Epiphany
5B 2015
Father Adam Trambley
February 8, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
Today’s gospel provides us with what we might call “A Day in
the Life of Jesus.” Walking through the
day with him offers us insight into how we might follow him in the various
aspects of our own lives.
We start today with a summary pointing backwards to what we
read last week. Jesus spent the first
part of the day in the synagogue teaching.
Then a man with an unclean spirit showed up, and Jesus cast out the
spirit and healed the man. What an
unclean spirit is doing in a synagogue, or in a church, is a sermon for another
time, but today we start by recognizing that when it was time for synagogue,
Jesus showed up and offered his gifts.
Sometimes the use of these gifts was planned, like his teachings might
have been. Sometimes the use of these
gifts was unplanned, like when someone showed up with significant needs who
demanded attention whether Jesus or anyone else was ready to help.
Now most of you could probably write the next paragraph of
the sermon yourself as you think about implications for us today. As much fun as it might be, though, I won’t
randomly call on people to preach a sentence or two, but I’ll just offer a few
reflections. If we want to follow Jesus,
we need to come and join our faith community for worship. Now it probably didn’t snow six inches with
an inch of sheer ice underneath it in Capernaum that morning, and, since God
made freezing rain, I’m sure he understands that sometimes we don’t make it. On those days we can reading the Bible and
saying some prayers. In general,
however, we as a parish need people present offering their gifts in ways both
planned and especially unplanned.
Everybody has some role to play in keeping the life of our parish going,
whether in worship, in social events, in outreach, in prayer, in generosity, in
music, or in any number of others ways.
The body of Christ needs all its members engaged or it can’t function
properly in the same ways that our bodies can’t function properly if our heart
is bad, or our kidneys are weak, or our arm is broken, or our eyes are
closed.
Equally important, however, is our presence for those
unplanned needs that arise. Probably the
most powerful opportunities for ministry, and the times when miracles flow most
freely, is when people just show up and demand our love. The more of us that can say a kind work, can
offer a prayer, can get someone a cup of coffee, can give somebody a ride to
where they need to be, or can stop and actually listen to them, the more people
will experience the love of God here, and for some of them that may be the
first time they will have experienced that love in a long time. Our prayers to touch lives are being answered
– people are showing up to be transformed on many different levels – but we
need to be present to offer whatever gifts we have if we want to reach the
number of people God wants us to love.
From the synagogue, Jesus goes home with Simon and
Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law was sick
with a fever, so Jesus heals her, and then she gives them dinner. This miracle is a little bit funny – if you
want dinner, heal the cook’s fever. But
this passage has two take-aways for us.
Most importantly, when we are home, we are still
ministering. Granted, Jesus isn’t with
his parents, but we can imagine this is his best friends’ house that is like a
second home to Jesus. Jesus is in the
personal sphere where he should be able to eat, rest, let his hair down, wash
his feet, and kick-back. But if somebody
needs him, he loves them and does what they need. Personally, I think this is one of the
hardest examples of Jesus to follow. He
doesn’t wait until after he’s had a snack, or after his show is over, or after
he’s checked his email. He finds out
she’s sick “at once”, and he goes and heals her. When we get home, is our thought, “at once,”
to see what the needs are of those around us and meet them?
The other piece worth mentioning is that Jesus allows
Simon’s mother-in-law to serve everybody after she is healed. Even though we need to start off by reaching
out to others, love and loving service is reciprocal. We need one another. Even Jesus doesn’t do everything for
everybody that night. Those people who
don’t have a hard time focusing on others first need to remember that they need
to stop sometimes and be ministered to, as well. Receiving love can be a loving act. We all need to love and serve, but we also all
need to be loved and to be served sometimes.
At sundown, when the Sabbath is over and people were allowed
to go about their business again, the whole town comes to Jesus to be healed
and to have their demons cast out. Jesus
is offering us an example here for how we act in our more public lives. For some of us this is work, for some it is
school, for some it might be the shopping mall or senior center, for some it
might be the table at Panera or McDonalds or Tic Toc when everyone gathers for
their morning coffee and to solve the world’s problems before lunch. Here again, we see Jesus ministering. Since he is out and about interacting with
people, he is interacting with them in love.
Interestingly enough, these aren’t people he expects to be
disciples. These crowds he is healing
aren’t made up of folks he who will fund his next ministry, or read his next
book, buy his next CD. They aren’t going
to come to church with him. But he loves
them anyway, and his impulse is to reach out in love to them. Everyone in those crowds experiences Jesus,
even if they don’t understand who he is or do anything else with that
experience.
In our public encounters with people, we are also called to
let people experience the love of Jesus through us, regardless of whether or
not they will really understand, or even care.
As Christians, as followers of Jesus, we are called to do things like
build loving relationships and meet people’s basic needs, and to give people a
true sense of how Christians love and care for others. Sometimes this means that we are focusing
more about meeting people’s needs than about getting the best deal, or making
the most money, or being the center of attention, or any of the other things
that our ego likes us to worry about.
Instead, we want people to find healing, or freedom, or love, or an
experience of God because they interacted with us, even in those instances
where the folks involved make it difficult for us to love them, and you all
probably get to interact with some of those folks from time to time. We want everyone who meets a Christian to
walk away better for the experience, just like everyone who met Jesus that
night was blessed by him.
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| Artwork by Elizabeth Wang |
Finally, Jesus goes out very early in the morning, at
oh-dark-thirty, to a deserted place to pray.
Why does he have to get up so early to pray? Because there is too much to do and people
won’t leave him alone otherwise. In the
midst of all of his responsibilities, and as Savior of the world his
responsibilities were fairly considerable, he not only takes, but he makes the
time to connect with his Father. He
needs to spread the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Crowds want to be healed and have demons cast
out and to be fed. His disciples are
hunting him down because they have the crowds asking them for help and they
want don’t want to disappoint all their friends and neighbors. But Jesus knows that he can’t do what he
needs to do if he doesn’t go and pray, and he knows the demands of being the
Messiah well enough to know that if he doesn’t go pray before everyone else
gets up, then he isn’t going to get the chance.
Again, you all probably know where I’m going. If Jesus is the Son of God who is without sin
and loves everybody and he needs to go and pray, how much more do all of us
need to take time to be with God in prayer if we have any hope to live a life
that isn’t a selfish disaster with emotional, physical and spiritual wreckage
piled up in our wake. Prayer isn’t any
easier for us than it was for Jesus – we have plenty of duties and distractions
to pull as away. But God still calls out
to us to have the intimate relationship of prayer with him, and he longs for us
to respond to him. We need to sit down
with our calendars and block out the time, in ink, or we need to set our alarms
and our coffee pots twenty minutes earlier, or we need to set an appointment
with a family member or friend to meet frequently to pray together. If we just pray when we feel like it, we’ll
miss praying when we most need it, and if we can’t find a way to pray when we
are tired, a lot of our prayer time will be God watching us sleep. God is alpha and omega, not A for awake while
we Z-zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
So come to church. Get
involved and use your gifts to build up the Body of Christ in expected ways,
and always be ready to make a difference in someone’s life unexpectedly. Love and serve those in your home with your
first efforts, and then be willing to be loved and served, as well. Ensure that everyone you meet encounters
Christ and his healing and his love through your actions. Then make time to spend with God in prayer,
which strengthens us to accomplish all of the other works which God has given
us to walk in. So have a good day – a
Jesus’ good day.
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