February 4 Worship

As soon as Jesus and the disciples left the synagogue, they entered the house

of Simon and Andrew with James and John.

Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once.

He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her,

and she began to serve them.

That evening at sunset they brought to him all who were sick or or possessed with demons.

And the whole city gathered around the door.

And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons.

And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted

place. And there he prayed.

And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him,

they said to him, Everyone is searching for you. He answered,

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Music.

Please be seated and let us pray.

Lord of the Sabbath, help us to find our rest and our restoration in you.

God, when the world wearies us, when our burdens feel too much to bear,

we ask that we may be lifted up by your Son.

And now, O God, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts

be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer.

Amen. them. Okay, as it turns out, there may actually be something to the subtle

and oft-maligned art of tree-hugging.

Didn't see that one coming, did ya?

Now, jokes aside, since the 1980s, there has been scholarly research and peer-reviewed

studies conducted on what in Japan they call or in English, forest bathing.

Forest bathing is more and less than your average weekend hike in the woods.

It's less because it involves being out in the woods completely unplugged and

with no agenda whatsoever.

And that includes the agenda of actually going on hike.

Forest bathing involves involves literally just being out and sitting amongst the woods.

But it's also more involved than that because it demands being mindfully and

meditatively present amongst nature and away from the sensory overstimulation

that is our human civilization.

And there is, in fact, something to it.

All these studies show that forest bathing can lower stress and ease depression

and boost our immune system, specifically increasing the production of our white

blood cells and other anti-cancer proteins.

This happens specifically through our sense of smell.

Trees release a chemical called phytoncides that, when ingested,

bring about all these benefits.

But we don't necessarily need the numbers on those physical benefits to show

us that being being present in God's creation can help center us emotionally and spiritually.

It's fairly self-evident to note, especially on this Scout Sunday,

that getting out in nature is good and restorative for our souls.

We can find God there perhaps more easily than in the hustle and bustle of our world.

But what Bayer's saying, again, is that how spiritual wisdom and scientific

reason both agree that how we are present in creation, specifically amongst the trees,

matters for the quality of that experience.

Now, the reason we have begun with this little excursion into the woods is because

Jesus himself makes this turn in our gospel passage.

After one of his first full days of teaching, I'll remind you,

this is Mark chapter 1. The story has just started.

Mark 1 · chapter mention

Jesus returns to a deserted place, the wilderness.

Earlier in the same chapter, Mark 1, Jesus, famous story, baptized,

heaven splits splits open, dove comes down, voice booms from heaven,

and then the Holy Spirit drives him out into, well, the wilderness,

where he is tempted by Satan and waited on by the angels.

You see, in the imagination of Scripture, the wilderness, as opposed to our

civilization, is much more spiritually charged.

But wildernesses do differ. At the site of his baptism in the Jordan,

the wilderness would have looked like a dry, arid wasteland, a desert.

Here in the town of Capernaum, the backdrop of the story, a bustling market

town on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, the wilderness would have included

the sights and sounds of the lake and the lush smells of a forest.

It's not a huge stretch to imagine that this time of mindful prayer in the wilderness

function, much like that art of forest bathing today.

Now, it's important to follow the reason, right, that Jesus felt it necessary

in the first place to reconnect with God in the wilderness.

It comes after a teaching session in the synagogue on the Sabbath day.

And as soon as that sun sets and night falls, the Sabbath day ends.

In the ancient Jewish world, the days ended at nightfall.

You might imagine, then, that Jesus has just spent the entirety of the day preaching

and teaching in the synagogue, and then the entirety of the following night

healing the whole city of their demons and diseases.

Likely physically weary and spiritually worn, Jesus seals off into the wilderness

that next morning, still before the day breaks, to reconnect with God.

And even then, as we follow the text, the disciples don't give him any rest, do they?

The disciples hunted him down, our text says, and the Greek here is ominous

and negative in connotation.

Same word is used later in the the Gospels for when the scribes and the Pharisees

are hunting Jesus down for his arrest and crucifixion.

The stakes are high.

You see, the disciples have fallen to the world's pressures and expectation,

in particular, the world's temptation to busy-ness, especially over against

restoration and wholeness.

This is a temptation that I must confess to you that I fall victim to as well.

Well, on a daily basis, you might know something of it yourselves as well.

That urge, right, to do more, to accomplish more, to, dare I say it,

earn more, can, ironically, cost us.

Burnout can lie close at hand. A loss of time seems to sneak up on us.

We might look back and wonder where all the life went, where all the wholeness went.

Even and especially amidst all of that activity. And yes, even and especially

amidst all the possessions and status that we gain.

I'll remind you, dear siblings, that yes, God worked. Yes, Jesus served,

but God also rested and gave us the Sabbath.

Then Jesus creates his own Sabbath here by returning to that wilderness to connect

with God and to reset a context.

The temptation that he faces in this passage is to be busy, to let himself get

transformed into sort of a divine vending machine,

doling out miraculous healings left and right.

Everyone is searching Jesus out for a miracle, not necessarily to hear the message.

And as Jesus Jesus makes clear to his disciples in our gospel reading today,

it's the message that actually matters.

The miracles we see Jesus perform in the gospels serve the message.

Their greatness glorifies the goodness of the gospel.

They're not ends in themselves.

Jesus shows us this, in fact, in the two other times that he steals away to pray in Mark's gospel.

Later in Mark 6, Jesus goes up the mountain and takes some time to pray right

after he performs the feeding of the 5,000.

In the closing chapters of Mark, Jesus steals away another time to pray,

this time in the Garden of Gethsemane right before his arrest and crucifixion.

In each of those cases, right, He faces the world's oldest and maybe most favorite trick, busyness.

Do more. Be more. Take more.

The subtle logic of the world would turn our Savior, the Messiah,

into a mere piece of technology, a mere tool for practical application.

Hush now, Jesus. Don't be problematic. Just give me those healings.

We also face that same pressure to find our ultimate identity in our work and

what we do and to let the temptations of the world to busyness anxiety and activity flatten us out.

But Jesus is, thanks be to God, so much more.

And so are we as well. Jesus makes clear that the message is what matters.

The disciples hunt him down and he responds by, well, by leaving.

Look at what he says when the disciples find him. Let us go on to the neighboring

towns so that I may proclaim the message there also. so for that is what I came out to do.

It's the gospel that matters.

Imagine for a moment, what if we were all, each of us, transformed by God's

good news throughout our lives?

Imagine, if you will, if our world was transformed by the message of God's love

and forgiveness, of our belovedness, yes, even amidst our brokenness.

With this, I want to take a quick step back to the beginning of our gospel text today.

You see, before the Sabbath ends and the whole city gathers around Peter's front door,

we see Jesus performing one singular act of healing, one which I think sets

the context for all of the other healings in this passage and throughout the

gospel that are going to follow.

Jesus finds Peter's ill mother-in-law, takes her by the hand,

and as our text reads, he lifted her up.

He lifted her up. Here we have an echo of the resurrection to come.

Same word in Greek used by Christ himself later to describe his coming resurrection,

resurrection being lifted up.

Same word in Greek used in the final verses of Mark's gospel as the disciples

look back and try to make sense of what's just happened.

Christ lifted up.

Point is this, that encounter with Jesus, that a connection with the God of

the universe, the creator, the the Lord of the Sabbath, brings us resurrection and transformation.

Peter's mother-in-law, this unnamed and oft-forgotten side character in the

gospel, shows us what this transformation might look like.

She's lifted up by Jesus, and she begins to serve.

Serve, as opposed to work. It's a simple but profound distinction.

You see, when we encounter Christ, our lives are taken and turned inside out.

We begin to look outward to others instead of inward to ourselves.

And in doing so, we begin to witness to the gospel.

The image of Peter's mother-in-law serving may seem trite, and though it's not

translated this way into English,

again, when you go back to the Greek, you see that word serve is the exact same

word used earlier in this chapter to describe the work of the angels waiting

on Jesus in the wilderness.

Simple, but profound. Our serving goes to glorify God, not to meet the aspirations

or or expectations of the world.

Imagine a world where we all served one another, instead of looking at our neighbors

to see what we can get out of them.

It might look like a whole lot more rest and wholeness, and it might look like

a whole lot less busyness and hecticness and anxiety.

And so with this image, dear siblings in Christ, I want to leave you this morning

with one One closing reminder is this.

Remember to rest in the resurrection life.

As Jesus shows us in this gospel, we find God most readily revealed when we

can turn it all off and walk away and find a way to tap in with God.

If you ever get that urge, right, to slam the laptop closed,

to throw the phone out the window, to walk away and turn it all off,

maybe you should take at least a few moments and actually do it. Jesus did.

And it could be very well that the Spirit is nudging you towards rest and restoration.

And if that might seem impossible for you in your situation,

situation maybe we need to reassess our priorities

because no one had a bigger task no

one had more pressure or weight on them than jesus and so when you feel worn

and weary when you feel that pressure to move at a breakneck pace to always

do more and more i challenge you to stop,

to take a moment, and to get out in creation,

to go sit with God in the wilderness,

to breathe in the resurrection, and to be turned inside out in service to your

neighbor, even as your neighbor serves you.

And the good news is that every time you do, that no matter what you may or

may not be facing, God will be there waiting to lift you up.