Bishop Craig Schweitzer

Mark 1:29-39 • February 5, 2012

Click here to hear the audio recording of this sermon.

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

I think many of you might be asking a question today after just hearing this gospel reading. It may sound something like this, “If Mark’s gospel is in such a hurry with his abundant use of the word immediately and quickly changing scenes, why are we spending five weeks getting through one chapter?” If you’re asking that question, good. It’s a good question. And my pastoral response to your question is this – “Because.”

In other gospels Jesus proclaims his ministry – his mission – his purpose so to speak – in lengthy, beautiful sermons like the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew. In Mark, it’s a little different. Instead of several dozen verses and a few chapters of scripture, the Jesus in Mark’s gospel gives us one verse, Chapter 1, verse 15, with Jesus saying “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Or as the paraphrase of scripture called The Message puts it, “Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.”

Mark chapter 1, verse 15, may just be the shortest sermon ever offered in the history of humanity. It’s pretty revealing that centuries after Jesus first spoke these words; we’re stilling trying to figure out what they mean and how we are being invited each day to live as brothers and sisters in Christ if we really do in fact believe what this new teaching from Jesus claims.

When we hear Jesus say, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” what do you hear? For many of us, it’s not so much a matter of whether we believe these words; we’re just not sure what to do with them. I mean – your plate and my plate are already way too full.

A couple of weeks ago I was getting ready to go home after our Saturday evening worship service. My phone rang. It was one of my daughters informing me that they were standing in line at HuHot and it wouldn’t be too long before we would get a table, so I should come and have dinner with them. It was the first HuHot Mongolian Grill experience for our family, so I gladly went.

Dining at a Mongolian grill is an interesting experience. Not only because of the way the food is prepared, but also the way in which we, the customers, participate in that preparation. You grab a bowl, which by the way are simple and very adequate serving size bowls. Not too small. Not too large. You place the ingredients that you would like to eat in the bowl and take your bowl to the grill to be cooked.

However, it quickly became clear to me that the size of the bowl was not adequate for the amount of food that I thought I needed to choose. I desperately tried to figure out how I was going to get everything I wanted to eat in this now itty bitty, tiny little bowl. And then I remembered what our waitress said, “You can go back, if you would like more.” I sighed in relief.

So in this first trip, I was very selective with the amount of ingredients I chose. I didn’t want to exceed the capacity of the bowl. And I have to say, I think I was successful in that quest.

As we made our way to the grill, what surprised me was that I was one of only a few who had selected just enough ingredients to actually fit into the bowl. Most everyone else had filled their bowls way beyond capacity. They were struggling to keep all of the food in or on top of their bowl.

As I watched many struggle, I thought about the many times in my life that these bowls reflected. The many times in life when there were way more ingredients placed in front of me than I could actually keep in my bowl. Some would fall to the floor. Some became smothered by the constant weight and pressure of other things on top of them?

“Everyone is searching for you,” is what the disciples say to Jesus in our gospel reading today. Jesus had a busy day – healing a man possessed by unclean spirits in the synagogue, releasing a fever from Simon’s mother-in-law, and countless other healings throughout the day.

Everyone was clamoring to see this Jesus and experience for themselves how the kingdom of God was coming near. From the very start of the gospel of Mark, Mark reveals just how many ways Jesus proclaims and witnesses to the kingdom of God. And in today’s gospel Mark also reveals the source of Jesus authority and power as he tells us that Jesus rose early in the day to be alone with God in prayer.

All of us have times in life when we feel more like a piece of vegetable at the bottom of our HuHot bowl, crushed by the weight of an 80 hour work week that we try to maintain? Weightless as we fall to the floor after being pushed over the edge because of emotional stress that simply can’t fit on top of our already over stacked bowls. Clinging to relationships and habits that we should have let go of years ago? They cause us to constantly be sick with a fever and keep us from experiencing the healing touch of Jesus.

The question I have for you today is this – How are you getting away to be alone with God in prayer? Times of prayer that reveal God’s strength and faithfulness and healing touch given to you through a savior named Jesus.

Saint Jerome said that we all have fevers in a sermon that he preached around 400 A.D. in Bethlehem. “O that he (Jesus) would come to our house and enter and heal the fever of our sins by his command. For each and every one of us suffers from fever. When I grow angry, I am feverish. So many vices, so many fevers.”

And nearly 16 centuries later, Bishop NT Wright said, “With Jesus, God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It’s the door to the prison where we’ve been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to experience God’s rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore the new world to which we now have access. In particular, we are all invited – summoned actually – to discover, through following Jesus, that this new world is indeed a place of justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, and that we are not only to enjoy it as such but to work at bringing it to birth on earth as in heaven.” Bishop Wright continues, “In listening to Jesus, we discover whose voice it is that has echoed around the hearts and minds of the human race all along.” (This quote is from the book Simple Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense)

So we get to spend five weeks in the season of Epiphany in the first chapter of the gospel of Mark. Thanks be to God.

And I hope and pray that our time with this one chapter in this one gospel, causes you and I to experience new life as we feel Jesus’ healing touch. That it empowers us to remember that the number of ingredients and the size of our bowls is not a burden, but a renewing freedom challenging us to serve one another. And that it challenges us to purposely spend time with God in prayer, which restores us and makes us whole through the strength and power and healing touch that we are given in Christ Jesus our lord and savior. Amen.

Click here to hear the audio recording of this sermon.

Mark 1:21-28 • January 29, 2012

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

I want to check and see if you were paying attention as our gospel was read today. Today’s gospel from Mark is the story of the first healing, the first miracle of Jesus. The casting out of an unclean spirit from a man possessed. It’s something that we expect to hear and see Jesus doing in the gospels, BUT did you catch where this event takes place? Where does the possessed man show up? ____________ Right… In the synagogue. Right smack dab in the middle of the church. It absolutely blows me away that the very first miracle of Jesus in the gospel of Mark happens in a very special place. The church building itself.

Lutheran Pastor David Rhoads points out that in the gospel of Mark “Jesus wields authority over demons, illnesses (when people have faith), and natural forces (seas, deserts, trees) – nonhuman forces that oppress people. Jesus wields no authority, however, over people. He cannot heal people without faith, make them keep quiet if they wish to speak, or force his disciples to understand his teachings.”

Jesus doesn’t aggressively force his authority on people. He doesn’t “lord it over” people with a hammer. Jesus’ divine authority is to serve people.

Authority to serve people.

I’m not sure that I believe in being possessed by demons in the way that our gospel seems to portray them today. But I do believe that I see people nearly every day, including myself from time to time, who are possessed.

How have demons taken hold of your life to the point where they’ve become the very authority of your life? They may not be demons that make your head spin around as you shriek loudly while your eyes pop out of your head, but they are there.

Theologian David Lose says that the Hollywood stereotypes of demons are not true to the ones that we actually face. Lose says, “Rather than bless, [these demons] curse; rather than build up, they tear down; rather than encourage, they disparage; rather than promote love, they sow hate; rather than draw us together, they seek to split us apart.”

Demons like jealousy or addiction or pride or unhealthy life styles or excessive worry or an inability to forgive. Demons that need to be cast out in order for us to live the lives that God is calling us to live in Jesus Christ. The gospel writer of Mark is very clear that when an unclean spirit possesses us, it is in direct opposition to what the spirit of Christ wants to do in and through us.

Is that part of your struggle today? A part of you that is so bound up in the darkness of something that possesses you that you are afraid of what might happen if you actually release your grip and let the authority of Jesus say to you, “Be silent, and come out.”

In her book Amazing Grace: a Vocabulary of Faith, author Kathleen Norris writes, “When I think of the demons I need to exorcise, I have to look inward, to my heart and soul. Anger is my best demon, useful whenever I have to go into Woman Warrior mode, harmful when I use it to gratify myself, either in self-justification, or to deny my fears. My husband, who has a much sweeter nature than I, once told me that my mean streak grieved him, not just because of the pain it caused him but because it was doing me harm. His remark, as wise as that of any desert Abba, felt like an exorcism. Not that my temptation to anger was magically gone, but I was called to pay closer attention to something that badly needed attention, and that was hurting our marriage. It confirmed my understanding of marriage as a holy act: one can no more hide one’s true faults from a spouse than from God, and in exorcising the demon of anger, that which could kill is converted, transformed into that which can heal.”

So the point here for Mark, probably doesn’t rest on what Jesus says or does as much as it rests on how the people respond to what Jesus says and does.

I think the most challenging and transforming aspect of life in Christ is when we finally allow Jesus to release the demons that keep us tightly focused on our own selfish wants and desires and stop us from seeing the needs of others around us. These are demons that we seem to hold onto very tightly. But when we finally let go of them, we realize that we have been given authority by God, through Jesus, to heal, to proclaim, to change, to bring about redemption and forgiveness, and to cast out demons – for the sake of others. For the sake of our neighbor.

What bothered the religious leaders in the synagogue that day was not that Jesus prayed and preached. It was the fact that his prayers and teaching was moving people into action. So often, I think the church’s problem is not that we do not have authority, it’s that we don’t use the authority we have. Let’s quit defining the problems and then beating each other up with them – whether they are problems in another part of the world that we have no personal connection with like Egypt or Syria or they are right here in our own congregation – Good Shepherd Lutheran Church – and let’s start applying the authority that we have been given by God, through Jesus to heal, to support, to cast out, and to lift each other up.

Life in Christ is not always easy. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been engaged in a community of faith. They have never shared the life and death moments that these communities experience together as brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. It is in and through these communities that life and death walk hand in hand.

Thank God that this Jesus comes to us over and over. And thank God that this Jesus doesn’t and will never give up on us.
Blessing in the Chaos is a poem written by Jan Richardson that I pray serves us well as a final thought for today.

Blessing in the Chaos

To all that is chaotic
in you,
let there come silence.

Let there be
a calming
of the clamoring,
a stilling
of the voices that
have laid their claim
on you,
that go with you
even to the
holy places
but will not
let you rest,
will not let you
hear your life
with wholeness
or feel the grace
that fashioned you.

Let what distracts you
cease.
Let what divides you
cease.
Let there come an end
to what diminishes
and demeans,
and let depart
all that keeps you
in its cage.

Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.