February 8, 2009
(Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany)
Ministry Awaits
by
The Rev. Canon
Susan Sommer
Isaiah 40:21-31 • Psalm
147:1-12, 21c • 1 Corinthians
9:16-23 • Mark 1:29-39
(From
The Lectionary Page)
For three Sundays in January, a small but hardy band of Cathedral parishioners joined me in an adult formation class on the Babylonian Exile. The Exile, we learned, was a national catastrophe in the life of Israel which occurred in the 6th century B.C. Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the invading Babylonian army. The king and the religious leaders were taken captive, as were either some or all of the inhabitants of Judah (depending on which sources you read). How the Judeans made sense of this catastrophe and how they chose to reconfigure themselves once they were allowed to return to their homeland informs virtually every book of the Old Testament. The Exile, we learned, truly, was as much if not more of a watershed moment in the life of the Jewish people as the Exodus was.
We also learned that several strands of meaning-making emerged from the Exile. One strand of thought saw the Exile as God’s punishment for the outrageously wicked King Manasseh, whose flagrant disobedience to the Torah spelled doom for the Judeans. The way forward for this thinking was righteousness: radical obedience to the Law of Moses. By contrast, another strand of thought saw the Exile as God’s punishment for the failure of the people to heed the prophets. For this thinking, the way forward involved the rebuilding of the Temple and rigorous attention to matters of ritual purity.
And there was a third way of thinking – a way that is illustrated in that lyrical passage from Isaiah this morning. This strand of thought began to understand God in broader terms. God was more than a tribal chieftain with authority over one group of people in one small piece of geography. God was transcendent, mightier than all of the other gods that the Gentiles worship, a God who could neither be confined nor defined by covenantal law or ritual practice. In Isaiah’s own words, The Lord is an everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth…his understanding is unsearchable. The suffering experienced during the Exile, to this way of thinking, is barely a blip in the vast, majestic, unfathomable history of God’s care for creation. The way forward for this strand of thought is through faith that God is very much in charge of salvation history, even though we humans may not always be able to see evidence of God’s hand at work in the world at any given moment.
In the five centuries between the return from Exile and Jesus of Nazareth bursting upon the scene, the first two strands of thinking – the way of righteousness and the way of purity -- flourished in Israel. The third way, the way of Deutero-Isaiah, as this portion of Isaiah is known, remained a minority voice. And yet it is the strand of thinking that seems to find expression in Jesus – at least the Jesus we find in Mark’s gospel. Last week we heard of the dramatic exorcism of the man who entered the synagogue with an unclean spirit. Today’s lesson picks up where last week’s left off: it is still the Sabbath and Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. The way of righteousness forbade labor of any sort on the Sabbath including healing. The way of purity rigorously forbade those who were ritually pure from contact with those who were sick or possessed with unclean spirits.
And yet Jesus healed the sick and cast out demons with impunity. Mark tells us that he not only proclaimed the good news of God’s salvation, he was the very embodiment of God’s salvation in the world. That which separated, that which oppressed, that which opposed God’s desire for wholeness for the created order was cast out by the mighty power of God in Jesus Christ.
It isn’t that the Torah or the Purity Codes had become worthless. To the contrary! They were very worthy processes for mediating the experience of God. Both systems safeguarded the spiritual well-being of the community. Unfortunately, the safeguards also excluded a good portion of the community. Precious few resources are going to be allocated to healing and restoring when the system is designed to keep the sick and the troublesome at bay.
We have our own version of the way of righteousness. We have our own version of the way of purity. Whenever the Church looks only within itself for credence and authority to support all of its own biases, we see it. Whenever its leadership or its members believe that they have a full and complete picture of God’s revealed truth, we see it. Whenever religious communities become self-satisfied enclaves of exclusion, or where right thinking – be it conservative or liberal -- is the acknowledged pathway to salvation, we see it. Our own versions of the way of righteousness or purity beguile us because they are clear, they are predictable, they are unambiguous.
And yet Jesus shows us another way. Chaos or even ambiguity are not things to be avoided; dis-ease or darkness are not conditions that point the absence of God. They point merely to ministry that awaits. That God is revealed when persons or systems are healed and restored. That God is infinitely greater than the sum of our religious beliefs. That when religious systems create roadblocks, however unintended, to health and wholeness, health and wholeness must hold the trump card. That the same transcendent God who spun the universe into being is also infinitely connected to all whom he created and works tirelessly to bring to fulfillment all which God intended.
And we are reminded, as the Body of Christ in this world with our own fair share of carefully guarded religious systems, that we, too, are called to a ministry of restoration and of healing. In fact, the Catechism in our beloved Book of Common Prayer spells it out. The mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. May we, in the midst of the cares and occupations of our mortal life, embrace and ever hold fast the eternal grace of God given to us in Christ Jesus. Ministry awaits.
