Sermon Transcript
Thanks, Nate, and good morning everyone. Before going through today’s scripture reading, I wanted to take the opportunity to recognize Nate and the worship team for all the The great job you guys do week in and week out. Thank you. Yeah. Offstage.
We’re really blessed to have you, and thank you so much for everything that you do.
So the passage from Scripture that Dan will preach from today comes from Mark chapter 1, verses 21 through 45, and feel free to follow along on the screen.
And then, and they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy I know who you are, the Holy One of God.
But Jesus rebuked him, saying, be silent and come out of him. And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, what is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.
And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee. And immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, and with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her. And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them. That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons, and the whole city was gathered together at the door.
And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him. And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, everyone is looking for you. And he said to them, let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out. And he went throughout all Galilee preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.
And a leper came to to him, imploring him, and kneeling, said to him, If you will, you can make me clean. Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, I will; be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once and said to him, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for proof to them. But he went out and began to talk freely about it and to spread the news so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.
May the Lord bless the reading of his word. Thank you. Thanks, Danny.
Finish this sentence.
The real problem with the world is— what do you think? The real problem with the world is poverty, war, hatred, disease, sin.
If you were going to start fixing what is broken in the world, where would you start? And by the way, for Christians, we should be fixing what is broken in the world. So is there a most important issue to address, or is there a whole kaleidoscope of problems that have their own nuances— physical problems, social problems— economic, mental, spiritual. Can we address all of those issues in the exact same way? Probably not.
Each situation, each circumstance has its own complexity, has its own unique remedy. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer for every problem every single person has. And if we are going to help people, which we should, we need to see each person as an individual who requires a unique response in order to be restored to wholeness. That is what we see Jesus doing in the Gospels. Jesus didn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer for everyone.
He gave unique types of healing to each need. He was nuanced in his approach because that’s what’s required. Last week we began our study in the book of Mark, and we saw Jesus say, the kingdom of God is at hand, like it has arrived, now it’s here. And today we are studying what happens when the kingdom begins to move and expand. We will see Jesus in his expanding kingdom healing, restoring, mending aspects of our world that have been shattered or twisted or broken, but we won’t see Jesus healing and restoring in the exact same way every time.
We’ll see a variety of restorations. And specifically, we’ll see that Jesus redeems the world spiritually, physically, and socially. Spiritually, physically, and socially. He heals the world in other ways too. It’s just not in our text.
So first, spiritually, Jesus repels evil. Jesus in this passage casts out many evil spirits, one man in particular who seems probably possessed or at least tormented by a spirit. And I know sometimes in the West, the idea of spirits or a spiritual world, especially evil spirits, is often seen as primitive or unscientific, like it’s hocus-pocus or it’s folklore. And we here in the West therefore can look down on other cultures cultures that have beliefs in the spiritual realm. But I would petition you to reconsider your assumptions if you are someone who is part of that particular Western ideology.
Because first of all, it’s not even everyone in the West who has a skepticism toward the spiritual. Statistically, it’s mostly only one demographic category in the West that’s becoming more secular. You can guess which one, which demographic that is. But by process of elimination, African American communities, Latino communities, many Asian communities that are geographically in the Western footprint, so North America, Europe, in those pockets of people within the West, spirituality, belief in the spiritual world is alive and well and growing. So the studies that you may hear that the West is becoming more secular, that’s true, but it’s not precise because if you dive into those numbers, it’s really only white Westerners that are becoming more secular.
Other demographics, even in the West, are deepening their spiritual beliefs. And then of course around the globe, South America, Africa, Asia, we again find strong and increasing beliefs in both good spirits and evil spirits. Very much part of those cultures. Very much part of their understanding of the world. Belief in the spiritual world is not shrinking globally.
The belief system that is shrinking is a kind of scientific elitism. Not science. Science is not shrinking, of course. But the ideology that says science will eventually get all the answers. Or the saying we pretty much know what’s going on in the universe, or if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.
Those are the kind of beliefs that are shrinking on the world stage. So one brief example, but these are all over the place, theoretical physicist at Dartmouth University, Marcelo Gleisler, who identifies as an agnostic, okay, he’s not a Christian, but in an article in Scientific American titled The More We Know, the More Mystery There Is, is, Gleisler says, the more we learn, the more we figure out we don’t know. In other words, of course, science figures out a lot, praise God for that, but as it does, what we don’t know is growing faster than what we do know. This particular article focuses on quantum mechanics, origins of the universe, multiverses, theories of human consciousness, you know, light stuff, but there’s others. There are huge fields of study that we have a growing list of questions, not answers.
And Gleisler, an agnostic PhD theoretical physicist, advocates for humility instead of arrogance. He says we can’t assume we know what’s going on. The more we learn, the wilder the universe gets. The universe is more and more and more unpredictable, um, which is counter to an accusation that atheists have sometimes levied against Christians. Atheists sometimes accuse Christians in particular, but really all people of faith, of having what they call a God of the gaps, meaning God only exists in whatever gap of scientific knowledge we have.
So whatever we can’t explain, we say, oh well, that must be God. So for instance, we used to say the weather was from God, but now we understand the weather cycle. We used to say biological life was from God, but now we know it’s evolution. That’s their claim. They say, we really only rely on God for what we don’t know, and therefore, as our scientific knowledge gap gets narrower and narrower, we as people of faith eventually won’t have any reason to believe in God at all because we will have figured out everything from a naturalistic worldview.
Okay, well, one problem, one of the problems problems with that accusation is that our gaps of knowledge are not getting narrower and narrower. They are getting wider and wider. We once thought there was this much knowledge to know. Then we jumped in there and we found out, ah, maybe it’s this much. And then, oh, maybe it’s this much.
And then, like, actually, we don’t know how much it is. So I would challenge you, if you’re a member of the ideology that says science is the end-all be-all of everything, you might want to reconsider that. There might be more to existence than we can measure. Those other cultures might understand something that certain Westerners have missed. Maybe we can humble ourselves like Gleisler and others recommend and not assume superiority over those other cultures that do believe in the spiritual.
Okay, now that we are hopefully disarmed about our preconceptions of the spiritual world, here comes Jesus and he says the kingdom of God is at hand. And as the kingdom advances, forces of evil are pushed out like light pushes out darkness, good pushes out evil, and goodness wins. Jesus and his kingdom are more powerful than the kingdom of darkness. The spiritual forces that seek to destroy the world will themselves be destroyed. That’s the point as the kingdom advances.
And I will tell you, whether you believe all of that is hocus-pocus or not, people around the world have found tremendous hope in it. As Christianity traveled to these so-called primitive cultures, those cultures rejoiced when they heard the message that Jesus can demolish evil strongholds, that evil has no power over his name. They embraced the supernatural message of Christianity as both fantastic news and also quite useful in their daily lives. Interestingly, when more progressive forms of Christianity also went around the world, which either downplay or outright deny the supernatural, the world at large did not embrace that type of Christianity, which is ironic because one of the goals of downplaying the supernatural was to make Christianity more accessible. So 100, 150 years ago, there were some veins of Christianity that were so convinced that scientific advancement would eventually answer everything, they strategically strategically thought, hey, in a few years no one is going to believe in the supernatural anymore at all, so we must reposition Christianity to make it fit in with what we now know about the world.
They would say things like, since we know people don’t raise from the dead, those accounts in Scripture must be figurative. Same thing with evil spirits— we know they don’t exist. You know, we’ve moved on from how ancient people understood the world, so we need to talk about these accounts in Scripture in a totally different way. They were trying to make Christianity more accessible, but they actually made it less accessible. The Christianity that spread around the world is not the progressive Christianity that downplays or denies the supernatural, because just imagine you’re working working with an indigenous tribe, sharing the Bible with the people who live there.
And then you explain all the accounts that you’re reading in Scripture of evil spirits are just— oh, those are just figurative because we know those kind of things don’t exist. Imagine saying that to a local person. The local person would just stare back with blank expressions. They’d say, doesn’t exist? Like, what are you talking about?
I can introduce you to 3 different witch doctors in my down. What do you mean doesn’t exist? Like, spirits are a daily part of my world. Don’t tell me they don’t exist. So when someone came along and told them all that stuff is not real, that form of Christianity just absolutely fell flat.
But when they heard Jesus came to do something about the evil you deal with every day— Jesus has power over evil that gives you so much trouble. That’s the message they were waiting for. It gave them tremendous hope, lifted them out of darkness and types of oppression even. So, before you dismiss the supernatural out of hand, okay, give pause. You may not want to discredit the lived experiences of most cultures, most times in the history of the world.
And if you do discredit most cultures, most times, you will not help them. It is not helpful to say your lived experience does not exist.
So spiritually, Jesus repels evil. Second, Jesus conquers sickness and death. Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, and then he heals all who were sick in various towns from physical illnesses. And this type of thing will continue over and over again as we read the book of Mark or any gospel. As Jesus’ kingdom advances, it not only repels spiritual darkness, but it restores physical health.
Jesus steps in, he interrupts, he reverses sickness, dying, and death, which means part of the goodness of his kingdom is the elimination of such things. And we might just breeze past that without stopping to think about it, but there are some assumptions underneath Jesus eliminating sickness and and death as part of the advancement of his kingdom that we need to stop and think about. Because not every philosophy or every worldview assumes the same things about sickness and death that Jesus does. For Jesus, sickness and death are incompatible with the goodness of his kingdom. Sickness and death are part of what has gone wrong with the world instead of being a natural or unavoidable part of our world.
And not every philosophy or worldview or religion believes believes that. Buddhism, for example, believes that suffering is the result of us having desires, and the remedy for suffering therefore is to give up desire. So the reason you’re sad when someone dies is because you desired a relationship with that person, right? If you stopped desiring relationships, you wouldn’t be sad when they died. Or you can find peace when you’re sick if you don’t desire health, right?
Which, which, if you can pull that off, I’m sure it works pretty well. But it means in Buddhist ideology sickness and death is only a problem to the extent that you desire what sickness and death can take away from you. In other words, sickness and death aren’t objective problems in their own right. It’s really only how people react to them that make them a problem. And Jesus says something very different from that.
He says the problem with sickness and death isn’t you. Although, of course, there are helpful ways to respond to loss and unhelpful ways, and he teaches us how to rejoice always, right? Of course. But for Jesus, sickness and death themselves are problems. So when Simon says his mother-in-law is sick, Jesus doesn’t say, don’t be so attached to her and you won’t be upset.
He doesn’t tell the mother-in-law, let go of your desire for health and you’ll find rest. He doesn’t say those things. Instead, he shows he believes the sickness itself is a problem. It’s a diversion from how the world ought to be. It’s a sign of the fall.
The only reason we have to deal with this stuff is because the world is broken. But Jesus says, I’m here to put it back together. And so Jesus is very different from Buddhism. Jesus is very different from yin and yang, which predates Buddhism. In the East.
Yin and yang is all about balance. It’s not about right and wrong so much as about equals and opposites in the universe. Star Wars pulled a lot from this, but they didn’t go all the way with it. But you have the Force and the dark side of the Force, and they push against each other, but there’s balance, right? Jesus doesn’t speak in yin and yang terms.
He doesn’t say death balances life or sickness balances death. Jesus says sickness and death are part of what is wrong wrong, and I’ve come here to overthrow them. Their reign is ending and soon will be gone entirely, which is not balance. It’s total elimination of one side. So Jesus is not yin and yang.
Jesus is also different from what evolution would tell us about sickness and death. In evolution, sickness and death certainly aren’t wrong. There really isn’t a right and wrong if we’re only products of mindless forces that created us for no purpose. There is no wrong. There’s just survival, utility.
You know, like if a lioness leaves behind a sickly cub knowing that the jackals will eat it, evolution would not say that is wrong. It would only say, well, if the mother who leaves behind her cub furthers her genetic line more than the mother who stays and cares for her sickly then the abandonment trait will win out and the nurturing trait won’t. That’s it. That’s all evolution would say. It’s about what wins.
It’s not about right and wrong. Right and wrong are irrelevant in evolution. And in fact, there are ways that sickness and death can advance a species because it’s survival of the fittest, right? And the weak need to be removed from the genetic pool. So sickness and death can provide a means where weak genes can be eliminated.
But Jesus looks at sickness and death and says, it’s wrong. It’s not only painful, it’s not only sad, it’s wrong. It’s a sign something is messed up in this world, and I’ve come here to restore what is lost, reinstitute how the world was before sin and its consequences entered into it, which is a very different understanding of sickness and death. Now, here’s the question.
Which one of those views of sickness and death do you believe is correct, if any of them? We can’t prove any of them, by the way. None of them are provable. So whichever one we adopt as our own will be an act of faith of sorts, right? Buddhism’s claim that we should get rid of all our— all of our desires— can’t prove that’s accurate.
Yin and yang— death balances life, sickness balances health— can we prove that? Can we prove that’s the way it’s to be, or evolution, there is no real right and wrong, there is only utility, only what works, only what wins because we are the product of mindless forces that created us for no purpose. Can we prove that?
Or Jesus saying that sickness and death are signs that the world is broken, that they are wrong, and that He will set them right. Can we prove that? Whichever of those views that we adopt or any other view, we can’t really prove it, prove it, They would all be leaps of faith, so to speak. So let me just ask you, which one are you going to choose? When it’s your beloved on the deathbed, which view are you going to take?
Would it be evolution? Will you say, my feelings of attachment for my beloved are only the result of a long evolutionary process. My ancestors who felt attachment for their loved ones were able to pass along their genetic traits at a higher rate than those who felt no attachment, and that’s the only reason that I have these feelings right now of loss. Is that what you would say?
Will you look at your beloved passing away and then look across the hall in the hospital at the baby being born and say, like yin and yang, well, that’s balance. My sadness, their joy, this death, that new life, the universe has righted itself. Will you take that response to death?
Will you take the Buddhism response and say the only reason your heart is aching is because you have allowed yourself to desire your beloved, and if you stopped desiring your beloved, you could have peace?
Or will you tell yourself what Jesus says, that this sickness and death stuff is messed up, that it’s wrong, is not the way it should be. We shouldn’t have to say goodbye to our loved ones. There’s something twisted and broken about that, that the world is not meant to be this way and we need someone to fix it. Which would you say?
Jesus, rather uniquely in philosophical systems, says he comes to conquer sickness and death. Third, uh, socially, Jesus restores the outcast. Jesus restores people to community. At the end of this passage, a person with leprosy comes up to Jesus and requests healing. And of course, leprosy is a tragic condition that requires physical healing, right?
Which today, healing for leprosy can be done with simple antibiotics, but of course they didn’t have those then. There was no known cure at the time, so people with leprosy would slowly waste away. Limbs and extremities would lose feeling, then movement, and then at least appear to crumble off, like fingers, toes, noses, and eventually the illness results in death. So this person who came to Jesus certainly needs physical healing. Don’t want to understate that.
But leprosy was more than just a physical disease. It was a social disease, because whoever had leprosy was required to isolate. These ancient people didn’t know a whole lot about the disease, but they did know it was contagious to some extent. So in order to protect the community, the person with leprosy could not be near others, could not be near family, could not be near friends, could not participate in festivals and celebrations, couldn’t go to temple, couldn’t practice their faith. And whenever someone came near them, they needed to literally yell, unclean!
Unclean! To warn people to stay away from them. They needed to do that forever. There was no end to it unless something quasi-miraculous happened and they could prove they didn’t have leprosy anymore. In the case of this particular man who comes to Jesus, we’re not told how long he suffered with the disease, but we do know it had been long enough that he came to Jesus on his knees begging, pleading, pleading, desperate for help.
Some of us can just barely scratch the surface of being able to empathize with that kind of isolation if we needed to isolate during the pandemic. You may have a similar story, but Beth and I both had COVID at different times, right? And so when one of us had it, we said to the person who, who had COVID, we said, you need to stay in this room by yourself with the door shut. And, you know, I’ll put food outside your door a few times a day, and then after I walk away, you can open the door, get the food, and eat alone in your room as if you are some kind of prisoner. You can only see your kids at a distance or through a window.
You certainly can’t make physical contact with anyone. Did you guys have to do anything like this? When we had it, the pro— this, of course, the protocol kept changing, right? But when we had it, you were supposed to either wait 10 days from when you first had symptoms or until you had a negative test before you could re-enter society. So for us, it was 10 days of isolation.
And the first couple days, we were like, oh, this isn’t so bad. I get a little break, food delivered, I don’t need to cook, I could do this. But by the end of it, when no one had hugged us, when we hadn’t played with our kids, when our kids were asking, how long until I can hug Mommy or Daddy? We were very ready for it to be over. But now imagine it hasn’t been 10 days.
Leprosy can progress very slowly, so maybe it’s been months or years or even decades because of the nature of the disease. No hugs. Maybe kids have grown up without you. You haven’t experienced the joy of any kind of festival or gathering. And anytime someone did come near you, you had to yell for them to stay away.
Leprosy is mostly a social disease. It’s isolation, which is some of the worst types of torture. And so this guy comes to Jesus on his knees begging for help knowing he’s not supposed to come near anyone, but apparently he’s too desperate to care. And Jesus does what no one would have done, what no one had done. Jesus touches him.
It’s the first time this guy has had any physical contact in who knows how long.
And his disease is cured. He doesn’t have leprosy anymore. But there’s much more here than that. Jesus sees the other need, the social need, which is probably the more painful of the two. The guy had been excluded.
He had been an outcast, literally an untouchable. And Jesus touches him, healing his body, sure, but also beginning to heal his loneliness. And then Jesus tells him to go to the priest because, well, that was the law. Someone had a skin condition, it was the priest who was supposed to examine the guy to determine if he could be let back into the community. You can read all about that in Leviticus 13 and 14.
It is riveting. It’s not. But a person with leprosy could not be part of the community again until the priest had given the person the okay. So Jesus, again, by sending this guy to the priest, is doing what is necessary to reinstate him into the community. He’s meeting the social need.
What we should see in all of these instances where Jesus heals is that Jesus does not hesitate to come exactly to where we are, to meet us exactly at our point of need. And in many cases, he meets us exactly at the point where everyone else is run away, where everyone else has given up, where everyone else believes that we are a lost hope, Jesus comes toward us. He gets involved. With leprosy, people didn’t want to touch the leper because they didn’t want the leprosy to get on them, right? They had always experienced it’s the unclean person who contaminates the clean, right?
It’s not like health is contagious. It’s sickness that is contagious. But Jesus turns that principle on its head. With Jesus, it’s the clean person who contaminates, so to speak, the unclean. With Jesus, it’s health and life that spread, not disease and death.
And it’s foreshadowing what will eventually happen on the cross, because on the cross, Jesus didn’t just touch sickness, he touched sin.
He that knew no sin became sin. On the cross, Jesus jumped headfirst into our deepest need, our deepest problem, the problem that had really caused all the other problems way back to our first ancestors when sin first entered the world. That’s when the world became broken with sickness and isolation and death. And Jesus jumped straight into it. He carries the burden, all of that.
He touches sin. He becomes it, whatever that means, but it didn’t spread to him. Instead, he spreads to it. He conquers sin. He reverses its effects, which means if he is in you, sin isn’t going to win.
Like leprosy didn’t win for the guy who came begging, sin won’t overpower him in you in the end. Because sin can’t contaminate him. He’s going to contaminate it in you with his holiness and goodness, charity and love. And one day, you and I, through faith in him, will be completely restored in every way. Evil and darkness will never touch us again.
One day, sickness and death will be completely eliminated from our experience. One day, and we will be greeted into the deepest sense of social community that we really can’t even imagine because it will be one that has not been tainted in any way by sin because Jesus has dealt with it. Finally and fully, He has defeated it, conquering it forever. That is our hope. Really, that is our certainty.
That’s what awaits us as believers and followers of Christ. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for Jesus, who looks at us all as unique individuals with unique needs, and he meets us where we are, Lord, to bring healing and restoration, to mend the brokenness, the brokenness that we have caused and, and the brokenness that others have caused that we are just victims of. Lord, we long for the day when it is all put back back together. But we thank you for the picture of Jesus coming in his kingdom, growing, restoring what has been broken.
May it give us hope today and always. We pray those things in his name. Amen.
Friends, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I was just talking to Nate and feel like we need to do something a little unplanned on a little different. Um, I just feel like God’s Spirit is saying that there are needs in this room that we need to pray for right now. And I don’t know exactly what this is going to look like, but Mike’s going to be playing We have an altar here, and I was just talking to Nate. We feel like we need to have a time of ministry, of prayer for these physical needs, these financial needs, these spiritual needs. And we don’t know exactly all that different ones here are carrying right now, but I’m just going to ask us to bow our heads and to pray.
And go on ahead, Mike, if you don’t mind playing. Just want to pray here for a moment.
Heavenly Father, we just want to spend a few moments just reflecting on this message and having a time of ministry and asking that the name of Jesus would be present here, that the power of your Holy Spirit would be present here. We’ve been spending time talking about the power in the name of Jesus to heal diseases and power in the name of Jesus to break the power of evil and to meet practical needs, God. And we’re asking that you would do that here today in a special way. I ask, Lord, that you would help us to be sensitive, Lord, to your Holy Spirit.
With your heads bowed right now, we just— I want to open up this altar down here in the front. If you have a physical need that you would like to be prayed for, we have elders who are going to make themselves available and come forward and just simply pray for you. If you have another need that you would like to be prayed for in some way, would like to just right now by faith invite you to come forward. We’re just going to take whatever time we need to, and I’m going to ask those of you who are in the audience who are praying to just continue to pray. So we’re just going to leave the altar up here open.
You can come, you can stand, you can kneel. And elders, staff, lay leaders, as you see people come forward by faith, I would ask that you would be ready to come forward and to just come around them. Let’s just spend a few moments, please, in ministry responding to this message. The power of Jesus is able to meet practical needs. Let’s pray for one another.
Let’s open up this altar.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for what you’ve done here in these few moments, and we ask that you would continue to do it in the coming moments after the service. Father, we pray that this will be a house of prayer, a house of ministry, and a house, Lord, that is dedicated to seeing your kingdom come and move in our midst in a very tangible way. So thank you, God, for this time of ministry.
Complete your work, Lord. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
