Podcast of "Looking for Jesus" (MP3)
Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-11, 20c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts
be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
There are times reading the
scriptures that the simplicity of a phrase becomes more than the sum of its
parts. I find this glorious grace in the phrase “Everyone is looking for you.” Jesus
has gone to be alone with the Father and when his new companions find him they
declare “Everyone is looking for you.” They mean everyone in town, in truth
they have no idea how right they are.
At the beginning of our reading, we’ve
reached the end of a long day; this is the day that started with last week’s
reading of Jesus teaching in the synagogue. This is the day he teaches with authority
in his words. With his words he exorcises a demon from a possessed man. His
words carry so much authority his deeds flow from his mouth. That is an
authority beyond the scribes.
After synagogue worship, Jesus,
with James and John, go to the home of Simon and Andrew. It’s a
multigenerational setting with at least two generations and perhaps even more
groups of parents and children. Since Simon and Andrew joined Jesus the
previous day and since there is no work on the Sabbath, there may well not have
been enough to go around. Still, the call to hospitality rings loud, so with
the mouths to feed at home; Simon and Andrew bring three more.
There are three more mouths at
dinner while Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever. Here’s something
interesting about fevers. Deuteronomy 28 brings warnings about what will befall
the nation should they be disobedient to the Lord. The blights include curses
to the countryside and curses to the city. There are curses to the grain basked
and the kneading trough. Neither the family nor the livestock nor the crop will
be fruitful. There will be blight and terror in the household.
Verse 22 offers this specific
curse, “The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and
inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which
will plague you until you perish.” Yes, that’s right, fever. The same fever
mentioned in Deuteronomy 28:22 is found in verse Mark 1:31. Jesus goes to her
and helps her up; he lifts her back to health. The fever leaves. The fever
leaves and she begins to wait on them. The Sabbath is not yet over, and she
serves him.
Humanity’s sin is figured in the
body of a wrecked woman who lies sick to the world, so ill she cannot rise.
Jesus comes not only taking her illness, but taking the curse of sin from the
world. This little note would not have gotten past the people of Israel . They who knew the law best would have
seen this connection.
Just to add fuel to the fire of
biblical injunctions and social conventions, touching the ill is a taboo,
especially for a person who is not a member of the family. For a strange man to
touch a woman who is not a member of the family is also against the mores of
the time. Then for him to heal and her to serve; each does work on the Sabbath making
a not a trifecta but a superfecta of prohibited behavior.
This is the simple point, Jesus
breaks the rules. Jesus does things that no other person can do, not because he
is above the law but because he is the law. He is the living law teaching us a
new way to live together and take care of one another. He teaches us that even
when it is unexpected, even when it is difficult to fathom, we are called upon
to serve one another. Jesus shows us what it means to be our brothers’ keeper.
In fact, the word that our bible[1]
translates as “to wait upon” is where we get our word deacon. In the
Presbyterian Church, deacons are “ministers of compassion” sharing the grace
and peace of God in the world through service. It’s not an administrative vocation
like the Ruling Elder, it’s a passionate call to serve. It is truly a wonderful
ministry and I thank the ladies of the church who have taken this ministry as
their own to serve the body of Christ and the world.
But Jesus isn’t quite ready to tell
the world who he is yet. So while this gospel begins proclaiming this the “gospel
about Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” Jesus is not ready for the others in the
narrative to know this yet. So as soon as the sun sets and the Sabbath ends he
heals many and drives out demons, he silences the demons so they will not share
the news they know.
This tells us something special
too, this tells us that the demons know the truth of the Son of God; the demons
know Jesus is the Christ. Often we hear people who “aren’t sure there even is a
God.” We also hear that evil’s greatest trick is to make it so people don’t
think the devil exists. Combine the two and there’s a really big trick: The demons
who believe in God have convinced people that neither they nor God exist. Now
that’s the big lie.
Yet, somewhere deep inside most of
us is a place that longs for peace, longs for connection. For many people, the
desire to seek God takes them to a solitary place where they seek connection
not with something but with nothing. They seek a peace that does not exist in
the natural world and they use nature as that focus. Many people would rather
believe in creation than in the creator. It give us a choice, do we believe in
something or do we believe in nothing. Friends, we believe not in something but
someone, we believe in Jesus our Lord and Savior.
Jesus wakes early in the morning
and while everyone else sleeps he goes to a solitary place to pray. He doesn’t
seek to commune with nature, he seeks nature’s creator. Even Jesus needs some
alone time with the Father, and if that’s true for him it is infinitely more
true for us.
When the four find him they tell
him everyone is looking for him. What does he do? Does he set up a base camp
and open a shrine or a temple? No. Jesus tells his friends it is time to go
somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so he can preach there also. That is why
he has come, not so that people can come to him, but so that he can go to the
people. We know that we need to seek God, but before that happens, before that
can happen; the Lord Jesus, God who walked the earth, sought us first.
According to the Christian Century
Magazine:
The GenXer [that is someone from the
Post-Baby-Boom Generation, someone born between 1962 and 1980] is suspicious of institutions, especially
religious institutions. He focuses on personal experience in the spiritual
quest, and on a sense of suffering expressed in a psychological and spiritual
crisis of meaning. The GenXer also accepts the ambiguity that may be found in
the fusion of sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual, orthodox and
blasphemous in popular culture. He does not reject or dismiss faith tradition
or religious institutions, but they are not the only sources of spirituality.
The implications are clear: If traditional Christianity is to engage the spiritual
quest of the GenXer, it must attend to the ways in which these young adults
draw on the church and popular culture.[2]
This was written nearly fifteen
years ago, but considering the bulk of people who define their heavenly belief
system as “spiritual, not religious,” it still rings true. As the article says,
they don’t reject everything out of hand, but they connect it with what they
know better than Jesus, the world around them. They seek connection, connection
to the world and to something bigger.
Our gospel says everyone was
looking for Jesus. In our time it may be more accurate to say everyone is
looking for their own personal Valhalla or
Nirvana or Heaven or whatever. So if everyone is looking for Personal Jesus,
what do we do to help them find him?
The answer is as easy as this,
share. It is up to us to share God with the world. We are called through the
community of God to have a relationship with the Lord that came for us first.
We are called to worship a God who seems to break the rules which appeals to
many but in truth has broken the mold.
We worship God who came not to be
served but to serve. In response we serve one another, the community, and the
world. Today we do this not only with our work, words, tithes, and offerings;
we do this through the Souper Bowl[3]
offering.
We are called to reach out. We are
called to share our treasure, sure, but that’s not all. Jesus of Nazareth, a
man without earthly treasure, shared his time and his talent. Jesus shared his
fully-human fully-divine being with the world and with us.
This too is our call. We are to
welcome people with hospitality. We are to share our time. And when the time
comes, we are to take time and recharge our batteries through praying. We are
to take our talents to the people who come and to the world that doesn’t know
what’s coming.
This is what we share. Why do we do
this? Why do we share ourselves with the world? Simple, that is why Jesus has
come, so that’s why he sends us too. I can’t promise this will always be
comfortable. I can’t promise you will always feel ready when the time comes.
Just know that God does not call the equipped, but equips the call.
And as always, remember, we are to
seek God but God seeks us first, that is why he came.
[1] This is
from the New International Version. As for me, I prefer the NRSV’s translation
which says “she began to serve them.”
[2] Foster,
Charles R. "Paying Attention to Youth Culture," Christian Century,
December 9, 1998, 1186. Parenthetic definition of GenXer is mine.
[3] See
http://souperbowl.org
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