Forfeiting the Soul

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Mark 8:31-38

I’m sure we have all been to a little league sports event where one team had to forfeit.  It’s a huge disappointment because it is an automatic loss.  They’ve trained hard but for some petty reason the team has to forfeit without having the chance to prove themselves.  When I think of what the word forfeit, I first think of children having to forfeit a league game of some sort and that doesn’t seem so terribly bad.  But if we consider the word’s origin in criminal and contractual law, I think it is overkill to use this word to describe an automatic loss in children’s sports.  So, how about some more adult examples of the word.

Have any of you been to a police auction?  At police auctions you can find some great buys on fancy cars, huge houses, exotic firearms, even exotic animals; all things forfeited by criminals or rather seized by the police as the consequence of crime.  Here’s another example.  A friend of mine was selling his house and an interested buyer put down $15,000 to keep my friend from selling the house to somebody else while the buyer researched the feasibility of being able to buy and renovate the house.  They established a date before which the buyer was to either continue with purchasing or forfeit the $15,000.  The date came and the date went with no action by the buyer.  My friend made an easy $15,000.  Last example; a couple buys a house on a twenty-year mortgage.  They are under legal obligation, a contract, to pay a monthly sum of money until the mortgage is paid.  If at any time the couple does not or is not able to pay the monthly sum, the bank has the right to foreclose on the loan and the couple must forfeit their right to the house and all moneys paid to date. 

So, as you can see forfeiture is a serious matter, much more serious than a little league sports team having to accept an automatic loss due to being unable to field a team.  To forfeit is to surrender or be deprived of one’s rights to an asset as the consequence of a crime, an error of judgment, or a breach of contract.  So, with that in mind we must ask what was Jesus saying when he asked, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”  What is it to forfeit the soul?  That sounds pretty serious!

Well, first we must understand what the Bible means by the word soul.  Incidentally, in our NRSV passage everywhere you see the word life read soul because it is the same word throughout.  The New Testament Greek word for soul or life is one that is actually familiar to us, psyche.  From it we get psychiatrist, psychologist, and psychotic.  When we modern-types think of the psyche, we think not of the soul but of the mental makeup of a person; the motive force behind a person – that which makes that particular person do what that particular person does.  But, our ideas of psychological makeup are not what psyche meant to the writers of the Bible.  Those ideas didn’t even exist then.

The writers of the Bible were all of an ancient Hebrew cultural mindset and I must also emphasize, not of the Greek cultural mindset.  When most people today think of what the soul is they tend to think like the Greeks did.  Greeks thought that the psyche or soul was a bit of immortal “being” or “energy” accidentally trapped in a body of which it must be freed.  If a Greek said “body and soul”, he meant two distinctively separate parts of a person – the immortal soul and the body in which it was trapped.   Hebrew people saw it differently.  If they said “body and soul”, they would have meant a person in her entirety.  The soul and body could not be separated as the Greeks thought.

 The New Testament writers used the Greek word psyche to translate the Hebrew word nephesh which was basically the entirety of a person as she or he stands before God in a covenantal relationship to God.  They did not think of humans as having a soul, but rather as being a soul, a human body made alive by God’s own breath of life which when God ceases to breathe that breath into a person, life stops.  The life that God breathes into us isn’t some mystical entity or power.  It is the ability for us human beings who are made in the image of God to actually be in relationship with God, a covenantal relationship that entails certain responsibilities.  

Before the Living God, we are people who are responsible for being what God has created us to be as those created in God’s own image.  Therefore, real life, true life is living the way God wants us to.  It is to walk the way of prayer, praise, and the study of and meditation upon Scripture so that we live together as God’s people according to his image.  

So, basically to have life, or rather, to be a soul is to be in a covenantal, not a contractual relationship with God.  It is covenantal in that God is God and humans are his creatures to whom he has given life that we might live together as God’s image, God’s reflection within his creation.  Since, God has given us life we must live it in loving obedience.  

Now, back to the question; what is it to forfeit the soul? It is to surrender or be deprived of one’s right to live in a fulfilling relationship to God and one another as the consequence of doing other than living up to our covenantal responsibility of living as those created in the image of God. When we forfeit the soul, we forfeit our person and purpose in relationship to God and each other and are thus useless, good for nothing with respect to God’s intended purpose for his creation.  We forfeit our God given breath of life and are in essence dead before God and one another.  Forfeiting the soul is a serious matter.

Jesus identifies two ways that we forfeit our soul.  There is trying to save it and trying to gain the world. As I mentioned earlier when Jesus says here, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.” he is really saying, “For whoever wants to save his soul will lose it, but whoever loses his soul for me and for the gospel will save it.”  The forfeiture of the soul leaves us with a huge gaping hole in us that we try to fill with some form of idolatry.  We try to create our own means of salvation; of trying to bring to life our dead souls and so doing we only destroy them more.  We invest ourselves in things or devote ourselves to things that we think will give us the meaning and purpose that the covenantal relationship to God would have given us.  Jesus renames this idolatry, this self-saving, as “gaining the world”.  By this he means using the things of the creation for our own advantage, our own profit, for building a name for ourselves rather than causing the things of creation to bring forth praise.

Jesus offers us a way out of the forfeiture of the soul.  He says, “If anyone would come after me, he must renounce claim to himself and take up his cross and follow me.”  We must renounce claim to ourselves and take the “shameful, weak” way of life in being Jesus’ disciples, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love.  We must stop trying to make names for ourselves and live in Jesus’ name.  Only in following him can we rediscover the souls that we have forfeited.  God has re-breathed his life into us with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  This new life will begin to froth forth in us as I have said in prayer, praise, and the study of and meditation upon Scripture so that we live together as God’s people according to his image.  

It is a wonderful thing to get the soul back, to find oneself in a covenantal relationship with God through Christ Jesus in the Holy Spirit.  It is a wonderful thing to go beyond blind believing to true faithfulness as the result of God touching you with his steadfast love and faithfulness.  Quite frankly, it is really good to be in a life-giving relationship with God.  But…we still need to make the daily choice between discipleship or trying to gain the world.  Our daily challenge is to strive to be sure that we don’t twice forfeit our soul?  Amen.

The Body Tested

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Matthew 4:1-11

This is the first Sunday of Lent and the traditional theme for the day is temptation.  It is often the case that over Lent people take up the practice of doing without something that will be difficult to do without.  On the noble side, some will take up the practice of daily skipping a meal and take what they would have spent on the meal and give it to a foodbank.  The thinking is that since Jesus fasted those forty days and hungered, we can experience a taste of this spiritual hunger by fasting a meal as well.  Add to that, any cravings that we might have and how we resist them can teach us about what it was like to be Jesus resisting the temptations that Satan threw at him.

 But this sort of practice has gotten out of hand and truly has nothing to do with what Jesus went through when Satan tested him.  Our little exercise of denying ourselves simple stuff and resisting the cravings has nothing to do with what Jesus went through.  It’s really quite tacky.  If I were Jesus, I’d be a bit insulted that my followers are trying to identify with me and Satan’s testing of me by denying themselves chocolate, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, or screentime or even a meal and thinking that what Satan confronted me with was simply avoiding the habitual practice of lesser addictions.  Jesus is not being tempted here in the way we think of temptation – this moral, lustful, craving thing.  

Just to give you the Greek lesson, the Greek word we translate as “to tempt” is really better translated as “to test” as in testing someone to see what they’re made of, their character.  Satan is not tempting Jesus to see how long he can go without chocolate, coffee, or alcohol. He is testing Jesus as to whether or not he will be true to who he is as the Son of God become human to save us and all of creation from sin and death.  If he is the Son of God, how will he use his authority and abilities to serve God the Father’s intentions or will he use them to serve himself.  Will Jesus be true to who he is?  The tests that Jesus faces here are specifically aimed at him the Son of God become human and whether or not he will succumb to acting like a sin-sickened human or be faithful to the God he called Father.

Now, something to make you think.  This passage is probably the only passage in the Gospels in which we put ourselves in the place of Jesus.  When we read the stories in the Gospels, we naturally will try to say what do I have in common with whichever of the characters in the story.  Usually, we find ourselves being like one of the disciples or the Pharisees or the paralytic on the mat or the guy who has to bury his father before coming to follow.  But we never put ourselves in the place of Jesus.  That really is like putting ourselves in the place of God.  It is inappropriate for us as individuals to put ourselves in the place of Jesus in this passage and reduce its meaning to simply Jesus giving “me” good advice on how to deal with “my” temptations.  

Now let me push you a little further.  What we can do here is put the Church in the place of Jesus.  I am not Jesus.  You are not Jesus.  We, us together, we are the body of Christ.  The Church is his body and he is our head.  We are bound to him and one another by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Us, this fellowship of believers in Jesus bonded together in the Holy Spirit, we are the body of Christ and we, as the body of Christ together face the same three tests that Jesus faced at the hands of Satan.  

So, what does this passage look like when we place us as the body of Christ in the place of Jesus?  The first test sounds like this, “If you are the beloved children of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”  We the church in North America are in the wilderness and very hungry these days.  The Church as we have known it has lost its authoritative place in our communities.  The local congregation is wasting away into obscurity.  This stones to bread test for is found in taking the route of institutional survival over and above being the body of Christ.  We try to make ourselves relevant or appealing to the community around us rather than being a fellowship of believers that simply lives by loving God, one another, and our neighbours sacrificially and unconditionally expecting nothing in return.  The church does not live by buildings and programs and doing whatever we can to keep these programs going.  It lives by the Word of God, Jesus, who gave us one commandment – to love one another as he has loved us, sacrificially and unconditionally.

Moving on to test number two.  Satan tries to get Jesus to prove who he is as the Son of God by going to the highest part of the temple in Jerusalem and jumping off knowing that he’s not going splat on the ground because according to Scripture the angels will catch him. If Jesus done something like that in Jerusalem at the Temple, he would have proven to the religious authorities beyond a doubt that he is the Son of God, the Messiah.  They would have set him up as the Messiah to welcome in their version of the Kingdom of God.  In turn, Jesus wouldn’t have to go to the cross to put sin and death to death and be raised as the firstborn of a new creation. 

For us, this test for congregations is when we do things that we believe churches ought to do believing God will prove faithful to our efforts rather than having the faith to actually trust that God will speak and lead us into things God has for us to do.  This is the “what can we do to get people through the door and into the pew” mentality.  We have to get comfortable with what will likely feel like doing nothing to us until God gives an inkling to one or more of us of what God would have us do.  This is going inward before going outward. Praying together, studying together, eating together…doing things together to grow in care for one another.   

The third test has to do with how the church tries to rule the world.  The history of Christianity in the Western world is the story of an institution readily corrupted by the power of empire.  Paul tells us that we reign with Christ (2 Tim. 2:11-12), but the type of reign that he is talking about is not establishing Christian governments and ruling the world in the belief that we do it on God’s behalf.  Whenever the church tries to take political power as it has done for the last 1,700 years in the West, we fail this test and the results are devastating if not diabolical.  

The type of reign that we share in and with Jesus the Christ, the Lord of all Creation, is exhibited and exercised by how we love one another.  How different would our local communities be if local churches simply got down to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, looking to the needs of the elderly and children and stopped trying to ensure its waning if not deceased institutional place of privilege.  

Well in closing, as the children of God, the body of Christ, we – this Christian fellowship, this congregation – we participate always in all times and all places in the ongoing work of worship and reigning that Jesus does.  That is a given.  Since that is the case our task, our purpose as a congregation is exclusively to simply be a prayerful communion of people who love God, who love our neighbour, and who love each other sacrificially and unconditionally and to do so openly in word and in deed without reserve expecting nothing in return.  To focus on anything else truly is succumbing to the devil’s testing.  

So, the lesson for us to learn in these three tests that Satan threw at Jesus is first, they have little to do with how we as individuals face “temptations”.  They are about how we together go about being the body Christ in the world.  As the beloved children of God and the Body of Christ, do we faithfully love as Jesus faithfully loved or do we use of giftedness in pursuit of institutional survival.  Do we simply just go about doing what we believe churches ought to do or do we prayerfully wait for God to speak and lead us.  Finally, do we try to rule the world or do we simply serve in unconditional love.  Amen.

See the True Colours

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Mark 9:2-9 

“That’s when I saw his true colours.”  You’ve heard that phrase before, I’m sure.  It is simply seeing somebody for who they really are.  It’s usually used in a negative way.  For example (and this isn’t going to be a good story), in a Presbytery I used to minister in there was a minister who had served a particular church for twenty or so years and wasn’t that far from retirement.  It was his second church, but I think he was the first called-minister of that particular charge which was a church plant from back in the ‘70’s.  It was a multi-ethnic church with a lot of kids who just loved his children’s sermons because he used puppets.  He was well loved by the congregation.  

It happened that the treasurer of the Presbytery suddenly died and we needed one in a hurry.  As his first career was in accounting, he volunteered to do it until we found someone else.  It took about a year.  The incoming treasurer who was a respected accountant requested the books be audited before he took over.  Lo and behold, some discrepancies were found amounting to over $14,000.  He had apparently been withdrawing small amounts from ATM’s over the year and then placing the money in his personal account.  He said he was trying to close out an unnecessary account the former treasurer had created and didn’t want to go into the bank to do it.  So he was emptying it and placing it in his personal account in order to lump deposit it into the Presbytery main account.  Oddly, the money had disappeared from his personal account and he didn’t have the funds to replace it at that time.  He said his wife mistakenly spent it.  She didn’t know that he was holding the money for the Presbytery.  He seemed to think Presbytery wouldn’t know manure when we smelled it.

This embezzling of funds prompted a bigger investigation by the Presbytery into his congregation’s handling of money because he was apparently one of the primary handlers.  The people thought that since he was the minister he could be trusted without question.  We discovered that whenever there was a fundraiser, it was he alone who counted the money and deposited it.  He had a habit of saying he knew of a family that needed some help and so he would readily and regularly take pre-deposited cash from fundraisers to help “anonymous” families.  The congregation thought he was a saint for doing that and never questioned.  We also found that he had a regular practice of asking congregation members for personal loans to help an “anonymous” family in need.  Again, they all thought he was a saint.  In their defence, the church’s neighbourhood had a lot of new immigrants to Canada whom you could imagine would from time to time need some cash.  Maybe that’s what they thought he was doing.

Presbytery’s investigation showed that he had embezzled at least $50,000 that could be traced.  He had borrowed over $70,000 from congregation members.  That’s just from those who would admit loaning him anything.  There is no telling how much he pilfered from fundraisers.  Presbytery put him on suspension and eventually defrocked him and turned the case over to the OPP.  

Oddly, the congregation fought Presbytery tooth and nail for over two years believing that we were persecuting their saint.  It wasn’t until Presbytery finally cited the congregation to appear before it to give reason as to why they believed they should still be called a Presbyterian Church in Canada congregation that they saw his true colours.  When it became evident that they would lose everything, that’s when they saw the brutally painful light that their minister, whom they had blindly followed, had betrayed them.  He never owned up.  It took several years and much help from Presbytery for the congregation find some healing and eventually call another minister.

Not a happy story.  Sorry.  Let me lighten the mood.  Maybe you remember the movie “Home Alone” which to my knowledge was the last big box office hit to portray Christianity in a positive light (1990).  It was about a little troublemaker named Kevin who was mistakenly left behind from a family trip at Christmas and had to defend his home from burglars on Christmas Eve.  There was also an elderly widower who lived next door, Old Man Marley, who kept to himself and shovelled his sidewalks a lot . All the kids thought he was a serial killer known as The Southbend Shovel Slayer.  

Early in the evening on Christmas Eve Kevin and Marley wound up meeting in a local church.  Kevin had gone there to pray and ask forgiveness for the way he had treated his family and that God would reunite them.  Marley was there to see his young granddaughter rehearsing with the choir for the Christmas Mass.  They sat next to each other in a pew and Kevin soon discovered that Marley was really a kind and gentle but broken-hearted man who had been estranged from his only son for years after an argument over something stupid.  His son refused to let him have a relationship with his granddaughter, so Marley had snuck in at the church to catch a glimpse of her.  Kevin very maturely encouraged Marley to go home and call his son and make the effort to reconcile.  

Kevin and Marley left the church having formed an instant, meaningful friendship due to having seen each other’s “true colours” as they each owned their mistakes.  They were just two hurting people desperately wanting to be with their families and have those relationships healed.  Marley took young, remorseful Kevin’s advice and called his son.  The movie ends with Kevin reuniting with his family and things are better and stronger than before.  And finally, we see Kevin looking out his window over to Marley’s house to see Marley and his son reunite.  

I appreciate that Home Alone portrayed the Church and Christian faith in the light that it did…as an environment where we can own our mistakes and be forgiven, where we can find deep meaningful friendships, and that God hears our prayers and acts to heal us.  Church is the place where God’s help can be found for the healing and reconciliation of broken relationships.  That’s usually not how the Church and Christian faith are portrayed anymore.  Most media sources will simply present the Church as I did at the beginning of this sermon...as the place where very painful scandals happen…a place of darkness not of the Light.

So, true colours.  Looking at our reading today, we see Jesus in his “true colours” and it’s just pure, dazzling white light.  And I have to point out again how the theme of what’s going on with Jesus is something as big as the Creation event itself.  This passage is rich with allusion to the Creation Story in Genesis One.  It’s starts out six days after Peter made the confession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah.  The Light of the first day of creation is turned on with Peter confessing that.  Six days later would make it the seventh day, the day God reposed, that Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up on a mountain. There, they meet God and God is Trinity…The Holy Spirit hovers over them as a cloud like on the first day of Creation.  The Father speaks as on the First day of Creation, but this time he says, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”  Jesus is the Light.  When God finished the Creation, God pronounced it “very good”.  So also, Peter says, “It’s good for us to be here.”  And so, he wants to build some little tents and repose…rest…they have entered into the seventh day of Creation and are reposing with God.  But, there’s more to do and they must come down the mountain.  

So, true colours…the light of Christ.  Jesus shows us our “true colours” if we’re willing to set aside our egos and rest in the “good” shelter we find in humility.  The light of Christ is something, someone, whom we see, whom we feel when we listen to him; especially when we do this listening together.  Wrestling with who Jesus is together in the presence of the Holy Spirit and trying to live accordingly is a taste of New Creation.  

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of relationship in all this.  We have had ingrained in us to our detriment that Christian faith is mostly about me and my personal belief and my moral conduct and all of that is just between me and God and so you keep your judgey big nose out of it.  But God is relationship…the unconditional, self-giving loving communion of the Father Son and Holy Spirit who give themselves to each other so completely in unconditional, selfless love that they are one.  We are made in this relational God’s image which means the image of God in us shows up in how we do relationship…particularly in how we give ourselves to one another in selfless love; in how we serve one another and seek what is best for each other not just ourselves.  

The image of God we are created to bear is not found in how I do me.  It is found in how we do us.  In fact, how I do me is defined by how we do us.  Our culture has this completely backwards.  Our culture seems to think that me being fully me is what I need to bring to an us, but that us never seems to work.  We are like children playing beside each other in the sandbox rather than children playing together in the sandbox.  When we are just playing beside each other, relationship is based on taking from each other.  When we play with each other, relationship is defined by sharing.

The minister I described at the beginning of this sermon was all about himself and he hurt a lot of people.  Our culture idolizes self-actualization – strive to be all that you can be.  As I see it, the full extent of self-actualization will always strand us in some form of addiction whether it be narcissism, or to money, to power, or to a relationship, or to a substance.  Addiction has its horrible side effects of shame, deception, blame, and debt.  That minister was hooked on something.  It didn’t appear to be drugs.  It was more likely gambling or porn.  Whatever it was, he caused so much hurt by what he took from the people he was supposed to serve.  He was just playing by himself in the sandbox taking what he could from others.

On the other hand, looking at Home Alone, Kevin and Old Man Marley, their actually getting to know each other and working together at healing the broken relationships of their lives and doing it together in a church pew is what the image of God looks like.  They were playing with each other in the sandbox and sharing their lives in such a way as to bring about healing of hurts and reconciliation.  That’s how the light of Christ Jesus does its work of Transfiguration in us.  His true colour manifests in us as loving, honest, healing communication with each other that leads us to serve with deep compassion and generosity.  Amen.

Healing the Bubble

 Mark 1:29-39

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I would like to jump into our reading in Mark today by first jumping into the Creation story of Genesis 1. I think what is going on here at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel and his account of the beginning of Jesus’s work is that he is giving us a glimpse of Creation restored, a foreshadowing of the New Creation when Jesus returns.  I think that to really understand the meaning of Jesus’s work of healing people and casting out demons we need to appreciate his work on the scale of it being as big as the creation of the Creation itself.  

So, in Genesis 1 we have what many Old Testament scholars would say is actually a hymn, a hymn about how God made a beautiful place for God to come and repose in…you know, just a place to sit and listen to the birds and watch the bunnies and deer, and…best of all…do some people watching.  It would seem God just wanted a place that’s well-ordered and peaceful, a place to go home to that’s in working order to relax.  You see, everything was this watery darkness that was formless and empty.  Other neighbouring cultures to ancient Israel who wrote creation stories like this would use words like chaos, disorder, or even evil to describe this primordial state.  There are monsters and other mean-nasties there.  The pre-Creation is just not good, not a place God can repose.

God decided to do something about that and, first, They (and I say “They” because God referred to Godself as Us, a convenient invitation for us to think in terms of God being relational in nature – Trinity; Father, Son, Holy Spirit.) They, God, turned on the light to see what They (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) were doing.  Then, They created a big bubble in the midst of the primordial waters.  Then They made land, seas, and heavenly lights in the bubble that give it the order of Day and Night.  They filled the seas and skies with fish and birds and covered the land with vegetation and bugs and animals.  Then, They created humanity in Their own image.  They made us male and female which necessitated that there be loving relationship for our species to continue.  They called it all very good and came and reposed.  

So, Creation is supposed to be this well-ordered, peaceful bubble for God to come to and repose and enjoy the beauty of it all and particularly fellowship with the one’s God made in God’s own image of “Us”.  But, if we read on in Genesis, we find that those mean-nasties from the primordial chaos outside God’s bubble can come in and mess things up.  That Serpent sure stirred up some muck in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and all but ruined God’s bubble.  In time disease and death and broken relationships become rampant.  God has been working to set things right ever-since.

That story of Creation, the idyllic Big Bubble, puts me to mind of my grandparents and the home they created.  It was by no means perfect, but it was always a place I could go and repose and enjoy the sense of being safe, welcomed, and loved among people who were “for” me.  Granddaddy was a quiet, solid, wise, and compassionate man.  Grandma was gifted at making you feel at home.  You never had to worry about conversation with her.  As kids, we had plenty of laughs with her.  Grandma was almost always in the kitchen.  She lived to feed people.  The Big Bubble of their home was at its best on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve when the whole family was packed in there together with the thermostat set at 87F.  On those two days, I’m sure God was reposing and the “hominess” there was what he created this Creation for.  

There were times when the chaotic disordered world out there broke into the family Bubble.  I had an aunt who had a knack for not picking the right guy.  But Granddaddy and Grandma always opened up the “bubble” to him.  He was welcome at the table.  The Bubble wasn't forever.  It began to collapse when Granddaddy’s emphysema finally took him.  Things weren’t the same anymore.  Sadness sat at the table with us.  Three years later my dad died and that pretty much did it for me.  Then, Grandma passed two years after that.  No more Bubble.  But, I’m very thankful for my grandparents. Jesus told the thief who died on the cross next to him “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  When the big door opens for me, I’ve had a taste of where I’m going.

Anyway, back to reality, back to the Gospel of Mark.  In Jesus’s day in small town Judaism outside of the home, the synagogue and the marketplace were the most important places.  Last week we looked at the synagogue and how Jesus brought peaceful order back to the synagogue in Capernaum by casting out from a man an unclean spirit who came in to hinder Jesus's work of bringing in the Reign of God as promised.  In today’s reading Jesus takes the Reign of God into the home, into Peter’s home, and then it spilled over into all of Capernaum.

Let’s talk about Peter’s home, his bubble.  We don’t know much about Peter’s home, about his family.  There are three things we know.  His brother Andrew lived with him and he had a mother-in-law who lived with him.  We also know a little about the roles of men and women in the family back then.  Women looked after keeping the home – cooking, cleaning, raising the children, managing the servants, getting the groceries, etc.  Men looked after things outside the home – business, family reputation, participation in synagogue, civic duties.  Roles are different now.  Let’s not get sidetracked by the way their culture did things.  Outside of those three things we can only conjecture.  So…let's conjecture.

We never hear about Peter having a wife or children.  He got married at some point, hence the mother-in-law.  Conjecturing, he likely married a woman who had no brothers and her mother was a widow and so Peter likely did a very honourable thing.  He must have taken his mother-in-law into his care as well.  It was not a friendly world back then for widows with no sons.  I like to imagine that his mother-in-law was a lot like my grandmother.  She loved to cook and offer hospitality.  So where is his wife?  Why wasn't she there to offer hospitality to Jesus and the boys.  It is likely that sadness sat at Peter's table.  Peter’s wife likely could have died giving birth.  Peter’s status as a honourable man would have increased tenfold in that he continued to take care of his mother-in-law as if she were his own mother.  Peter’s home was well-ordered with compassion and honour, but it also knew the disorder of grief.

That brings us to Jesus coming to visit.  Jesus went to Peter’s home but due to illness, there was no one there to offer the customary hospitality.  This could have brought serious shame to Peter.  Peter likely makes his apologies and informs Jesus that his mother-in-law is in bed with a fever.  This concerned the King of Compassion.  He wanted to heal the bubble.  We don’t know what was causing this fever, but for it to be severe enough to keep her in bed meant it was quite serious maybe life threatening.  There were some popular ideas about the cause of fevers.  Demonic attack and punishment by God for sin topped the list.  Needless to say, no matter the cause this fever was another outright incursion of the disordered world outside God’s Big Bubble into Peter's home, his bubble, bringing with it the possibility of death.  Peter’s bubble was greatly threatened.

What does Jesus do?  He doesn’t destroy Peter’s home because there is sin, sickness, and evil there.  He restores Peter’s bubble to the “very good” that God pronounced at the end of Genesis 1 so that God could come and repose.  Jesus does this in an eyebrow raising way.  He doesn’t have her brought before him to interrogate her as if to find fault in her for this plague that has beset her.  Rather, he goes into the bedroom of a woman (raise one eyebrow).  In her bedroom, he touches her, he takes her by the hand (raise both eyebrows.).  He raises her up out of the bed…and she becomes well…and immediately she returns to doing what she loves doing – serving, offering hospitality.  She is restored.  Peter’s bubble is restored to “very good” ...and…God is reposing at his table.  Jesus is reposing with them.  The next thing you know the whole town is outside the door bringing the sick and the demon-possessed to be healed.  In Capernaum that evening many bubbles, many homes were restored.

This little seemingly insignificant story of Jesus healing a woman with a fever could be called a signpost passage for what the Reign of God looks like when it breaks forth amidst the disorder and chaos that is life today inside God’s Big Bubble that has been invaded by the forces of darkness that harbour outside the Big Bubble and let's not forget that sin-diseased humanity is in collusion with them. 

This is the way the Reign of God works.  Jesus in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit comes into our bubbles, our homes.  He does not judge us for our sin-sickness.  But rather he meets us in our most shameful places of weakness where we burn with fever in our bedrooms, so to speak.  He touches us and raises us up.  

Greek lesson – that word for “to raise up” is almost always used as some form of a reference to resurrection from the dead.  Jesus raised up Peter’s mother-in-law and that points us to the Day of Resurrection coming.  In the Reign of God Jesus touches us and raises us up to renew us, restore us with resurrection life, his life, new life in him – living with compassionate purpose in the sure knowledge of the love of God and God being with us reposing.  

The appropriate response to being “raised up” is to serve.  Another Greek lesson – the word for serve is the one we get our word “deacon” from and the type of serving it refers to is particularly offering hospitality and compassion to others.  It is the perfect word to describe the way disciples of Jesus should live.  Deaconing, showing hospitality and compassion, is what faithful disciples do.  

So, this is a glimpse of what the Reign of God looks like.  Jesus steps into our sick, disordered lives.  He touches us.  He raises us up to new life and restores us so that we deacon.  We serve others with hospitality and compassion.  This is God’s Big Bubble restoration project.  God is healing the Bubble in which "They" come to repose and enjoy its beauty.  We are part of that. We are small congregations.  We don’t have a lot to offer in the way of programs and stuff.  But what we do have is Bubble - compassion and hospitality.  We got Bubble, Big Bubble.  “We got Big Bubble and I cannot lie” - especially when we potluck.  The longer I am your minister, the more I get to know you each, the more our churches each feel like Grandma and Granddaddy’s home.  God is in our midst reposing and it is very good.  Amen.