February 8, 2009
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23;
Mark 1:29-39
I had the good fortune to be at a Deans’ meeting this week. Some of you may not know that I serve as the Dean of the Concord River Deanery and as such I am to offer and be part of the Bishops’ extended care for the clergy in this deanery. There are twelve deaneries in our Diocese and so there are thirteen Deans, Jep Streit, Dean of our Diocesan Cathedral, also joins us!
As we gathered this month – we gather seven or eight times a year – Bishop Bud Cederholm led us in a discussion of the gospel for today. After reading the passage, conversation about it ensued. Most of us had, of course, already read it and begun to think about it and what God might be calling us to say in our sermons this week, and we had done a bit of study so the conversation stemmed from that fact. The men began to pronounce what they were going to preach. What struck a few of them was the quote from this passage about “being hunted.” The passage says that Jesus was hunted by Simon and his companions, “hunted!” We spoke of the negative images of being hunted, like a fox with hounds after them, like a criminal who is begin pursued by police, and many other negative images that are associated with being a rector of a parish. We spoke of the feeling that everyone wants “a piece of them,” and that there is always way too much more to do than is possible to do.
But what struck the women deans in this passage – they never got as far as being “hunted” or even thinking about the ministry of Jesus to heal or to spread the good news to the neighboring towns – instead, all of us got stuck on the sentence, “Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.”
Of course, we all know the chauvinist, patriarchal reality of the first century. That a woman would be healed and then get out of her sick bed to serve the men feeds on even the most latent of feminists with righteous indignation. But this passage, we decided, is so much more than a statement of first century social order. It is, we proposed, a statement of how a person of faith responds to contact with Jesus Christ. The unnamed woman got up to serve, to serve! She served by becoming Christlike
We wondered if she might not be the first deacon! We wondered if this woman who was healed on the Sabbath, right after prayers in the synagogue, responded to being healed with the thanksgiving of serving others! Giving of herself for others! People of faith, people who have been richly blessed, healed, restored, forgiven, whatever form God’s blessing takes in their lives, those people of faith respond by serving others.
And deacons are the best example I know of people who respond to their relationship with Jesus by serving others. So the women in the room of Deans wanted to make this unnamed woman – unnamed as are most of the great women in biblical stories – we wanted to make her the first deacon, at least in Mark’s gospel. I bring this up this morning because yesterday Maggie, our Deacon, and Bishop Harris and I met and we decided together that Maggie who serves us so faithfully needs some respite. Her “real job” at Children’s Hospital is particularly demanding right now and her primary Diaconate responsibility as the Minister in charge of the Aids Ministry for Jubilee Ministries in the diocese, including much of our companion relationships with hospitals and schools in Tanzania and Kenya, and planning mission trips for summer to Africa is putting much more demand into her life than she has hours in the day.
One of the easiest ways to give her the time she needs is to give her a month’s leave from Good Shepherd. All her time with us, everything she does – everything! – is done without compensation in terms of money. Her faith calls her to this ministry of service from which we reap the benefits. But just as Jesus in this morning’s gospel, had to go apart for a while to a deserted place so he could resume healing, the ministry of his calling, so Maggie needs to find some time. So in thankfulness for all she has done for us, we can gladly give her a month to serve others as faithfully as she serves us. So our shining star of a deacon will, I hope, be sleeping in a few Sunday mornings for the next month! And not driving to
Now back to that first deacon, a woman who served Jesus and his friends making it possible for them to do the healing work they were called to do! (Very diaconal, I might say, as further evidence of the female Deans’ theory!) The disciples had a different response to their contact with Jesus. They were not so much deacons as healers. They were called to heal and they went about that healing all day long, until sundown. The whole city, we are told, clamored at the door: diseases, daemons, they were cast out! The next day Jesus got up and went out to the deserted place to pray. Then he was hunted by Simon and his friends, who, when they caught him, told him “everyone is searching for you!”
And his response was, “Well, let’s go on to the next town so I can proclaim God there, too!”
So, you know what that means? There were people left in
And frankly that is the question that I wrestled with the rest of the week. Is it capricious on the part of God to heal some and not others? Do people of more faith get healed and people of less faith are left behind when the healer moves on? Is healing a sign of God’s special favor and so those who are not healed are the recipients of God’s disfavor? Is God really so busy moving on that some are simply left in the dust?
You can tell I got myself worked up into a frenzy over this!
And when I calmed down and prayed, asking God these questions, I wish I could say a voice came out of the clouds and explained it all to me, but it didn’t. And so in my muddled way my prayers were answered by thoughts that came to me in flashes over the following days. One thought that would not go away was, “God sought the poor and the sick, indeed, seemed to have a special preference for them, but God also said the poor will always be with you.” To me that means that God knows, Jesus knew, the human condition: we are subject to our own humanity, and, while God ultimately overcomes that humanity for all of us on the cross, the truth is we still live in a broken and not-yet-the-kingdom-of-God world, so in that world not all can be or will be healed. All will be redeemed for certain, but some will not be healed even if they ask. Or some may be healed but not cured, and if they are wise, they will know that healing is what they truly sought when they asked for a cure.
And in another flash of thought/prayer, I wondered if God doesn’t love the broken most of all, if God doesn’t love the unhealed in their brokenness best? if they aren’t the ones God longs to hold under the shadow of his wing?
And finally, it seemed to me that God was saying to me that God’s favor is not always bestowed on us with great miracles of flash and dash. God’s favor toward us is shown with steadfastness. God is there when we pray. God is here when we gather. God is with those who are not here, with the children dying of Aids in
May this week be one of trusting the “steadfastness of God” for each of us. May we pray not so much for what we want, even our healing or the healing of those we love, but for that steadfastness to permeate our beings with so much depth that our will and God’s are one. Then, some will be cured, and some not. But all will be healed!
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd