“Feverish Living and Sabbath Rest”
Isaiah 40:21-31 and Mark 1:29-39
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
2/4/24
Isaiah 40:21-31
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain
and spreads them like a tent to live in,
23 who brings princes to naught
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
24 Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
25 To whom, then, will you compare me,
or who is my equal? says the Holy One.
26 Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
mighty in power,
not one is missing.
27 Why do you say, O Jacob,
and assert, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the faint
and strengthens the powerless.
30 Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted,
31 but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint. (NRSV)
Mark 1:29-39
29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.30 Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. 31 He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
32 That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons. 33 And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34 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.
35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.36 And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37 When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” 38 He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.” 39 And he went throughout all Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. (NRSV)
I wonder if the first-century writer of Mark wouldn’t have felt somewhat at home in the feverish pace of life of the twenty-first century. As we noted last week, in Mark’s telling of Jesus’ story, much of the action happens “immediately.” In the first chapter, “the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness.” (Mark 1:12) That urgency continues all the way through the gospel to the first verse of chapter 15 when, “As soon as it was morning,” Jesus is arrested and handed over to Pilate. In the Greek, “As soon as” is the same word elsewhere translated as “immediately.” After that, in less than a day, Jesus is dead and buried.
Today’s passage begins with that same immediacy. “As soon as [Jesus and the disciples] left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew.” And at once they tell Jesus that Simon’s mother-in-law is bedridden with a fever.
Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, and afterward she hurries back to work in the kitchen.
By sundown, the end of that sabbath day, a crowd stands at the door, pressing Jesus for healing or to watch healings happen. Jesus tends to as many as he can until everyone finally goes home.
Feverishness hounds Jesus everywhere he goes, doesn’t it?
Now, to some of you, all this begins to sound rather cliché, but maybe some things become cliché because we need to face them over and over.
Who among us hasn’t experienced the feverishness of life? In our culture, busyness has become a badge of honor. “How are you doing?” someone asks. And most of the time we either say, “Fine,” or we declare that we’re too busy to know what day it is. It seems to me, that even more of the time, all we want to hear from others is that they’re either fine or busy. We’re so caught up in our own fevered lives that we seldom have the physical stillness and the spiritual peace required to listen to and care for one another.
Even young people feel this feverishness. At what age do we start them in organized sports requiring daily practices, and weekend-long tournaments in far-away towns?
The sad paradox is that while many folks try to use busyness to validate their lives, the cost of feverish living is life itself. Frenetic existence is about achieving and acquiring rather than growing and sharing. It numbs us to people we claim to love and to the systemic inequities and iniquities that destroy human community.
Now, here’s the redeeming twist. In today’s story, Jesus rises before the sun and slips away by himself. He escapes to a secluded place to pray. After sunrise, the disciples launch a desperate search for Jesus. When they finally find him, they say, “Everyone is searching for you.” Translation: Let’s go, Jesus! We gotta get busy!
Jesus doesn’t disagree, but he does redirect. Yeah, we’ll get moving, he says. But I have other places to go, and other people to see.
While Jesus experiences his own feverish pace of life, he handles it differently. All along the way he prepares for that busyness. He prepares by entering, repeatedly, the relationship-restoring peace of solitude, and the invigorating stillness of prayer.
I think that Jesus pulling away from the people who need him is the very point of today’s story. Precisely because of his disciplined retreat from the relentless demands, Jesus is able to fulfill his calling as the Christ. In yet another paradox, Jesus regularly avoids people as the only way truly to be with them and to lovethem.
Years ago, I read that the reformer Martin Luther said that the busier his life got the more time he had to commit to the renewing peace of contemplation. As one who kept on the move in order to avoid arrest and execution for heresy, Luther lived a terribly feverish life, and he couldn’t study, write, preach, travel, and thrive if he didn’t carve out ample time simply to sit in the presence of God.
Folks like me are usually expected to set good examples of faithfulness in prayer. And while I may be well-practiced at cluttering up silences with words, and calling that prayer, I struggle as much as anyone with physical stillness and spiritual peace. I struggle to make adequate time for the kind of contemplation and prayer that causes fevers to break, wounds to heal, and that opens our eyes to the Spirited holiness at work creating and uniting all things in love.
While such a confession is no excuse, it can be a starting place. If we claim to be the body of Christ, doesn’t it make sense, that, to prepare ourselves for Christian mission, we, too, would regularly pull away from the world? For us as a community, that means more than simply shutting ourselves up in worship one hour a week. It means making time to lay everything else aside so we can sit together in receptive silence.
There’s a story told about Mother Teresa answering a question about her prayer practice. When asked about her discipline, Mother Teresa said, “I sit there in God’s presence and just listen.”
“What does God say,” said the interviewer.
Without any hint of guile, Mother Teresa said, “God just listens.”3
We’re talking now about creating sabbath time—time to gather in community to hit a collective off switch and surrender to the embrace of Spirit. And in that embrace, we simply feel and listen. Through sabbath time we place ourselves in the hands of God who heals our fevers, and deepens our capacity for giving and receiving love. And real sabbath takes practice.
Well known for honoring silence in both individual and corporate worship, Quakers seem to have learned this better than many other Christian groups. The hymn “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” is an adaptation of the poem “The Brewing of Soma” by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.1 The story behind the poem is quite interesting, but for our purposes, it’s enough to recognize that this hymn invites us into sabbath.
So, instead of filling more time with my words, we’re going to sing this hymn together. As we sing, I invite you to contemplate God’s healing and comforting presence in sabbath stillness and peace.
Benediction:
When I Am Among the Trees
by Mary Oliver
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you, too, have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”2
1https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-dear-lord-and-father-of-mankind
2 I heard this story from a friend, and couldn’t find confirmation of it as told. The following quotation is close and may actually be the source of the story as it came to me. “God speaks in the silence of the heart, and we listen. And then we speak to God from the fullness of our heart, and God listens. And this listening and this speaking is what prayer is meant to be…” From: The Best Gift is Love: Meditations (ed. Servant Books, 1993) - ISBN: 9780892838141
3“When I Am Among the Trees,” by Mary Oliver. Published in Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, Boston, 2006. Pg. 4.
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