Today’s Gospel story is about being church.
Yes, it is a story about healing, and prayer, and miracles, and exorcisms, and Jesus and the disciples roaming around the countryside preaching and casting out demons and making a name for themselves, but at its heart, today’s Gospel story is about being church – and about the work of the church – work that includes miracles and healings and casting out demons, certainly, but more importantly, the work of the church that is quiet, and continuing, and hard – work that is not flashy, but is profound; work that is not necessarily earth-shaking, but is life-giving.
This story comes very, very early in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus has been baptized by John and the Holy Spirit; he has spent 40 days in the wilderness, tempted by Satan and taken care of by angels. He’s been preaching in Galilee, recruiting fishermen as disciples; he has astounded the locals by preaching at the synagogue in Capernaum and he’s performed his first miracle, just that day – casting an unclean spirit out of a man in the synagogue. His fame, Mark says, has begun to spread – and
we’re not even at the end of the first chapter of the gospel.
And then this episode. Which can be – frustrating – to read. Our Women of Faith group
started discussing it this past Wednesday, and it didn’t take us long to realize we’d need at least one more week to work through it!
To recap:
Jesus and his four new disciples go to Simon and Andrew’s home where Simon’s mother-in- law is sick with a fever. In those days, people often believed that a fever was caused by the presence of an evil spirit, and that illness was punishment for sins. Jesus, with no judgment, no fear or hesitation, takes her by the hand, raises her up (and no, that’s not a coincidence, that echo of resurrection) and heals her.
And… in response, Simon’s mother-in-law gets out bed and begins to serve her guests.
Really, Jesus? Simon’s mother-in-law is sick in bed – Jesus comes to the house, does some miraculous magic – she is healed, her fever gone, and the first thing she does is get up and start serving a bunch of men. Couldn’t Simon have maybe brought her a bowl of chicken noodle soup? Shouldn’t Jesus have said, sleep in, rest up and don’t try to rush back into work – you don’t want to make yourself sick again. We’ll fix dinner.
But no. Simon’s mother-in-law – and we never even know her name – gets up – and
depending on the translation you read, she begins to “serve them,” or to “wait on them,” or to “prepare a meal” for them.
Like I said, it’s a Gospel story that raises some questions.
But it is not a gospel story about Jesus and his disciples telling a recently sick woman that her place is in the kitchen.
If you take a look at some other translations, including the King James Version, you’ll find a translation that is closer to the truth of this story: “he came and took her by the hand, and lifted her up; and immediately the fever left her, and she ministered unto them.”
Look back at the original Greek for “serve” or “wait on” or “minister” and you will find a
word that sounds familiar: diekonei – DIAKONEO. It is the root word of deacon, one of the ordained roles in our church today.
The call of the deacon is to be a connection between the world and the church, to hear and understand the needs, the griefs, the challenges and hopes of the community and be a voice in the church for those needs and griefs and hopes, to serve the church and to serve the world and to find the connections between them. That is the vocational call of the Ven. Brian Hutcherson, who is our diocesan archdeacon – you might have met him the other Sunday. He has started spending one Sunday with us and he will be back next week. It is the first call of every priest in the Episcopal
Church, for we are ordained deacons first, and when we are ordained as priests we are reminded to not let go of that diaconal call when we become priests, not to stop listening to the world.
And I would offer that the call of the deacon is in a sense the call of every person in the
church – to listen to the world and respond to its needs and its hopes, each in our own way.
Simon’s mother-in-law is remembered as the first deacon in Christ’s church. Healed by Jesus, in response, turning around to serve those who are with her – in this case, her family and also complete strangers.
And so this morning’s Gospel story is a story about church, about church that’s found in the most ordinary of places.
For Jesus heals her at her home, and in those days, the home was both ordinary space and sacred space – it was where the early church met. And once Jesus had done this miracle in Simon’s house, the word got out. By the end of the day – the end of the Sabbath – crowds had come there to their home, begging to be healed, to be made whole – “the whole city was gathered around the door,” Mark says – perhaps an exaggeration, but a lot of people. And Jesus responded. He healed them, he did miracles, he gave them hope. The church, wherever it is, is a place where faith and the
world meet. The church is a place where we bring our brokenness, our grief, and our pain, and we find healing – we experience new life, perhaps what we might even call resurrection.
Once we find that healing, that new life, that resurrection, what are we to do with it?
Theologian Karoline Lewis thinks about it this way, and thinks about this particular story in this way – she asks: “What if resurrection” – what happened to Simon’s mother-in-law – what if resurrection is not some dramatic transformation, but is instead “being raised up to be who you always were and were always meant to be?” Simon’s mother-in-law’s healing, her resurrection, wasn’t a transformation of who she was, but a restoration of who she was. She stepped back into the work she was called to do, into her role in her community.
And, Karoline Lewis points, out, Simon’s mother-in-law’s “role looks an awful lot like how Jesus himself will describe his own ministry, his own power, and his own presence, ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’”
This unnamed woman’s work looks like the work of Jesus, who washed his disciples’ feet, touched lepers, and sat with children, and cooked breakfast for his friends. Jesus even downplayed his own miracles, those dramatic acts that he performed. The next day, after healing this woman and all of the crowds, he leaves before dawn to find a place to be alone and to pray. And when the disciples track him down – hunt him down – he returns again, to the work that calls him.
We are, like Simon’s mother-in-law, called to be the church, to follow the path that Jesus took, to practice the faithfulness and compassion that Jesus modeled. We come to church to be healed, and also to be healing for each other. We come to share meals, to serve one another, to learn and to teach, to walk together, to pray together, and then to carry the restoration that we find here back out into the world, into our roles in our families and our communities, our schools, our neighborhoods, in ordinary spaces as well as sacred spaces – because so often they are one and the same – among strangers and among friends. Like Simon’s mother-in-law, we are called to do for one another the quiet, compassionate, everyday work that happens between the miracles.
And that is the story of the church.
Amen.
Sermon for the fifth Sunday after Epiphany at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Va., February 4, 2024.
Art: The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law by James TIssot
