I begin this morning with reference to three incidents this past week. The first is a sanction leveled by Major League Baseball at a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves named John Rocker. The sanction fined Rocker $20,000 and forbade him from going to training camp opening in two weeks or to go near the Atlanta Braves team until May 1. Now, John Rocker played in the World Series against the New York Mets last October, and when asked of his opinion of New York, and whether he might in the future ever play for a New York team he answered as follows: "I would retire first." (Most of us could sympathize with that.) But Rocker goes on. "It's the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the Number 7 train to the ball park, looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, and some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude whose just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20 year old mom with four kids. It's depressing. And the biggest things I don't like about New York are the foreigners. I'm not a big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?" Incident number one.

Incident number two is simply the poignant, shocking and heart rending story of the Boston High School girl, an immigrant from Morocco, attacked, molested, threatened with a slit throat, her clothes torn off on an Orange Line train this last week because she walked hand in hand with one of her girl friends from school. Some of her schoolmates interpreted this activity, normal for her native culture, as that of a lesbian-a mistaken identity, as it turns out-but its consequences in any case frightening, horrifying, very, very sad.

The third incident: the tragic shooting of an African-American policeman in Providence, Rhode Island, by two of his professional colleagues. Another case of mistaken identity, really. Could it be a consequence of what we come to call "racial profiling"? A black man with a gun in a violent incident cannot be an off-duty cop helping law enforcement officials; he has to be one of the criminals. I don't know. And one dare not jump to any conclusions here for we suspect the two Caucasian policeman who shot Sargeant Cornel Young, Jr. are themselves numbed, aghast, paralyzed by the nature of the incident.

Now why bring these images to bear? Why begin a message following the reading of a New Testament healing story with references to social pathology and communal breakdown? It is because this tremendous healing event described by Mark is not primarily the account of a medical miracle. It is not offered to us as magical proofs of our Lord's divinity. It is not meant as a description of what we might call spiritual or faith healing. It is not an illustration of the so-called supernatural overwhelming the natural. Not in the least. The reason we set the images of broken community, John Rocker, the young woman from Boston High School, the officer from the Police Force in Providence, next to this woman raised form her sickbed, healed from her fever-"fire in the bones," the literal translation-is because in the religious culture where her healing takes place she is perceived as a bearer of evil, her sickness an affliction not only laying waste to her, but a sickness separating her, excluding her, marking her as deficient, abnormal, cursed, diabolical, damned. You see, for Mark the fever, the disease, the illness, the sickness is not simply a matter of body chemistry going berserk, a virus doing its virulent thing, a bacteria heating up the immune system. The sickness represents a culturally symbolic curse creating a chasm, a barrier, a wall, a barbed wire fence between the sufferer and the wider community. The woman's illness shows her as God-forsaken. It screams of alienation from the love of God. It triggers fearful and terror-stricken communal resistance and rejection. And thus, when Jesus raises the woman from her bed healed, Mark, in the most vivid image he can imagine, illustrates for us the restoration of the woman, not simply to fullness of her health, but even more importantly to a wholeness recovering her ties, her connections, her integration-Lord, how can we say it?-her full reclamation into a human community with the barriers down, the prejudices dissolved, the discrimination blotted out. Mark describes for us the kind of world we live in when the love of Christ infuses it. We see here the purpose of God to affirm us, each and every one, as a full participant in a community of grace and love.

What a message! Do you see what it means? The New Testament confirms something we know already: the things that really kill us are the things that cut us from others. The things that do us in are the things threatening to isolate, to stigmatize, to diminish our full humanity in the eyes of others and what we may believe to be the eyes of God. When Mark shows Jesus marching right into the midst of the diseased and socially rejected he intends to assure us that should any of us be afflicted with some illness, some virus, some physical characteristic that the general public either stigmatizes or counts a disability, while not changing the biological components of our condition, Mark assures us that while the world may be against us, our humanity is in no way diminished. God is on our side and so is God's church.

You see, in the world Jesus Christ brings, there is no disease, no illness, no purported social sickness, no prejudice or public stigma, whether it be a prison record, a troubled, tormented, ethical dilemma, a past history eating us up, a bout with drugs or alcohol, a blunder with sex, no anguished or even furious division with family or friend-nothing that can stifle the love of God for us regardless of what others consider our condition. Be assured, whatever our status, our mood, our thought, our action the grace of God wipes away the lines we draw to put each other down, set one another apart. We are healed. And honestly, that is why on the back of every bulletin this morning, and every Sunday morning, "we affirm each individual as a child of God, and recognize that we are called to be like one reconciled body with many members, seeking with others of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, gender, physical or mental ability and sexual identity to journey together toward the promised realm of God . . . relying on the healing, unconditional nature of God's love and grace . . ."

Hear that? Do you believe it? In a world where John Rocker makes the pages of Sports Illustrated with his bigotry and contempt, where a young woman gets assaulted and molested under suspicion for her sexual orientation, where a Black policeman coming to the aid of his compatriots can be confused with a criminal-we have to believe this great news. It signifies our hope. It illustrates our faith. And, yes, remember when the woman gains healing, what she does? She serves. She serves. Indeed. The healed, restored, reconciled, just community claims our service. And as we gather at this Communion table this morning we know in a rough and tumble, broken world there is no riskier nor higher calling.

So, healed? For what? Of course. For Community. For service.