneeling down, if you will do so, you can cure me. Moved with pity, our lord stretched out his hand, touched the leopard, and said, I do, will it be cured? The leprosy left the man at once, and he was cured. Jesus gave the man a stern warning and sent him on his way.
Not a word to anyone. Now, Jesus said, go off and present yourself to the priest and offer for your cure what Moses prescribed. That was according to the law. That should be a proof for them, meaning the scribes, the pharisees, and all all that ilk. The man went off and began to proclaim the whole matter freely, making the story public.
As a result, it was no longer possible for Jesus to enter a town openly because they swarmed all around him. He stayed therefore in desert places, yet people kept coming out to him even in the desert places to be cured. This is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Well, yesterday was a great day.
And even the day before, we heard a lot about peace. And for the first time, we heard a great deal about praying and about god. He's come he's come into existence again. He's being recognized. That is something I suppose to be grateful for, maybe.
Have you thought for a minute that the three powers involved in this disaster, this catastrophe, are all believers in one god? The Jews call him Jehovah. We call him God in English and any other word you wanna use, and the the Muslims call him Allah. One god. We all are praying to the same god.
Do you realize what a fixed god must be in? Have all these people praying for him and at the same time, wear each other's throats? That is a very curious situation. And I'm absolutely astonished that some secular humanists haven't pointed this out, how ridiculous all this can be, they would say is. Because it's easy to be cynical about this, that all of a sudden, everybody involved in this, difference of opinion, everybody's carrying candles and praying and and hailing God to pray for peace.
This is a very curious situation. Of course, this is nothing new. All during the Middle Ages, we had first class Christians fighting for first class Christians. On in the sixteenth century, we had first class Christians cutting off the heads of other first class Christians. So there's nothing really new about this situation.
The only thing is we ought to face up to it and say this is this is a rather curious situation. We're all praying to the one and the same god. We're all praying for peace. That's what they were saying. Of course, nobody practically knows what they were praying for.
And yet we're we're aiming to destroy one another because there are three peep three elements involved. What what sense do you make out of this? What sense do you make out of this? Now let's look at this gospel today. I am not one.
I'm not an Augustinian or a Saint Ambrose seeing all kinds of, meaning that is allegorical and metaphorical meanings. I'm pretty much of a literalist. Not a fundamentalist, but a literalist. But take this story. Here you have a man who was sick and ill of what was called leprosy.
He was a leper. Now he comes to Christ. He's a sick man. He's a dying man. We're all dying, incidentally.
Keep that in the back of your head. There's nothing immoral about dying. It's not a sin. Unless it's suicide, and and then the suicide is not because of of dying. So this good leper comes to Christ, and the first thing he does is to kneel to him.
Did you notice that? Why did he kneel? And then why did Christ touch him? Christ didn't have to touch him to cure him. Christ did although it's very significant that in many of Christ's miracles, he does touch the person.
For example, the son of the widow being brought out dead on the on the, litter. He touched the corpse. But there are other miracles where Christ didn't touch anybody. So he touches the leper, and he raises him up and says, you're cured. But notice this, the leper, the sick man, the diseased man, the man who had no hope, he'd probably tried everything possible given the medical information of the day, and he's given up.
So he comes to Christ. You can't lose anything. But notice he kneels to Christ and says, if you will, you can cure me. But notice Christ didn't go to him. He came to Christ.
He kneeled to Christ. He admitted his illness, his sickness, his leprosy, his disease. And at the same time, he he knew that Christ could cure him if only Christ would. And a thought struck me as I looked this over last night. Let's think about this.
Let's think about this. What we're seeing over there to happening today didn't happen overnight. It was built up who divided up that those lands? Who created these these, so called nations along the Persian Gulf? Where did they come from?
When these men sat down about fifty years ago and and dealt with the Kurds, did they admit that they were sick? Did they admit that they were inhabitants of a sick world, of a diseased world, in other words, of original sin? How many of them? Was the cross of Christ on the wall of the assembly room where the men who were char were carving up the the Middle East? That's what what what they they were sitting around the table drawing maps and said, this is where we're gonna make it.
Was there any were they did they get down on their knees and say, lord, you can cure me if you will? Was there any invocation of god then? Is it it it you see, these good you see, I have a respect for secular humanists just like I have a respect for atheists and practically none for agnostics. Because they talk about the the we used to call foxhole religion. Of course, most people don't remember the foxholes.
But the point is when the going gets absolutely tough and we have nowhere else to turn, then everybody starts talking about god. Well, why don't they talk about god when they can do something about a situation that only god can help them to do? But you see, I know I'm talking this isn't the way the world is at all. The way the world is is the way it is now. The world is not a world saying, Lord, you can cure me.
I'm a leopard. I'm diseased, but only touch me. They don't come to the Lord at all for the most part. Not in my recollection of any of these huge meetings after the first world war, after the second world war, and I don't know what's happened after that one. We've had not a lot of them, little ones around.
You see, we we are living in a air era, whether we like it or not, where we think we can make this a perfect world because man is infinitely perfect, which goes back to the old great to Rousseau and company. All we need to do and Marx, of course, gave it the big shove. All we have to do is to use our human resources, and we can transform the world. Because man there's nothing wrong with human beings. Nothing at all.
The only thing is they've been depressed. They've they have been been shackled. They have been dominated. All you have to do is the freedom to let good old human nature in its perfection or perfectibility. You Just give it a chance, and we will have paradise on earth.
If you think I'm exaggerating that picture, you are absolutely wrong. Because that picture is just exactly where the picture of the world. You see, comes down to this. When you lose your health, you've lost everything. That was that was full page advertisements.
That tells you something. How does that compare with with old man Cicero when he says it is a good, whole, noble, and proper thing to die for your country? Put those two things together. What do you come out with? And Cicero was a pagan, so we say.
And so when that leper came to Christ, he said, Lord, I'm a sick man, but you can cure me. And if any if people are talking about peace, the first thing they better ask themselves, what are we talking about? What are we talking about? I'm bringing this up about every day, but it's to it's so frightfully important that we get our shrinking thinking straight. And if it's true that Christ came to save the world, then what chance have we of saving it without him?
Tell me. And what are the chances of Christ dominating the world, becoming the king of kings and all that that we we we talk about from the pulpit? Is that likely to happen? No. It isn't.
Not in this world. Because man notice, I'm not saying human beings are intrinsically evil. I have not said that. Good old Luther said that in Calvin. What I'm saying is that man and women let's not forget the women in this case.
They we are not perfect. We are born imperfect. With baptism, we are raised to another order. With baptism, we got or or whatever replaces it as is possible. But we're in entirely new order.
And our blessed lord, Barry, simply said, we're in the we're in the order of Christ. We call ourselves Christians. And Christ said, my world is not your world. See, there's here's the rub. A Christian in these situations is in a pretty bad situation.
But let me tell you the thing we have got to come back to is to have the serenity and the peace of Christ. As I said, it has nothing to do with war. Because to be a Christian is to be a soldier. And to be a soldier is to be potentially in a battle. And that's precise.
See, we used to talk about the church triumphant and the church suffering and the church militant. See, we but that word militant was had has been eliminated because it it militant means war, it means soldiers, and we mustn't Christ came for peace, so we mustn't talk about that. And yet that's what we're talking about. The Christian is en route. The Christian is fighting a daily battle.
God put him into this world to come back to him, and we can only go back to him through Jesus Christ and his grace, and that is war. Because my world, Christ said, is not yours. I am not of this world, Christ said. And so our light is a battle. We are soldiers by hope of Christ, and that means warfare.
A Christian is a soldier, and I pray of Christ. And if we see that that the the the essence of peace is in that warfare, in that battle of going back to Christ, of trying to cast off the world as we know it around us, and to surround ourselves of the world of Jesus Christ, which is his world. The closer we come to that, the closer we are coming to realizing the peace of Christ, which surpasses, let us hasten to add, human understanding. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the spirit. Amen.