The closest I can come to imagining the scene in Mark is in a memory from childhood. Despite growing up in a generation far-removed from unpaved roads and non-powered vehicles, I remember the clip-clopping of a horse's hoofs on pavement, the creaking of an old, dilapidated wooden wagon pulled behind, and the mournful cry of the ragman.

"Rags!" he would wail. "Rags!"

And those in the neighborhood who had strips and pieces of cloth to discard would wait until the wagon had passed and they were behind the view of the crumpled old man who drove it. And then, as if to avoid any possibility of making human contact with the driver, they would almost surreptitiously run up behind the wagon to toss their rags into the hopper, and then just as quickly dash back inside the safety of their homes.

"Rags!......Rags!" he bellowed as if he too were a part of the charade, pretending to be unaware of the people running up behind the wagon.

The ragman came around our neighborhood only occasionally, but left a deep impression in the minds of we the children who lived along Calumet Avenue. To make it worse, our parents used to warn us to never stay out after dark...because we might be taken...by the ragman. Thrown into the rag-filled and probably rat-infested back of the wagon. Never to be seen again.

"Unclean!...Unclean!" came the woeful cry, slicing through an early Galilean morning.

It came from the pitiful figure of another man whose distinctive public persona revealed him to be, like the ragman, a social outcast. He was a leper. The society of that day considered lepers to be both ritually and religiously unclean. Lepers were not allowed in places of worship. They were separated from family, friends and public life. They lived in rat-infested shanty-towns erected outside the populated areas. They were denied employment, except to beg on the outskirts of town. Leprosy was considered to be a living form of death itself, and so the leper's life reflected the grave. His clothing was required to be torn to shreds. Head shaved of all hair. A covering, attached to his upper lip, draped down over his mouth. The leper was a living corpse haunting the edges of a community he could no longer enter. And he was required to maintain a safe distance from the rest of the people, and to signal his presence by shouting a warning.

Jesus is on a preaching tour of Galilee. Going from town to town, he proclaims the Good News that the kingdom of heaven is here! God has established a beachhead on Planet Earth, and something fundamental to all of life is changing. Its like yeast in a lump of dough, working in the background, creating a chemical reaction that ultimately will cause the dough to rise. Its like a tiny mustard seed silently sprouting in the undergrowth, and beginning a process of quiet maturation that will one day result in a bush big enough for birds to nest in. God's reign is streaming into the midst of a broken world. The reign of the Powers-That-Be is being eroded moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, heart-by-heart and life-by-life. And the clear and convincing evidence of this comprehensive and all-inclusive transformation of the world is seen in Jesus' healing of the blind and the lame, his forgiving of sinners, his liberation of the possessed and the dispossessed. These mighty works are downpayments on the promise that the Kingdom of heaven is here!

Of all the places where evil thrives and is most productive in its enterprise of destroying human souls, the world of the clean and unclean is a major demonic stronghold. For if you can successfully divide the world into the clean and the unclean - if you can reduce humanity to prejudicial stereotypes that divide people from each other and people from God - you strip the world of its common humanity, and God of the power of his love for everyone.

These echoing words rising from a distance away signal much more than an individual encounter with a leper. They announce the beginning of a cosmic struggle between Christ and the Powers-That-Be. It is the first of many encounters between Jesus and the cult of the clean and unclean. And we might be wise to consider through whom this cult works to establish and enforce the distinction between clean and unclean. Why, its the religious establishment that determines who is clean and who is not! And the medical profession works right alongside! And the political system! And the economic structures! All of them - all of the institutions of society - have been duped into becoming conspiratorial instruments of evil in dividing people from God and from each other. Each, in their own way, are contributors to the process that results in the forlorn cry that day at the outskirts of the city, "Unclean! Unclean!"

Jesus looks at the man behind the pitiful voice. The leper falls to his knees. His hands reach out in begging posture. "If you choose... you can make me clean."

Now, Mark doesn't tell us whether Jesus went to the man, or called the man to come to him. Either way, it would constitute an act of utter defiance of society's requirement for the unclean to stay at a distance from the clean, and the clean to avoid the unclean like the plague! But the gospelwriter does tell us about something even more important. Moved with compassion, Jesus says, "I DO choose. Be made clean."

And then Jesus stretches out his hand and does the unthinkable. Jesus touches the unclean man. And make no mistake about it. According to the Law of Moses, in so doing, Jesus himself becomes unclean!

You don't hear much in the Church today about the importance of imitating Jesus' ministry of becoming unclean for the sake of the salvation of others. Quite the opposite. The message of the Christian Church in our day is most often a message about becoming clean. About staying clean once you get there. And about cleaning up society or the Church and restoring it to some sanitized notion of how things used to be. Christianity - like all other religions - easily succumbs to the temptation of becoming just one more institution that wrongly divides people one from the other, and that finds reasons to build barriers between people and God. Like the religious institution of Jesus' day, the Church in our time often takes up an approach that causes some people to be pushed to the outskirts of life crying, "Unclean!...Unclean!", while others - the clean - sing songs of praise that God has brought us out from among them.

Oh, you and I have been immersed in the cult of the clean and the unclean from the earliest times of our lives. That's why the word "ecumenical" is considered a dirty word in some quarters. We are much more comfortable identifying what divides us rather than what unites us. That's why there are so many churches along the Kingston Pike. That's why there are more kinds of Baptists in the world than there are people. That's why the hot-button issues in the American Church today are purity issues: how to keep women in their proper submissive place "according to the Scriptures", how to keep gay people out of the church, how to ward off theological incorrectness, how to restore America to Christian values, and how to become the perfectly successful Christian family, couple, husband, wife, child in six easy, biblical steps. How can we become clean and avoid the unclean?

That's also why "The Left Behind" series of books is so popular in our day. They probably wouldn't sell if - by some wild stretch of the imagination - God actually does what he says he'll do and somehow saves the world. Why, for these books to work, you have to have some who make it and some who don't, some who are raptured, and some who are left behind, some who are clean, and some who are not. That's the very premise of the series. And that's why people like them so much.

Without even knowing it, you and I get wooed into the popular Christian culture within which evil has for a long time wrapped itself up in disguise. And we are sucked right into taking up a worldview that places great emphasis upon personal purity, so-called Christian values, and knowing the apocalyptic signs of the times...

...all the while God-loved human beings are left by the side of the road crying, "Unclean!...Unclean!"

Poor people. Abused people. Hungry people. Marginalized people. People of color, or some despised ethnic group. Old people pushed aside by the young. Single mothers. Crack babies. Children growing up in crime-infested neighborhoods turning to gangs for belonging. People who cannot yet believe in God in a world filled with so much darkness, hatred and pain. Our own children caught in the web of materialism. People who live in the land of our political enemies. Lepers and rag men all.

As a Christian, I must confess to you that I have been taught much more about the sin of having dirty thoughts than I have been taught about the sin of standing apart from ostracized people. I have heard far more about the importance of the doctrine of justification by faith than I have heard about any doctrine of never using a prejudicial name when referring to another of God's children. I know much more about how to pray than I do about how to love a Muslim person. I am much more highly skilled at memorizing Bible passages than I am at working hard to understand what another person is going through. I feel much more comfortable holding my Bible in my hand than I do holding the hand of a man dying of AIDS.

And so Jesus walks into our lives today. He invites us to come and discover another way of being Christian. Not a way that divides and discards people along the path. But a way that steps across boundaries, and includes everyone in the promises of God. And in the story of the leper, Jesus gives us three gifts to mull over. Three gifts to put to use in our own lives.

First, the gift of compassion. To live as a Christian is to work at understanding and identifying with the hopes and the heartaches of others.

Second, the gift of CHOOSING to make things clean. To see the possibility of redemption in every human circumstance, and to believe that God will win!

And third, the gift of touch.

Early on in my ministry, a young 35-year old woman - a wife and mother of two beautiful children - was diagnosed with a deadly form of leukemia. Her only hope was a bone marrow transplant, but even that was a long-shot. After lengthy consideration, Patti decided to go ahead and give it a try.

I remember her first day in Boston's Beth Israel Hospital when they shaved off her hair and prepared her for the chemotherapy that would kill her own bone marrow. She showed me her small room where she would live in isolation for many weeks, able to communicate with others only through a wall of glass to ward off the risk of catching something from them. Over the weeks that ensued, I was touched by the moments when I came to visit and saw Patti valiantly talking over an intercom with her children in the next room. Her fingers traced figures on the glass wall, and their fingers followed along. Sometimes they would press their cheeks together - the glass in-between - and always, Patti would kiss them goodbye, through the glass.

One day, many weeks later, Bob called me and said the transplant was a failure. Patti was dying. I sped down to Boston and rushed to her room. It was no longer necessary to stay on the other side of the glass. And when I came through the opening, I saw a remarkable sight. Patti lay in her bed with her children in her arms, stroking their heads and telling them it was going to be okay. And they touched their mother's face, and kissed her cheek, and Patti looked radiant.

One of the most powerful of all the gifts God has given us is the gift of human touch. For by it, distances are crossed, divisions melt away, and no one is left beside the side of the road crying, "Unlean!...Unclean!