Sermon: Gathered to be Sent

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.      

Junk Food - Sacred Food

Deuteronomy

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

“Junk Food – Sacred Food”

            As we enter in this sacred journey together, I am glad that on this first Sunday, we have a mission component to our worship service.  I personally think that the Souper Bowl of Caring is genius and completely God inspired.  To think, this started as a small movement, a youth pastor in a church looking at culture, looking at the world all around us, and asking the question, how can we be a faithful people of God in and amongst this world in which we live?  Before becoming overwhelmed with all the issues of the world, God whispered and directed, Pastor Brad Smith, specifically towards Superbowl Sunday. 

As a child, I loved watching football with my dad, but over the years, I have drifted away and really only focus any attention to the game on Superbowl Sunday.    I have many fond memories of Superbowls past from those days watching the big game with my dad, to youth group gatherings where we would play games as we watched the game together, or as an adult, gathering with friends.  Over the years, things changed, and more and more attention was moved away from the game to the commercials.  And then, one year, I remember on the news that a 30 second commercial was running for a million dollars.

 I think at that point in my life it all clicked and connected and the inner faithful part of me questioned this use of money.  What!  That’s a lot of money to run a commercial for Doritos, M&Ms, and Coke.  I might have thought about how this just did not make sense, but I did not know how to respond.  I have absolutely no control over how businesses operate and they have every right to spend their money how they want to. 

            And perhaps that’s why I think the Souper Bowl of Caring is so God inspired.  For this one youth pastor, he sought a way, not to stop the commercials, but to respond to this inner calling that so many of us feel.  That’s a lot of money to spend on commercials that are selling food that – well, is junk.  Yes, very tasty, but junk.  And so, instead of condemning the culture, he found a way to walk along side and helped people connect a day of football which incorporates lots and lots of food, to the reality that a lot of people right here in our own communities are going hungry.  Would people prayerfully consider bringing in a can of soup for the local soup kitchen, or contribute a dollar towards the local feeding programs.  He invited people to faithfully think about the way in which we celebrate this day, with parties, and food, and junk food, and commercials that cost way too much money.  This year they are 4.5 million.  He asked us to prayerfully consider taking a step away from our own celebrations and make a contribution towards feeding others. 

            What started twenty-five years ago as a local movement is now a national day of giving raising over 8.5 million dollars last year.  Their vision statement is the following:  To transform the time around the Super Bowl into the nation's largest celebration of giving and serving.  One person’s spiritual creativity has been a gift to so many people over the past twenty-five years. 

            Food, we Presbyterians love to eat.  And we are also very good at feeding others.  But can you imagine, if in our faith, we were restricted as to what we could or could not eat?  Various faith practices have food restrictions, whether it is pork, beef, alcohol, or caffeine and that is just to name a few.  Our first reading today from Deuteronomy is an example of food restrictions.  At one point in time, people of God were not to eat any of these unclean foods.  In my own life, I’ve always just eaten the foods that I like.  I’ve never really examined food in my life to what God would or would not like me to eat.  My church, my faith tradition, has not given me restrictions on what I can and cannot eat.  My mom, at least, did her best to teach me to eat healthy, and to not have my dessert before dinner.  But that’s about the extent of it.  

So, can we even relate to this issue that Paul is addressing?  We purchase or food at the grocery store and I, for one, have never worried about it being dedicated to an idol.  We could look at it from the angel of how sports have become our modern day idols and all the junk food we eat while watching these games is part of the sacrificial worship we do while watching our games.  But, I’m not going to go there.

Instead, I think the real issue in this text is that food is not just food but can be a symbolic representation of our spiritual selves.  We are what we eat,  I learned that when I was rather young.  But does food impact our soul as well?  Paul is saying here that it can, depending on how strong our faith is.  In the case of food being sacrificed to idols, the food is then eaten, either in the temple or sold in the markets.  The food is just food but it carries with it a symbolic meaning of is intended purpose. 

I have various friends that are very specific about what they will and will not eat.  For them, food is not just food, food is a part of their life practice, part of their philosophy, part of their faith practice.  More and more people are buying organic fruits and vegetables or free range meets.  I attended a Vegan wedding a few years ago, several of my friends are becoming vegetarians and more and more people are on gluten free diets.  Various movements are being practiced by people, such as buying only local food, which means not purchasing food that has to travel more than 100 miles to get to your store.  Farmers Markets are a huge draw in the summer months as people seek to purchase the freshest produce. 

What does food mean to us?  Throughout the Biblical story, food has often had greater meaning then just what we need to eat.  Jesus gathered with people over a meal.  Food represents hospitality.  Food is essential to our celebrations: Thanksgiving, birthdays, Christmas and Easter.  What symbolic meaning does food have for us as spiritual people?  I know for myself, I have been living on a processed food diet for most of my life.  I am seeking to grow in my own spiritual practice of sacred eating.  Of being more intentional about what I eat and how I feed not just my body but my soul. 

            It is no accident that God uses food to meet us in this sacrament that we call Communion.  God told the people when they fled from Egypt to remember the Passover and to celebrate and to remember once they were not a people and now they are a people, once they were slaves in Egypt and now they are free.  As a spiritual people, God continues to use food not just as food but as a symbol of who we are.  We can argue whether this bread and this cup are just bread and cup or the real presence or symbolic presence of Jesus.  But more than that, we come to this table to remember that we do not journey in this world like locusts tearing through a cornfield, but that we are created to be a community, a community that has a God given purpose to be set apart for sacred living.  Sacred living where we walk alongside our culture and listen to those places where our souls sit uneasy.  Are there places, such as the high cost of commercials for food, that make your soul uneasy?  Take, eat, and remember, that God is calling us to listen and respond. 

            Ann Weems writes this:  Ordinary bread made by ordinary people is holy when we take and eat and remember.  Ordinary grapes taken by ordinary people made into ordinary wine is holy when we hold it to our lips and rink and remember.  This bread…remember his body was given for us.  This wine…remember his blood was poured out for us.  Bread and wine, from ordinary to holy, Remember. 

            Food is just food, but as spiritual people, our creating God recreates food as we gather in this sacred time and are blessed by this covenant of Grace, Forgiveness, Renewal, and Love.  Amen.