Sermon: Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 4th, 2024

In today’s Gospel reading we get to see a day-in-the life of Jesus, a summary of how Jesus went about in His ministry. First and foremost, what did He do when He got up in the morning? He went to a place where He could be alone, a deserted place or the wilderness, to pray. After prayer, He went out into the towns and surrounding communities to proclaim the message of the Kingdom of God, and while doing so up until evening, he healed many and cast out or silenced many demons. This text also shows us the specific healing of Peter’s mother-in-law by Jesus, as “He took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them”. So perhaps our main question for today is: what does it look like when Heaven takes Earth by the hand and lifts her up? What does the Kingdom of God, this message that Jesus proclaimed, look like? That is perhaps one of the most asked questions in Christian history. How do we recognize Jesus among us? Where do we see signs of the Kingdom of God? Where is God showing up and how does He show up? There are so many generative key words and ideas in this text that reveal to us the workings of this Heavenly Kingdom-on-the-go manifested through the person of Jesus. I’ve chosen three for today’s sermon: 1. Prayer 2. Touch 3. Mission

So the first thing that Jesus does in the morning, He goes into the wilderness alone to pray. How does Heaven begin to touch upon the earth? Jesus demonstrates that it begins with prayer. So what is prayer? It’s such a simple yet multi-faceted activity. It is also perhaps one of our distinguishing features as human, we are creatures that yearn and seek out what stretches beyond our bodies, what transcends and sustains us in a fundamental way. Prayer on the one hand can be like an arrow shot all the way up to Heaven, it is an elevation of our hearts and minds to God. We lift up our hearts, our worries, our gratitude towards God, and we act on the Promise that He is listening and desires to be in loving relationship with us. In this mode, perhaps we are doing most of the talking. On the other hand, prayer can also be communion, a resting with God, a waiting of the soul for God’s response. Prayer is dynamic as it resembles a dialogue. We can empty our thoughts to God, but we must be open for the dynamics of being responded to, either through silence, or the Scriptures, or by an event in one’s life. Prayer is essential, yet we often forego putting too much time into it. It can feel useless. But perhaps that is the beauty of it. We are not commanded to pray just for transactional reasons, we are commanded to pray because in the useless glory of conversation and dialogue, we actually get to experience being seen and loved. Isn’t it one of life’s great blessings to just be in wordless accompaniment with those we love most? So it is not strange at all that Jesus begins with Prayer. He doesn’t begin with the “useful” or “valuable” work of healing and exorcism, but rather with the secret and intimate communication with the Father. Some commentators raise an important question regarding this text and prayer: Do the disciples, who are looking for Jesus when He goes out alone to pray, understand that Jesus’ ministry stems from God? Do they understand why Jesus is praying before He goes out to work? The word used in the text when the disciples sought Jesus means to hunt or track down. They were anxiously looking for Him to tend to the needs that were piling up at the front door. They knew Jesus could solve these problems, so they wanted to whisk Him away from this alone time. But Jesus is showing us as He showed them, that the healing and liberating power of His ministry began with being at one with the presence of God first. These healings are a sign of God’s desire to come down to us and take us by the hand. Jesus, who brought this gift to the people, showed how by prayer we open up the channels by which we can receive this gift and give it to others. Beloved, we need this time set apart. We need this time to show our life to God, to let God in loving silence declutter our minds from all the pressures of the world, and allow Him to remind us of our Belovedness, by which we will be able to serve others in the same way.

So after communion with the Presence of God through prayer, Jesus goes into His work, and proclaims to the people the good news and this brings with it healing and liberation from the oppressive powers of the unclean spirits. Now we transition to our second key word: touch. Touch is a sign of closeness and of presence. Mark’s Gospel does something special in this portion of our text, for he does not just leave us with Jesus did these things and that’s it, he gives us an intimate view of what Heaven touching upon the earth looks like. These healings and these liberations are neither individualistic or mass productions, they are personal, and they are collective. When God takes us up by the hand, we are not merely a number, and perhaps we are not the protagonists of the world, but the action of God is always personal and intimate, a life-giving event for a person and all the other persons that are witnesses and recipients of the graces of God’s Kingdom. So we get the healing story of Peter’s mother-in-law. She was suffering from a fever. And immediately, the family sought Jesus, because they loved her and wanted her to get better. And that 31st verse, when Jesus comes into the house to see her, just that one verse packs a treasure trove of indications of where God’s heart is. “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them”. This verse portrays three social taboos that Jesus breaks. First, He heals during the Sabbath, he is seeing the need that is present, and tends to it. To preserve the Sabbath does not mean to withhold charity and love. Which is an important reminder for our prayer life, yes we must pray, but let our prayer never be a stumbling block to love, but rather let it lead us to love others. Secondly and most notably, Jesus enters the home and touches a sick woman on the Sabbath. In Jesus’ time, the fact that a man would visit a woman’s house was frowned upon. There were fears of uncleanliness and walls of social taboos. It was not considered proper for a man, and a teacher at that, to visit and even more so, to touch a sick woman’s hand. But Jesus saw beyond those taboos, his uplifting and healing of Peter’s mother-in-law was another sign that the Kingdom of God was doing a new thing, it was breaking barriers that oppressed the marginalized and saying God’s presence is in this house, God is not concerned with what is proper or improper according to one’s social, cultural, or economic station. He doesn’t care about our taboos, especially when they minimize the life of His creation. God sees the human person, God sees the face of someone created in His image, God sees that when He made humanity, He said that it was good. So when the Kingdom of Heaven touches upon Earth, it breaks the chains and walls of oppression, it sets the captive free, it takes by the hand and accompanies those who are suffering. I love that image of the touch of Jesus, that God in Jesus Christ reaches out and takes us by the hand, no matter how sin has corrupted us, God’s Love and Mercy takes us up because He loves us. He can’t help Himself but be there with us and make us alive again in Him. And so, Jesus’ socially transgressive act heals this woman, the fever leaves her, and then what does she do? She serves. The third act of this verse: The touch of God’s grace provokes in us the desire and the joy to praise God with good works. To inhabit in our own small ways the transformative presence of God’s Kingdom. And thus the manifestation and the ministry of the Kingdom has not been given just to the privileged social class, on the contrary, it has been gifted to those at the margins, for there is no one out of reach for God. What God has made good, let no one rob that goodness from them. Let goodness and mercy abound even more, with more people joining the feast of Christ.

So a day in the life of Jesus: marked by prayer and by His outstretched hand to the oppressed, we finally get our third and final keyword: mission. We have Jesus looking to the horizon saying “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” Filled with God through prayer and then enacting the new reality of the Kingdom, Jesus sets out to what is ahead, to all the people, all the unique lives and stories that need to hear the transformative word and touch of the Gospel. Jesus sets out into those communities, He leads the way ahead and is out there restoring the world to wholeness. It is a good reminder for us, that the life of the Gospel is lived out in the world, it is out there that we cultivate and practice the reality that is proclaimed and has its source from the God we worship here at church. In a sense, here in church we get the same threefold dynamic. We pray and seek to be in unity with God, gathered here together by the Holy Spirit, the Word of the Gospel is proclaimed and we are touched by Heaven through the sacraments. Here God reaches out to us and uplifts us, so we may go out into our communities and live out the reality of the Kingdom of God, to praise Him with our good works. So this week, let us leave this place as little Christs for our neighbor, touching upon the realities that we might find out there in the world, and be founts by which God’s grace might be seen and felt. May our very days emulate the patterns of Jesus. Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, you bring Heaven to us, You bring with You a new reality shaped by Love. You break the barriers of our sins and restore us to wholeness. You see in us a glory the world refuses to see, may we remember always Your Word and Your touch. Take us by the hand and renew us, shape us according to your Will, and may we praise you always with fruits worthy of repentance. In your name we pray, Amen.