Sermon on Mark 1:29-39

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

So far this year, we’ve explored what Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus have to say about Sabbath.

Today, we’re going back to the suggested scriptures for the day and back to the Gospel of Mark, and we’re going to see what Jesus’ life says to us about Sabbath and rest.

It’s still really early in Jesus’ ministry, but he’s done a lot, as the action-lacked Gospel of Mark reminds us. He’s gotten baptized, spent time in the wilderness, and called some disciples. Right before our reading today begins, Jesus was preaching at a synagogue on the Sabbath, and he cast a demon out of a man.

In this reading, we see Jesus’ ministry expanding from the personal to the local to the larger surrounding area.

After the service at the synagogue, Jesus went with his disciples to Simon and Andrew’s home, where Simon’s mother-in-law was sick with a fever. It says, “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

Now, it’s easy to get cynical about a woman who’s just been ill immediately getting up and serving men. And that’s a valid reading.

But I find a more charitable reading empowering. First of all, the language of Jesus taking her by the hand and lifting her up is just beautiful.

Then, the word for serve is the same that’s used to describe the angels caring for Jesus in the wilderness just a few verses before. And also, that same word is where we get our word “deacon”—ministers who are known for service. We can read her as the first deacon. I wonder if the moment the fever left her and she got to her feet, still holding onto Jesus’ hand, if she felt a clarity in her mission, a passion to serve those around her in Jesus’ name.

I admire that clarity of mission, and we’ll talk in a minute about where else I see that in this reading.

But first, we see Jesus here having a personal connection with Simon’s mother-in-law in the privacy of her home. That privacy didn’t last long as the sun set on the Sabbath and the first day of the week began.

Word had spread fast about Jesus casting out the demon from the man in the synagogue. So, the moment the sun went down, everyone brought their loved ones distressed by demons or illnesses to see Jesus. Can you imagine the crowd pressing in, full of desperation and hope?

Jesus spent hours curing people and casting out demons. He served the city, just as Simon’s mother-in-law served him and his disciples.

Jesus’ ministry goes from the personal with Simon’s mother-in-law to the local with all their neighbors showing up at the door.

There seems to be plenty for Jesus to do here.

But we know his ministry didn’t stay in that one city. So, what happened?

Our reading says in the morning Jesus went out to a deserted place while it was still very dark.

Perhaps he healed people through the night and was only able to sneak away in the early morning hours. Or maybe he got a few hours of sleep before waking with the faces of the people he had ministered to before his eyes, unable to fall asleep again.

One way or another, Jesus went to be alone and prayed.

Surely there was more for him to do, and it didn’t take long for his disciples to come looking for him in a panic.

But Jesus went to be by himself to pray.

We sometimes get the impression that Jesus was kind of lax about the Sabbath. There are many stories in the Gospels of Jesus getting in trouble for healing people on the Sabbath. In the very next chapter in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says, “’The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.’”[1]

This can give us the impression that Jesus didn’t care about observing the Sabbath.

But in today’s reading, we see Jesus get overtaken by a crowd of people who needed him, and then we see him withdraw and pray. He could have just kept goinguntil burnout and compassion fatigue consumed him.

But he didn’t. After what must have been a tiring day, he found time alone to spend with God. If that’s not Sabbath, I don’t know what is.

And what happened when he found some time to renew himself?

When his disciples found him, he told them, “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.”

His time in prayer clarified his next steps. He wasn’t supposed to stay in that city healing people for the rest of his life. He was supposed to go on to neighboring towns to proclaim the message there also, for that is what he came out to do.

We see in our reading a cycle of action and then reflection that gave Jesus direction and clarity about his mission, which went from the personal with Simon’s mother-in-law, to the local need in that city, to the broader mission to share the good news in the larger surrounding area. Jesus needed solitude and prayer before deciding his next step.

That goes for us, too. How often do we take what we think is the next step in our lives, only to find that we’re moving fast toward something that isn’t fulfilling?

If we don’t pause to reflect, we can end up chasing goals that don’t light us up inside.

So how do we figure out what does light us up inside?

It takes time. It takes time to get to know ourselves, to reflect on our values, to listen to the Holy Spirit about where God is leading us.

And we can’t do any of that unless we pause.

Sabbath isn’t about being legalistic about the things we can’t do for a whole 24 hours. It’s about pausing to orient our lives toward God.

It’s not legalistic to feed yourself every day. It’s not legalistic to get a full night’s sleep at night. These are things you need for your body to feel good and to function well.

We need Sabbath rest to feel good and function well. It’s between you and God what it looks like for you. But we all need rest, and we all need to rest in God’s presence.

We, like Jesus, can find rhythms of action and reflection to guide our lives.

One thing that’s been helpful for me over the past several months is meeting with a coach as I’ve been navigating the transition in my role here at FLC. She helped me discern my values:

compassion, connection, community, clarity, and collaboration.

And she also helped me craft a personal mission statement, inspired by this congregation: I compassionately feed hurting people body and soul to collaborate in the practice of Beloved Community.

Knowing my values and mission statement gives me a starting point in the reflection part of the action and reflection cycle in my life.

Our church council will spend some time on this sort of thing at our retreat later this month, and I encourage you to do the same. Find a few minutes this week and jot down a few things that matter to you. You don’t need a formal mission statement. Just knowing your values can help you figure out life-giving next steps in your life.

Jesus could have had a successful career as a doctor in that city. He could have bought a house next to Simon and Andrew. But that wasn’t his mission, and he wouldn’t have figured that out if he hadn’t spent time in reflection and prayer.

It’s not legalistic or self-indulgent to rest and reflect amid all the action we do every day. It’s a gift from God and something we need for our well-being.

May there be rest and reflection for you this week as you seek God’s vision for your life.

Rest well, beloved.

[1] Mark 2:27-28

Sermon on Leviticus 25:1-24

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

We continue our sermon series this week, reading parts of the Bible we don’t normally spend a lot of time on—parts that talk about Sabbath, Jubilee, and rest.

This week we read from Leviticus, which records the code of Law given by God to God’s people after they had been freed from enslavement in Egypt. It’s not the most exciting of books. One can only read about different types of offerings and what people should do if they have a skin disease for so long before one’s eyes begin to cross. There are a lot of laws that don’t have a whole lot to do with our lives today.

But then, there are beautiful passages like this where, yes, it’s still a list of laws and details, but it sets out a beautiful picture of the life God intends for God’s people. There are intentional practices of rest, not only for the people, but for the animals and the land.

In addition to the weekly practice of Sabbath named in the Ten Commandments, this passage describes sabbatical years and Jubilee.

Every seven years, the people were to give their land a rest. They were not to plant or harvest anything in their fields for the whole year. It was a “year of complete rest for the land.” If any of you grew up on farms or have spent any time in agricultural work, I’m sure you can teach me a lot about how to care for land. But I do know that if you grow the same crops in the same fields year after year without changing things up, the fields will produce less. It’s not good for anyone involved.

God taught the people how to take care of the land, which involved taking a year of rest. It benefited not just the people, but God’s creation which they tended.

Then, after 7 sabbatical years, there was a year of Jubilee. That fiftieth year was hallowed, just as God hallowed the seventh day of creation. Again, people were not to plant or harvest their fields. The land went back to the original owners as it was divided up upon arrival in the Promised Land. This is troubling, considering there were people who lived on that land before the Israelites conquered it, but that’s a very important conversation we’ll have to save for another time.

Suffice it to say, though, that there was a reset of ownership every fifty years. Land went back to its owners, those enslaved became free (it has more details about that in the rest of the chapter, which we didn’t read), and there was rest for the land and the people.

God decreed these patterns of rest: a Sabbath every week, a sabbatical year every seven years, and a year of Jubilee every fifty years. They were communal, not individual, practices. Today, self-care is so often marketed as an individual practice. You have totake time to rest. You have to make time for a bubble bath or a yoga class. None of these are bad things, but they fall short by themselves.

Sabbath and sabbatical years and Jubilee are not individual self-care practices. The ways we take care of ourselves as individuals are crucial, but they alone will not lead to the authentic justice and peace of the Beloved Community.

For example, mental healthcare is so important, and I have personally benefited from therapy immensely. But, if someone is anxious or depressed because they’re not sure they’ll be able to afford the rising cost of housing in their gentrifying neighborhood or because their disability benefits are not sufficient to cover their needs or because their farm isn’t able to compete with larger agricultural companies, that is a societal problem, not an individual one. Individual solutions are not sufficient.

In the Law, God establishes patterns that support the well-being of the whole society, not just the individual. God gives instructions to foster practices of freedom and justice. And one of the ways God does that is through practices of rest:

·       In Sabbath, the people are to rest in God’s love and care for them.

·       In the sabbatical years, people are to give the land, and therefore also themselves, a rest to renew.

·       And in Jubilee, people’s relationships with each other and their possessions and their land are refreshed and restored.

Through Sabbath and sabbatical years, and Jubilee, God institutes rest as a form of freedom and justice that heals the relationships between God, people, and creation.

So what does this mean for us?

We don’t live as a unified people group who worship the same God with a rule of law that dictates spiritual practice.

We, in fact, live in a pluralistic and individualistic society. We have many different faith traditions and forms of spirituality which we are encouraged to practice privately. There are pros and cons to that as with anything else. But it does have some challenges.

In our pursuit of Sabbath this year, it’s hard to imagine what that looks like on a communal and not just on an individual level.There are certainly individual restful practices, and I definitely encourage trying them out.

In fact, that’s exactly what I encourage you to do for your Lenten discipline, if you’re so inclined. Lent will be here in just 3 ½ more weeks, so it’s a great time to start thinking about it. This year, try on different rest practices.What would be restful for you? Maybe it is setting aside a full day of not working. Maybe it’s stretching five minutes before bed.

What type of tired are you? Are you physically tired? Mentally tired? Emotionally tired? That can help you figure out what would be most restorative for you this season. Or try something new each week.

Individual practices can bring you rest and connection with God. That is so important.

And also, we see in our reading today a set of communal practices of rest. What can that look like for us in the society we live in today?

I don’t have a prescription for that. I’m learning to practice Sabbath alongside you. This is something for us to learn and figure out together.

But I do notice some things about our reading that could give us a place to start:

1.    The laws in our reading care for the land. What does caring for the land we live on look like? How can we be good stewards of the land on which our church building sits? Most of us don’t grow our own food, so what do just agricultural practices look like today? How can we support that?

2.    The laws in our reading today also remind the Israelites that they are “aliens and tenants” of the land which is God’s. What practices can we do that help us hold our possessions loosely? Our stewardship team is always finding ways to help our congregation to live in a spirit of generosity and gratitude. What can we as a congregation do to remind each other that we are entrusted with what is God’s?

3.    One final thing I notice is that our reading enacts practices that allow for others’ rest. People are not just told to guard their own rest, but for instance, the sabbatical year laws require everyone to rest. If the land is not being worked, the laborers rest, the animals that work the land rest, and the land itself rests. The patterns of rest foster rest for everyone. There is trust for God’s provision, because God says there will be enough to eat until there is food to harvest again. It is a bigger pattern of what we read in last week’s reading about God providing enough manna the day before the Sabbath that the people wouldn’t have to gather it on the Sabbath itself. God is setting up patterns of freedom and rest for God’s people.

Now, we get the opportunity to not only try on Sabbath for ourselves, but to craft Sabbath practices for this faith community that foster rest for everyone.

As you try individual Sabbath practices, listen for what the Holy Spirit is saying about how to build a culture of rest that encompasses our communities and creation.

Our God of freedom proclaims rest for everyone. Rest well, beloved.

It Would Have Been Enough

Pr. Jaz Waring

Epiphany 2 January 14, 2024

I walked into the discount grocery store with $20 in my pocket to buy groceries to last at least a week. Getting laid off work and living on my own required me to get creative with my budget. I ate a lot of bean burritos when I was broke. Buying a large can of Rosarita Traditional refried beans was about a dollar at the time, and I’d get a stack of flour tortillas. This was enough to feed me lunch and/or dinner, mixing it up with instant ramen or scrambled eggs. This was may manna for my wilderness season of unemployment. It sustained me and warmed my bones until I was able to get constant income. Sometime I look back at that challenging time with a sense of nostalgia, but I don’t want to live through that ever again. We’re continuing our series on sabbath and rest. The last time I was here, I talked about how we rest in the face of injustice. This week, we’ll get into how we can rest in the face of scarcity. Israel gets a bad wrap for complaining in the wilderness. In context, I think they had a right to complain. They were refugees escaping slavery, and were stuck in an arid wilderness. They could not cultivate the land to produce food. So when the food they grabbed on the way out of Egypt ran out, they rightfully complained to management. They began to look back on their past experience of oppression with rose-colored lenses. Sometimes the oppression you know feels better than the liberation you can not see. God responds to the cries of Israel, a common theme in Exodus and the Hebrew Bible. God provides quail and manna to sustain them while in the wilderness. This mysterious carb from heaven was a gift that revealed God’s presence with them. The manna was not your ordinary bread from heaven, it had very quick expiration date. If you tried to save some leftovers for the next day, it would rot. I’ve had similar experiences with avocados. This was an intentional exercise in trust, teaching Israel how to navigate the age old question: how do you know when you’ve had enough? As the story continues, God told Israel that on the day before the sabbath, to collect twice as much food so that it would last the next day. This is tip number one for rest in the face of scarcity: If you don’t plan on resting, then rest might not ever come. We need to be intentional with how we use our time and resources so that we can enter into our rest. However, Israel would rather work than trust God to provide for them. God created the world with abundance for everyone. However our sinful and imperfect systems do not distribute resources equitably. There is enough food in our world for every mouth to be fed. There is enough housing in the world for everyone to have a permanent home. There is enough money in the world for everyone to have affordable healthcare and more than a barely-living wage. Instead, we as a society create scarcity and hoard our resources. Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes about the “myth of scarcity” in his book, The Covenanted Self: Exploration in Law and Covenant. He writes about an over 1,000 year old Passover song called “Dayenu” which means, “It would have been enough” or as he puts it, “There is enough in God’s goodness.” The song goes through the Exodus story, God’s miracles, and the gift of the Torah, with the refrain “It would have been enough.” For example, here are a few lines from the song: If God had brought us out from Egypt, and not carried out judgements against them Dayenu, It would have been enough. or If he had given us their wealth, and had not split the sea for us Dayenu, It would have been enough or If he had supplied our needs in the desert for forty years, and had not fed us the manna Dayenu, it would have been enough. If he had fed us the manna, and had not given us the Shabbat, Dayenu, it would have been enough. This song displays the abundance of God because if God had not given or done more, it would have been enough. They would have found satisfaction, but God didn’t stop there! God kept going, kept giving, kept protecting God’s people. There is enough in God’s goodness for us. We can be completely satisfied in God’s goodness, not because of our work, but because of who God is. God is abundant and does not want to withhold any good thing from us, and we also live in a world that has created scarcity. These two things can be true at the same time. So how do we rest in the face of scarcity? We have a Dayenu kind of faith. A Dayenu kind of faith trusts that there is enough in God’s goodness for everyone. A Dayenu kind of faith resists the urge to hoard, or overwork ourselves. A Dayenu kind of faith influences these corrupt systems in order to serve the public good. When you don’t have enough, you can trust in the goodness of God, who provides the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, fleshed out in community. Christ is the Bread of Life, sent from the heavens to sustain us, and to be a sign of God’s presence with us. We consume the Body of Christ in Holy Communion every week to nourish our spirits and re-member ourselves as an interconnected beloved community across time and space. God may not send money and food from the heavens to provide for us, but does provide for us through community. God’s presence within each of us has the grace and the ability to be God’s hands and feet, and make the world a more equitable place. When everyone does their part, and takes only what they need, there is room for all of us to rest in the goodness of God. So if God has given you the strength to get out of bed, but not brush your teeth. Dayenu, it is enough. If you had the strength to brush your teeth, but not to cook for yourself Dayenu, it is enough. If you had the strength to cook for yourself, but not get out of the house, Dayenu, it is enough. If you had the strength to get out of the house, but not to work or run errands, Dayenu, it is enough. If you had the strength to work or run errands, but not to pay your bills Dayenu, it is enough. If you had the strength to pay your bills, but not do something you love, Dayenu, it is enough. There is enough in God’s goodness for today, and for you. Amen.