‘B’   //   Epiphany 5   //   2-8-09   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian

 

Scriptures    Isaiah 40:21-31    Mark 1:29-39

 

 

 

 

“As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house …”

 

Halfway through the first sentence of our gospel scripture today, the plot has already thickened.

 

For Mark is writing to a faith community of Jewish Christians. Those who still made their way to the synagogue each Sabbath day, and yet find their own homes more and more accommodating as their primary worship site.

 

For when it came to prayer for this new Jewish sect, the suffocating hostility of the synagogue was proving no match for the supportive hospitality – as well as security – of these growing house-churches.

 

Especially when it came to the combination of Sabbath day worship with a healing ministry.

 

 

Prayer and action; action and prayer.  A discipleship tandem we find embedded in the hasty, spare language of Mark’s rustic Greek sentences today. The beginning of a two-chapter narrative moving us deeper and further into Jesus’ first direct action campaign: an assault on the religious social order in the Capernaum area.¹

 

Prayer and action; action and prayer. And waiting for us at the very end of today’s passage: a simple statement of faith. The proclamation of the central faith message Jesus has established a few verses earlier: that the kingdom, or commonwealth, of God is at hand.

Prayerful action into faith. Seems kind of backward, doesn’t it? All of my Christian life, I have been challenged and cajoled, provoked and prodded to put my prayerful faith into action.

 

All of my life … until I and many others experienced the grace to step away. Step away – for a moment, at least – from our usual cool and airy and spacious North Atlantic theological vents to encounter the brace and embrace of a warm gust of Spirit-wind arising from the deepest south. Deeper and warmer than the Gulf Stream, even – sweeping our heritage as always back to our Old Country cocoon …

 

 

The late Robert McAfee Brown stands as arguably the finest theologian out of the Reformed tradition of western Christianity over the last century. Twenty years into his esteemed teaching career, he was asked by a publisher friend to write a dust jacket blurb for a book written by someone he had never heard of: a little priest in Lima, Peru who lived and worked among the poorest of the poor. A Catholic scholar by the name of Gustavo Gutierrez.

 

Robert McAfee Brown would later write,” “As I turned over page after page of galley sheets (of Gutierrez’s book A Theology of Liberation) in the summer of 1972, I thought, ‘If this is right, I have to start my theological life all over again.’”²

 

What was “right”, Brown was discovering, was Gutierrez’s thesis in A Theology of Liberation: that prayerful action is the primary act of discipleship – preceding “God-talk”, or theological reflection, as the secondary act. The authentic starting point of discipleship, in other words, was not – as so many ivory tower North Atlantic theologians had taught it so long – our words as ironclad creeds. The authentic starting point of discipleship, our Latino neighbors were teaching us, was our worlds out of our lived experiences.

 

 

A discipleship starting point based firmly on our scriptures. A discipleship starting point Jesus honors today when he heals Simon’s mother-in-law in a house-church on the Sabbath day. In other words, it’s a healing that takes place in a place that challenges the standing religious social order – it’s not in a synagogue! And it’s done on the one sacred day of the week when no such healing should ever take place.

 

Picture this: A rabbi … and an outsider to the home … making physical contact with the female of the home … in a house-church … on the Sabbath! What would all those establishment words and creeds say … about that?

 

Say about this richly prayerful action – for, as with nearly all of Jesus’ healings, there exists in the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law “almost total disregard of symptoms ... Instead, there is constant concern for meaning … Jesus’ activity is best described … as (social) healing, not as (medical) curing.’’³

 

 

No, not the evening meal – although yes, many male biblical commentators have suggested this. And yet, Mark’s Greek word for serve here – and it’s Matthew’s word and Luke’s word, as well, in their remarkably similar parallel stories – indicates something qualitatively different than the sounding of the dinner bell. For in the Greek, we read and we hear that Simon’s mother-in-law diakonei them: the root of the English word “deacon”.

 

 

Now – as you may know – we don’t do deacons here at Northside. The closest thing we have to a formal diaconate in our small congregation is our amazing contingent of six women with collectively 155 years of Northside membership who serve on our Membership/Nurture Team – a ministry body which just met on Tuesday night. (An important footnote: You need to know that, without Marti Keefe’s leavening presence, there would have been only five women with only 154 years of Northside membership represented at that table!)

 

That’s “service”! So ponder with me those 155 membership years around that Tuesday night table as I read to you an excerpt of what Part II of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Constitution – our trusty Book of Order – says about the office of deacon:

Friends, let me introduce you – in our Mark story today – to the first deacon of the first church according to what most scholars agree was the first gospel ever written! The first deacon: As with most Presbyterian deacons and with our Membership/Nurture Team members to this day, (a) she’s a woman, and (b) she’s a woman who roams the annals of church history … without us even knowing her name. Barely recognized – and then, in her ancient history case, only in relationship with a man.

 

And yet: Simon’s mother-in-law – from the moment of her healing, read: the moment of her social redemption – becomes an active disciple. A lot more active in her discipleship, it seems, than Jesus’ male disciples ever prove to be – at least, according to Mark’s consistent accounting of things.

 

 

Hear again our Constitution: “It is the duty of deacons, first of all, to minister to those who are in need, to the sick, to the friendless, and to any who may be in distress both within and beyond the community of faith.”

 

 

It has taken, over the last two years, session’s dogged focus on the fourth of five 2006-2009 church goals to get us here. That fourth goal reads, in part: “Expand outreach efforts to create a greater presence for Northside within the broader community … connect(ing) (us) to organizations and demographics not typically associated with the church.” And it has taken your congregational assistance – in a post-worship lunch last April and in a survey this past September – to get us here, as well.

 

And it has taken at least three More Light and Peacemaking Team meetings and intensive research in-between to bring this goal and that lunch and that survey together into one recommendation for us all: a dedicated outreach partnership with SOS Community Services. A recommendation that our session will act upon after SOS makes its partnership presentation and engages us in discussion of it at the potluck and program this Wednesday evening.

 

As your ex officio member of the More Light and Peacemaking Team, and as one who witnessed on January 15 a movement of the Holy Spirit at – God help us! – a Northside committee meeting, I’ve got a hunch about this. I’ve got a hunch that you will agree that SOS Community Services – an area organization that would continue our ministry with the erstwhile homeless, only now with families and on a partnership level – meets each of our four established criterion for a dedicated outreach partner:

 

·        Church Goal #4, as cited earlier;

·        Supports economic justice, rainbow justice, and peace;

·        Provides potential for service opportunities at some level for all of our members; and

·        Provides opportunities for us to engage in advocacy for systemic justice – moving us from giving “at and to” to actually giving “with”.

 

 

 

 

  Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

 

 

 

Now may God who said 'Let there be light' and there was light – be light in your life.

May Jesus Christ who said not only, 'I am the Light of the World', but 'You are the light for the world' – give you courage to be that light.
  

And may the Spirit which descended upon the disciples like tongues of fire be fire of light within you.

And know this: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

 

  Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.

 

 

¹Ched Myers aptly titles chapter 4 of his seminal commentary on Mark’s gospel, “The First Direct Action Campaign: Jesus’ Assault on the Jewish Social Order in Capernaum (Mk. 1:21-3:35).” See Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), pp. 137-168.

 

²Robert McAfee Brown, Gustavo Gutierrez: An Introduction to Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), xix.

 

³J. Pilch, as quoted in Myers, op. cit., p. 145.

 

⁴The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part II: Book of Order, 2007-2009 (Louisville, KY: The Office of the General Assembly), G-6.0401 and G-6.0402a.