Advent Lutheran Church

"God's Invitation, Our Response (Epiphany 5)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Sometimes, an invitation from God can take you by surprise.  Dan McKnight is the pastor of Kaw Prairie Community Church in Lenexa, and the other day he posted on Facebook about an experience that he had.  It seems that Dan had just formed a new ministry team at Kaw Prairie, and they had their first meeting, got themselves focused and figured out who was going to do what.  They had their meeting over at Callahan’s Bar and Grill in Lenexa, and as the meeting was wrapping up, Dan walked up to the bar to pay their tab.  This is what happened:

“As I'm up at the bar to pay the tab, a big strong fella on a barstool makes a loud comment about my bald head and pretty sweater. No, I'm not kidding.  So I walk over real slow to where he's sitting, size him up, and open up a can of ‘Wanna-come-to-worship-next-Sunday?’ on him.  And guess what?  He & his wife said they'll come visit us at Kaw Prairie this weekend.  And then he hugged me.  Honest!  Situations like that turned out way less cool for me back in college.”

It will be interesting to see if that guy on the barstool actually shows up in church, actually responds to the invitation.  But one thing’s for sure: the invitation came through Dan, but it came from God.

God’s invitation, our response – two sides of the same reality.  Here at Advent we try to be vessels of the invitation and encouragers of people’s response, because we believe that that combination of God’s invitation and our response is the key to a full life.  God’s invitation to us to come closer in relationship with God is constant and present throughout our lives.  The only question is: How will we respond?  Our Gospel lesson this morning illustrates two radically different kinds of response, and my hunch is that we will find ourselves somewhere in this story.

At the very beginning of Mark’s gospel we see that the first several disciples who Jesus calls appear to lead fairly settled lives.  Simon and Andrew, James and John – two sets of brothers – are fishermen.  All four learned the trade from their fathers.  The scent of the sea had been part of every waking moment, day after day, year after year.  And then Jesus showed up.  “Follow me,” he had said, and all four of them simply dropped what they were doing and followed him.

Why?  Why did they do that?  Well, if you’re even an occasional reader of the Bible you’ve noticed that the people who wrote it weren’t very big on answering our “why” questions; they simply told us what happened.  So how would these new disciples live, what about their families, what about their careers?  No answers.  But there must have been something compelling about Jesus, something that fired their imaginations.  Maybe it was the promise that he had made them. 

When he first called those disciples, he promised that he would change them.  “Follow me,” he had told them, “and I will make you fish for people.”  In other words, he would change them from fishermen to fishers of people; he would teach them how to catch people who needed catching, people who were falling, people who needed saving.  He would teach them so that they could make a difference for the better with their lives.

Isn’t that what we all want – to make a difference for the better with our lives?  Somewhere along the way we come to the realization that real fulfillment in life doesn’t come from moving up from Fourth Assistant to the Vice President to Third Assistant to the Vice President.  You want more from your life than that.  You want to know that in the grand scheme of things, it mattered that you were on this planet, that you made a difference for the better.  It isn’t about catching more fish, or making better widgets, or sealing more deals. 

That’s why you’re here this morning, in fact.  If your sole goal in life, your entire life’s project, was the gathering of more money, you wouldn’t be wasting your time here in church.  No, we want our lives to count.  Maybe you can make a difference for the better in the life of just one child.  What a tremendous legacy that would be – to shape the course of the world by shaping the life of one child!  Or maybe you can make a difference for the better with your colleagues – we hear time and again that real satisfaction in our work comes not from the work itself but from the people we work with.  Or maybe you can make a difference for the better by catching someone who is falling – falling into despair, or falling into a hole they can never dig themselves out of.

I believe that it was that promise that he would be changed that Simon found so compelling, that fired his passion.  And maybe that explains what happened toward the end of this story.  We read that after spending the night in Simon’s home, Jesus got up early in the morning and went out alone in the predawn darkness to a deserted place to pray.  He did that a lot, in fact – went out alone to a quiet place, away from the crowds, away from the noisy voices that constantly called for his attention and help.  Getting away to pray is how he maintained steady contact with his heavenly Father, how he stayed true to his mission.  That’s what he was doing on this particular morning.

When Simon and the others found him, the story says that they were “hunting” for him.  The write of Mark’s gospel used that word “hunted” very intentionally.  It’s not a friendly word; in fact, it carries the connotation of hostility; Simon and the others had an aggressive edge to their attitude.  They’re astonished at Jesus’ behavior.  “Everyone is searching for you!  What are you doing out here?  The healing ministry that you started last night – everybody who came to the door sick went home healed – that was awesome!  You’re off to a great start, don’t cool off now.  What are you thinking? 

This is the same Simon, you remember, who was later reprimanded by Jesus.  You might recall the scene: Jesus tells his disciples that it is his fate to be rejected by the church leaders and executed by the state.  It’s Simon who pulls him aside and says, “Whoa, wait a minute; that’s not how this is supposed to go.”  And that’s when Jesus tells him, “Get behind me, Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  Simon had a very clear idea of what Jesus was supposed to be about; it just wasn’t Jesus’ clear idea of what Jesus was supposed to be about.

It’s extremely frustrating and difficult to follow a savior who refuses to be accountable to us.  I bump into that frustration regularly, in fact; it happens every time I say the Lord’s Prayer and I get to that petition, “thy will be done.”  When I pray that petition, in the back of my head I often hear myself add, “and here’s how I’d like you to do it: this needs to happen, this person needs tending in this way,” and so on.

OK, here’s a little window into the prayer life of your preacher this morning.  I start the day with the Lord’s Prayer, and I try to be very intentional and think through the various petitions of the prayer.  I follow that prayer with a free-flowing, unscripted prayer that focuses on you; on the various needs I know about in the congregation; on my family; on the various issues in our country; and on what’s happening in the world.  And I admit that when I’ve been praying about a certain something for a while and don’t see any changes, I get a little testy.  “Lord, we’ve been talking about this.  You promise that when we pray, you respond; well, I’ve been praying, but you haven’t been responding.  Now we know: there’s a war in Afghanistan, the Kardashians are on the loose, it’s Super Bowl Sunday – you’re busy, we get that.  But we need you to get serious, we need you to show up and fix this!”

Well, from your reaction I see that I’m not the only one who occasionally gets impatient with the Lord.  You know how it goes: you’ve been praying about something, the faithful solution seems so clear, but God simply does not show up with the goods.  And it gets frustrating.  Or maybe it leaves you thinking that God doesn’t place a very high priority on what you’re praying about.  Or, worst of all, it might lead you into despair, feeling that God doesn’t care at all.  If that’s where you are this morning, in despair, think of who has been there with you.  It was despair that Jesus was giving voice to as he hung on the cross, feeling utterly abandoned by God.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But God hadn’t forsaken him; God was working out his plan, and his plan was for life – for Jesus and for the world.  That desire for life is at the heart of the second kind of response to God.  In contrast to Simon’s sort of response, the response that demands that God make sense to us, the more life-giving response is the one by Simon’s mother-in-law.

We see that the first thing that happens when Jesus and the disciples enter Simon’s home is they encounter Simon’s mother-in-law.  She’s sick, has a fever, lying in bed.  Four simple actions complete this beautiful scene: Jesus takes her by the hand, he lifts her up, the fever leaves her, and she serves them.  We could read this as simply one more example of the stereotyping of women into traditional roles defined for them by men, both in the ancient world and in the modern world.  But I think that the writer of Mark’s gospel has something more in mind.

Mark writes that Jesus “lifted her up.”  That’s the same phrase that is used at the end of the Gospel of Mark to refer to Jesus’ resurrection, when God raised him up, lifted him up, to eternal life.  It’s the same phrase that’s used later in the New Testament to refer to the believer who has faith in Christ, that that person has been lifted up to new life, and that it’s a new life that doesn’t begin after physical death but begins now.

Jesus resurrects Simon’s mother-in-law to new life.  And what does she do with that new life?  She serves; not as a fulfillment of a cultural role but as an embodiment of the words that Jesus will use to describe himself, that he came “not to be served but to serve.”

Over the next several months this congregation will send out four mission teams, to Mexico, the Gulf Coast, Joplin, and the Dominican Republic.  From home building to disaster relief to water and sanitation projects, the people on these teams will be engaged in doing God’s work with their hands.  But you don’t have to be on one of those mission teams to put your faith to work.  There are plenty of opportunities right here in our own backyard: to speak a word of encouragement and hope to someone who desperately needs that word; to speak a word of forgiveness to someone who has wronged you; to serve breakfast at Metro Lutheran Ministry; to teach our kids in Sunday school.  The possibilities are endless to perform mission team work right here.  In fact, when Jesus and the disciples went off on their own version of a mission trip, it was Simon’s mother-in-law who stayed put and served Jesus right where she was.

It takes a lot of hope to stay faithful over the long haul.  I’m sure that’s what sustained this woman.  We don’t even know her name.  In fact, this is the one and only time we see her, in this brief, carefully composed snapshot at the beginning of Mark’s gospel.  But I have a feeling that she shows up again, at the end of the story.  After Jesus was raised from the dead, the news of that event was greeted by disbelief, even by his disciples.  That was the early church’s response to the resurrection of Jesus, and these were the people who had traveled with him, heard him preach and teach, watched him perform miracles. But when the resurrection actually happened, as he had told them it would, they just couldn’t conceive it.

But I can imagine that in the midst of those confused, despairing disciples, a silent woman patiently went about her duties of serving, a knowing smile across her face, filled with hope, filled with the memory of that day when Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.

Whether you can feel it or not this morning, Jesus has come and taken each and every one of you by hand and lifted you up.  Lifted you up to a new life that begins not when your life in this world is over, but begins now and carries you into eternal life with God.  The only question is: How will you respond?

Amen.