As we come together this morning in this time of worship, I am very aware that the landscape of reality is shifting all around us. If you believe, as I do, that perception is part of reality, you know definitely that change is taking place on a massive scale. The news media bombard us with stories of diminishing wealth and lost income, numbers documenting dramatically rising unemployment, and interviews with people who are re-evaluating their priorities.
A case can be made that over the past couple of decades, when prosperity was taken for granted, many people dabbled in different forms of spirituality, a word with a broad spectrum of meanings. It was not hard to find televangelists who offered a kind of spirituality that led to material wealth and a good feeling about oneself, especially if one happened to be attractive and rich. Other kinds of gurus sent out a similar message, a message that sought to comfort the comfortable and allow people to scratch their built-in itch for deeper meaning in life without asking very much of them.
That kind of spirituality has lost its power, in the same way trickle-down-economics with its gospel of tax cuts for the wealthy has lost its credibility—although you wouldn't know that from the arguments of Republican senators in Washington this past week. What a travesty.
Today's reading from Mark's Gospel suggests some truths, maybe even hard truths, about healthy spirituality, especially healthy Christian spirituality. The reading begins with Jesus and his friends leaving the synagogue in Capernaum and entering the home of Simon Peter, one of the friends. The synagogue was a place of worship and learning, central in the spiritual life of Palestinian Jews in Jesus' time. Attendance at synagogues was a regular part of Jesus' life. All four Gospels emphasize that fact.
In our culture during the last two decades or longer, it has been fashionable to say "I believe in spirituality but I don't believe in organized religion." I am quick to agree that some, maybe even much, of what we call organized religion has been life-negating rather than life-enhancing. But I am also of the strong conviction that much of unstructured spirituality has failed to be life-changing or life-enhancing. Any athlete, any artist, any scholar will tell you that discipline is essential to any attaining competence or excellence. I can tell you the same thing is true about spiritual maturity or spiritual health: discipline is essential.
As I was reading today's Gospel lesson earlier in the week, I thought of something I discovered in James H. Smylie's very readable book A Brief History of the Presbyterians. Smylie says that a Presbyterian layman from Philadelphia wrote a book in 1851 addressing the challenge the church faced back then when the country was becoming urbanized in major ways. The Presbyterian industrialist Stephen Colwell was concerned about the condition of the church as it faced a new situation. The subtitle of his book was Creeds without Charity, Theology without Humanity, and Protestantism without Christianity.
What I was thinking about in that connection was the Gospel reading about Jesus leaving the synagogue with his followers and entering the home of Simon Peter. These are the people to whom Jesus said "Follow me." And they left everything and followed him. That was the beginning of the Christian Church. Its focus was Jesus, clearly Jesus. Everything else flowed from that—from him.
The first Christians knew about Jesus, knew Jesus, and didn't know about buildings, budgets, committees, traditions, and things that make up church experience for many people today. So often we reverse the order of things in our church life. We grow up in a congregation or become part of one; we learn the way that congregation does things. Or we find a church where we feel comfortable, and we learn how it operates. We become familiar with a way of "doing church." But, an awful lot of people in Christian churches today don't know very much about Jesus. The Philadelphia industrialist would subtitle his book if he wrote it today "Christianity without Jesus of Nazareth."
I don't say that to be critical or judgmental. That is not my style of ministry. I say it to encourage you to get to know Jesus as we find him in the Gospels. I believe Jesus still has the magnetism, the authority to attract people to follow him, just as he did two thousand years ago. We need to do the footwork of reading the Gospels, really reading them. For most of 2009 the lectionary Gospel readings come from the Gospel according to Mark, the shortest of the four, and the Gospel according to John, the most mystical of the four. I highly recommend that you make it a point to read Mark's Gospel and John's Gospel in the next few weeks or days, preferably reading several chapters at a time rather than just several verses at a time. Buy something like the Oxford Study edition of the New Revised Standard Bible if you don't have anything like that. It will be a good investment in your spiritual health.
This morning's Gospel reading gives us an outline of what Jesus did in his brief ministry: he preached good news, he taught, and he healed.
The message Jesus preached was a positive one. He said, "Change the way you organize your life because the reign of God is breaking in." He was inviting people to direct themselves toward life affirming realities rather than to life negating realities. He was saying, "If you try to make yourself the center of the universe, as some people do, you're setting yourself up for catastrophe. If you try to play God, you will end up in misery. The world isn't designed to work that way. The world is designed to work with God in the place of God, and with human beings in the place of human beings—and they're not the same thing.
Jesus taught people about life, about how to live life on life's terms. He said, "Love your fellow human beings as you love yourself." What's behind that teaching is not some arbitrary rule or regulation, dreamed up to make life difficult. What's behind it is the way the universe hangs together. If we learn to love other people, to care about and for them; and if we learn to love ourselves in a healthy way, which means caring about ourselves with healthy self-respect; then life will have meaning and purpose, and life will be satisfying in a profound way. That's what Jesus taught.
And Jesus healed. In this morning's reading he healed Simon Peter's mother-in-law. All four Gospel writers give healing a significant place in Jesus' ministry. The people of his time clearly saw his works of healing as miracles, as demonstrations of a unique kind of power. Their world view was different from our world view. Their understanding of how the human body works was different from our understanding of how the human body works. The same thing is true about how the human mind works and other related subjects.
For me that means it is simply impossible to understand fully "what happened" in Jesus' works of healing. But the record clearly wants us to know that because of what Jesus did, and especially because of who he was, people who had been blind came to see, and people who had been paralyzed were able to walk, and people whose lives were wildly out of control were restored to sanity, and people who had been afraid became courageous. Jesus was able to direct the power of God in such a way that healing took place for all kinds of people.
The Bible is silent about one of the most perplexing questions people raise in connection with the healing ministry of Jesus: why some people were healed or cured and others were not. Not all the people with leprosy in Galilee or Jerusalem in Jesus' time were healed. Not all the blind had their sight restored. Not all desperately sick children were given back to their parents in good health. Not all the dying were brought back to life.
A few years ago I visited in the New Jersey home of a church member who was dying of cancer. Her husband said to me with tears in his eyes, "Dave, I don't understand why some people are spared, and my wife is not. She's such a good woman, a teacher who has inspired so many African-American young people in a positive way. They need teachers like my wife. I just don't understand."
I said to the husband, with tears in my eyes also, "I don't understand either why some people are healed and others are not. But I know this: God loves the ones who are not healed as much as God loves the ones who are healed, and they are safe in the arms of Jesus." There is healing for all of us who have to wrestle with what life brings us: good things and bad things, joy and sadness, birth and death, laughter and tears. God loves us all, in life, in death, and beyond death.
The last thing to notice in this morning's Gospel lesson is Jesus going off for some time alone so that he could pray and meditate. There was a rhythm to his life, a balance between quiet reflection and active involvement. I learned a long time ago to set aside at least ten minutes every day for prayer and reading. When I am especially busy or stressed, I make it twenty minutes. That's the only way I can stay centered and spiritually healthy. I recommend such a practice.
I began this morning by saying I hope you will continue getting to know Jesus. Read about him in the Gospels; discover him in the interaction of your life with other people of faith or of no faith. I do not argue for the exclusivity of Christianity. But I have found Jesus to be a wonderful guide for life; a wonderful window into the heart of God; a reliable source for the kind of healing that touches us in our places of deepest pain and sadness, and moves us toward joy and wholeness—which is God's design for life—and strengthens us in our work for peace with justice.
Thanks be to God.