Kathleen and I recently returned from our visit to Asia. We visited the city of Beijing, which I have described to some as overwhelming with its purported 30 million residents and its unbridled economic expansion. We visited South Korea where we had the opportunity to visit with our some Dominique who is flourishing there teaching English as a second language. And we visited Bangkok and area spending time with our nephew Mark who has lived there now for nearly four years working as an engineer for a Celestica, a Canadian hi-tech company with a large manufacturing installation in Pattaya.

Beijing, Seoul, and Bangkok are huge cities and negotiating the crowds and the traffic happens very differently than in Ottawa. Apparently, there is no road rage in Asia as there would be if people here drove as they do there. The etiquette around space and right of way is very different from here. One afternoon in Beijing Kathleen and I were crossing a major intersection on a green light- which means little there, and I insisted on my right of way before an oncoming car. The driver expected me to jump out of the way. At the last minute the driver screeched to a halt inches from me and was reared-ended by the car behind him. I raised my arm in a sign of victory and then the both of us disappeared as quickly as we could into the crowd.

A three week visit, of course, gave us little opportunity to get much of a sense of the uniqueness of each place, and, of course, language differences are a huge barrier to any real communication with the people who live there. As a outsider, I felt very much the isolation of being on the outside looking in with little understanding of the social dynamics which were driving the daily lives of the people I saw.

Most us feel like strangers in a foreign land when we hear biblical readings. Here and now, we stand in a very different time and place, from most any biblical text you might choose. There is a surface story which we can understand- this morning the healing of a paralytic man in Mark's gospel, but the deeper layers of meaning escape us without a lot of digging.

I suppose one of the jobs of the preacher is to do some of that digging for you. As believers we know that the digging is worthwhile because, despite the very real differences of language and culture, time and place, there is a vast similarity in human personal and social experience whether one is living in first century Capernaum or twenty-first century Beijing or Ottawa. Despite these differences, the divine-encounter is the same.

In her sermon last week, Linda mentioned a watershed work of biblical scholarship by Ched Myers and made reference to one of his best known books called Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark`s Story of Jesus,( Obis Books, New York, 2002). I would like you to remember that phrase- binding the strong man. It is the underlying theme of the entire gospel of Mark- and we will be reading from the gospel of Mark for several months as we work our way through Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.

In her sermon on the healing of the leper she underlined something which is not obvious from a casual reading of the text- that Jesus actions of healing were regarded as both subversive and blasphemous by the religious authorities. Jesus acts of healing as described in Mark's gospel were not just about the personal deliverance of one person from a condition of illness, In fact, the healing acts of Jesus have to do with the non-violent confrontation with the existing social power structures.

Keep in mind as we read through the gospel of Mark that there are two teams lined up against one another throughout. On Team A we find Jesus and the poor people and on Team B we find all the big shots in society: the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, and the Romans. Everything that Jesus does questions Team B about its use and abuse of power. Jesus stands alongside the poor, and says to the power brokers of his time, Can you see life from our perspective? Do you truly understand what is going on in our lives? Do you see what effect your actions have on us ? Do you care? Do you care?

Myers makes a point worth repeating since it helps us see just how intentionally aligned Jesus is with the social have-nots of his day. Let me explain. Mark uses the term "the crowds" repeatedly. As you know the gospels were written first in Greek and the Greek term used in Mark for "crowds" is "ochlos". This is significant because normally the New Testament Greek word for the people or the crowds is laos from which we derive the English word a"laity".

The famous South Korean female biblical scholar, Ahn Byung-mu, has done an exhaustive word study demonstrating that the term ochlos found in Mark, means, the people of the land, the lower class, the poor uneducated masses, those ignorant of the Hebraic Law of Moses and therefore, outside of God`s favour.

The fact that Jesus is among the ochlos all the time is hugely important for our understanding of what God was up to in Jesus Christ. The leper was found among the ochlos, as is the paralytic man of today's text. We know just how poor the ochlos were because they lived in mud huts- no problem pushing aside the mud and straw on the roof to lower him down to Jesus.

There is simply no getting around it, Jesus in Mark's gospel consistently identifies himself with the dispossessed - we usually use the word poor.

And this is where I have trouble and no doubt most you do as well. We ask "Who are the poor?" Many of us here don't think of ourselves as poor at least in economic terms. Nor do we consider ourselves to be entirely powerless. In these respects we are not poor. So if Jesus is for the poor what does he think of me? If Jesus were to appear here today with whom would he stand? Would he be beside me? If Jesus were to say to me, "Go and stand amongst the poor and you will find me.", would I know where to find him?

This is precisely where we twenty-first century westerners need to do some serious work. We need to determine who the ochlos of our time are. The categories of the much simpler society of first century Palestine, simply don't work for us. Who are the ochlos of our time?

South Korean biblical scholars may be able to help us out here. In trying to answer that question for themselves they have drawn a term from their own cultural and historical experience. They use the term minjung. Minjung are any and all who stand outside the circle of power and influence, those for whom dominant society has found no place, those who are specifically targeted for exclusion by their cultural, religious and political systems.

If we use this definition then you will see that the minjung are different from one society to another, one age to another. In western societies like ours we hear the voices of those who say they are amongst the minjung: aboriginal peoples, peoples of colour, refugees, prisoners, women, gay, lesbian and transgendered people, people with mental and physical disabilities, all make a case for being among the minjung.

And when we have determined who are the minjung amongst us then we should go on to ask ourselves the corollary question, "Who in our society create the minjung? Who are the powerful who make the rules of dominant society? In some countries it is clearly the military elite, in some it is religious authorities or parties, in some it is corporations and ideological elites.

I think that Mark's gospel is bringing us a Jesus who asks us these questions and wants to know what answers we have.

One of the things about Jesus which is both intriguing and frustrating is that he refused to allow himself to be set up as the leader of a revolutionary movement. He stands with the poor but does not set about organizing the for political purposes. Jesus offered no political platform nor styled himself as the leader of any movement of social reform even those he challenged social norms constantly.

But he did stand as a sign to all, whatever their social place, of the possibility of liberation and transformation. And because he did that so now it is the work of the church to do the same. Over the centuries the church has been many things - a powerful instrument of social control, an enforcer of public morality, a bulwark for the maintenance of privilege, but it has seldom done a good job of being subversive of systems of domination which diminish human lives.

Jesus said to the paralytic man, "Son, your sins are forgiven." And when the outraged Scribes challenged him on taking a prerogative belonging only to God ( and to them!), the forgiving of sins, Jesus replies, "Which is easier to say to the paralytic, 'your sins are forgiven' or to say, 'Stand up and take your mat and walk?'

Jesus did not say this because he believed that all the ills which beset us are the result of our own sin. Quite the opposite. I take Jesus to be saying "You are all forgiven, you are always forgiven, God has already set you free, now you lay hold of that freedom, stand up, take hold of your freedom and walk".

But we don`t want to forgive ourselves ( or possibly we don't know how to) and we certainly don't want to forgive others. And so our bondage continues. In today's reading from Isaiah we read of God's vision for Israel, "I am about to do a new thing," he says ( Isaiah 43:19), "I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins" (43:25). And what happens to God's gift - nothing, no response. Silence. And so the violence and alienation goes on. Not because is hard and unrelenting but because the people are.

And things have changed little since. We enjoy being enslaved, thank you very much.

We create our own personal and social structures of oppression. Jesus is saying, "You people, you create these artificial distinctions between what is spiritual and what is not, who is in and who is out, you make the political and religious systems which exclude people.

But in God's heart and mind, and in God's intention you are one, you are one people, one body, my body. I made you, I love.

Jesus left us with a vision of God's mind for us and the church has clung to it from the beginning: humanity is one indivisible body. We are Christ's body and our work is to liberate all persons and societies from clutches of the strong man, all the forces which enforce domination. That is the what salvation means for us Christians- it is dynamically personal and collective.

And that is why the Eucharist is so important to us. It embodies our social vision. When we come together around the table we are one, all distinctions about who is in and who is out are left behind, all ideas about who is sinner and who is not are irrelevant. We know full well that the reality in our hearts and minds and in the ways we treat one another is far from this vision.

But what counts most for we believers is how God sees us. What counts is what God sees when he looks upon us. That's what counts most- and let us never forget it!