Isaiah
40
Mark
1
“Gathered to be Sent”
Our lives are filled with various rhythms. The sun rises and sets and the majority of us
follow the rhythm with being awake and going to sleep. Depending on where we are in our lives, we
have the rhythm of school or work and hopefully days of rest within our
weeks. We have the rhythm of the
seasons, knowing that spring does follow winter gives a lot of us hope that
this cold days will, hopefully, soon be over.
Our rhythm of life is enhanced by various holidays that are scattered
throughout the year.
As a
people of faith, we also have rhythms that guide us through our weeks and
years. We gather on Sundays to center
ourselves in God’s presence, for some it is a time of recharging our batteries
in order to move through the week ahead.
For some it is a time of prayer, sharing of concerns and joys, and
sacred rest. Together, it is a part of
our rhythm, our time to gather and worship.
We also have the seasons of the church year that break us out of the
ordinary, such as Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Advent, and Christmas.
Today’s
Gospel reading is one of rhythms. Jesus
and the disciples have gathered in the Synagogue for a time of worship,
teaching, and learning. As the time of
worship concludes, Jesus is called to come immediately to the home of Peter’s
mother-in-law. As Jesus enters the home,
he finds that she is ill with a fever and immediately, heals her. As the day progresses, we are told at night,
people come from the entire city to be healed.
One commentator shared that the reason it is at dark is that this is
when the Sabbath has ended. Once people
are released from the Sabbath regulations they are able to come and be
healed. Jesus sets the course for one
set of life pattern while the majority of the city still follows the rhythms of
their tradition. Sometimes, the patterns
of our lives are so ingrained within us, we don’t even realize that they may be
keeping us from wholeness.
As the
scripture continues, we learn that early in the morning, Jesus separates
himself from everyone else, he goes alone to a deserted place to pray. As his disciples realize he is missing, they
set off to look for him and once he is found, they want him to come back and
heal more people, but Jesus responds that it is time to move on to the next
town. It is time to share God’s presence
with others, to move on to a new place.
This pattern of faith living is a little more challenging for us. For many, we set aside time on Sunday to
gather as a faith community to worship, but that day has ended and Jesus still
sets aside time in his life for prayer, for entering into God’s sacred
presence. Finding that time in our busy
lives is so challenging. In order to
make this time part of our daily rhythm, people use various devotions books or
in today’s world of technology, you can even have a daily prayer, or Bible
verse, or devotion emailed to you. Over
the next few weeks, I would like to see if there is enough interest to start a
weekly Bible Study or monthly study group.
Beginning practices of gathering throughout the week then moves us into
the next pattern of being sent to serve God.
In just
my two weeks with you all, I have already heard some really “God Moment”
stories of how people have been called to serve God both within your local
faith community and out in the world around us.
In Jesus’ daily living, he is establishing a model for
how people of faith are called to live.
We gather to worship and then we go out to be present with each
other. They start with someone familiar,
this is Peter’s mother-in-law, and then they are present for the community in
which Peter’s wife’s family lives.
Perhaps this is also Peter’s community as well, but there is still a
sense of being in a familiar community.
Then Jesus spends time alone with God in prayer and then pushes his
disciples to move into the less familiar.
I think this is where most of us get a little uncomfortable. When I was an interim pastor in CT, the choir
once a year would go to the woman’s prison in Danbury and lead worship. Little did I know, the pastor was also
suppose to preach. What? Me?
You want me to go into a prison and preach? I was shaking in my boots. No way!
But I couldn’t tell my choir that.
I’m not sure how many times they told me that I had to have my driver’s
license as a form of ID to enter the prison.
Well, that was fine, because I always had my driver’s license with
me. But when we arrived that day, I
could not find my driver’s license. Did
I subconsciously remove it? However my
license disappeared, they still let me in.
We had done a security screening ahead of time, and I think that must
have been when I did not put my license back in my wallet.
Long story short:
I actually enjoyed being a part of the worship service at the
prison. All of this fear, all of this,
not me God, turned into a really amazing experience. In fact, we went back. Not as a choir to lead worship, but one of my
deacons put together a four week self esteem program for the women. So, we not only were present in worship, we
began the formation of relationships, of hearing their stories, of being
present with them in their pain, loss, failures, and hopes for a fresh start
once they were released. God calls us to
the familiar but we are also called out of our comfort zones to enter into
communities that might make us extremely uncomfortable.
We gather in worship to be sent into the world. We gather to be sent to the familiar as well
as the unfamiliar, but we gather to be sent.
This is something that I know you all have been discerning over the past
few years. Where is God calling you to
serve? Are there rhythms of life holding
you back? Are there patterns of
tradition that might be holding you back such as the people that came to be
healed only after the Sabbath ended?
I wanted to spend a little more time with Peter’s
mother-in-law, but sometimes sermon writing takes you in a completely different
direction than planned. As Jesus enters
the house of this woman, she is healed, and immediately she serves them. For some, this can be a challenging text as
women struggle with traditional and untraditional roles. But, we have to put ourselves back two
thousand years and understand that Jesus healed a woman. Jesus knew she had value and worth and is
ever bit a child of God as his male disciples.
As she is healed, she serves. We don’t know how any of the other people
that are healed later that night respond.
But we know she serves. She
encounters the sacred in her life and she is restored to her fullness, she is
restored to use her God given gifts, her purpose in life, she responds not by
taking the rest of the day off, but by serving.
As we seek to find wholeness in our lives, as we encounter God moments
and the sacred presence, we too may find ourselves in those moments where we
know we are called to serve. Not out of
obligation, not because no one else will do it, but because we are restored to
a fullness that calls us into serving.
As a congregation seeking to be present with God here
within this place and out in the world around us, let us find the rhythms of
our faith living that energize us, that heal us, that give us meaning and
purpose, that open our souls to our God given gifts and then, let us
serve. Amen.
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