RESTORING COMMUNITY

Restoring Community

For close to twenty years I worked in hospitals. Assigned to areas of Neurosurgical Intermediate and Intensive Cares, Cardovascular and Neonatal Intensive Cares, as well as Emergency room and Ventilator Care. 
From this experience came the observation that once one is considered ill or infirm, the disease often assumes or becomes the identity of the person. They are no longer Larry or Jane or Bobby or Katelin. They are the lung cancer in 409. Their prognosis is their destiny. Their status is ostracization from the flow of routine society. 
A sort of out of sight out of mind relationship occurs between them and the rest of the "functioning community"
This was particularly true of Jesus' time in Judea. The sick, especially the leper was an outcast an outsider.
How did Jesus cross that line of ostracizing for the benefit of individuals in community?
Do we have "lepers" today that we ostracize. How might we follow Jesus' example to heal community one soul at a time?

Mark 1:40-45
1:40 A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean."

1:41 Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!"

1:42 Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

1:43 After sternly warning him he sent him away at once,

1:44 saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them."

1:45 But 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.