Current Sermon: From the Table to the World
By the Reverend Matthew Nickel
February 5, 2012 (5th Sunday after Epiphany)
A few weeks ago, my wife and I celebrated Epiphany with a group of her friends. After dinner in discussion one person asked a woman who was with us how she decided on a career in activism and community organizing. Her story was a story of transformation and calling.
When she was in college she was a part of a campus ministry in a local church. One afternoon they were setting up to watch a documentary about poverty in the United States. With the afternoon light, the only room dark enough for the movie was the sanctuary. As they set up the projector they needed a screen to project onto, but they couldn’t find one. The only substitute they could find was the tablecloth for communion table.
So they hung it up in the chancel and began to watch. As she watched images of poverty in the United States move across the table cloth for the Lord’s Table, one phrase remained at the bottom of the makeshift screen: Do this in remembrance of me.
Each Sunday those words would appear over the edge of the Lord’s table at her church. As my wife’s friend watched the images she kept reading those words, do this in remembrance of me. The words and the world’s needs were forever paired. To live her faith and live her calling, she felt a desire to serve people in a particular way. She wanted to be a part of God’s effort to reconcile the world. She wanted to bring people from the outside in; to restore those who were forgotten back into the blessed community. She went from the table to the world to do just that.
Do this in remembrance of me.
Jesus and the disciples left the synagogue, their worship space, to go to Simon’s home. The disciples and Jesus are leaving from the synagogue where Jesus healed a man. It was a public healing and the whole town is buzzing over the authority Jesus has for teaching and commanding unclean spirits.
At Simon’s house, he brings Jesus to his mother-in-law who is sick. She has a fever. She is confined to her bed. We don’t know much about her. We are not told what her name is, or why she lives with Simon.
What we do know is she is facing a very serious illness. What we know is that a fever is preventing her from living out her purpose in life. Her illness prevents her from living out her calling. She is a particular part of her community, like each of us is in ours in our own way. IN particular, she is a woman of hospitality. Now, confined to her bed, she cannot do what she is so wonderfully created to do.
The four disciples and Jesus are in the home only a moment before Simon brings Jesus to his mother-in-law. Jesus goes and takes her by her hand. He lifts her up and her fever is gone. In his so subtle way, Jesus heals her. And it is subtle. The language for the way he heals her uses the same words and phrases1 that are used for the resurrection story at the end of the gospel. The woman’s healing is a transformation, an experience of God entering her life and she will never be the same.
Her healing is no ordinary event. She is restored to be a part of her community. In this whole scene, Jesus doesn’t rely on words, he performs an action that creates wholeness, that restores family and community.
After the experience of healing, after she rises to a new life, she serves. She serves as a disciple, as one called by God. She serves God by serving the world she lives in.
She serves. It is funny that this word is used. Because it is the same word that Jesus will use later to describe his ministry. “For [I] came not to be served, but to serve.”2
It is interesting that her service happens in the presence of these disciples. Throughout the gospel of Mark, these disciples try to understand what it means to be a disciple. They try to get it right. As Mark tells us over and over, they rarely do. They often fail. They misunderstand. But Simon’s mother-in-law is lifted up in front of them as an example. She is a model for these disciples. She gets it when they don’t understand. She embodies what is means to be a disciple of Christ. In Jesus, God reaches to her and she responds by serving. First, God serves us, then in faith, we are called to serve the world.
Her calling is to serve God. The word “serve” used here, has the same sense as it has the story about the Temptation of Jesus that appears in Mark 1:13. When Jesus is in the wilderness, angels come to serve him, to support him. The meaning of serve here is as though Simon’s mother-in-law is serving like one of these angels. The angels who serve Christ, live in community with Jesus. When Simon’s mother-in-law serves, she is doing the same thing as these angels. She is living in community with Jesus, in connection with God. Her act of serving carries a significance that is beyond a simple, ordinary, helping hand.
When God lifts her up, she serves. When Jesus offers her grace, she acts with faith. And this scripture reminds us that when our faith calls us to serve, we are offering more than an ordinary helping hand. When we live out the ways God would have us live in the world, we are living out our faith in communion with God.
To live in communion with God, is to live together with God. It means to trust God when we don’t have the answers. It means to live faithfully even when there are no easy solutions. To live in communion with God means that we support the community and live peacefully with all because Christ is seeking to restore our communities and bring peace.
When my wife’s friend saw the movie projected onto the communion table cloth; when she saw those words Do this in remembrance of me, she experienced communion in a way that called her to live her faith in a new way. She was freed by her faith to serve, she was freed by a relationship with God that let her rise to a new possibility.
These two women experienced communion with God in a way that changed them.
This morning we will celebrate the sacrament of communion together. The Lord’s Supper. It is a table, much like ones we keep in our homes. Our families, our church, our friends, gather together around tables. When we gather at this table we remember Jesus the Christ. We remember the resurrection and the promises God made when Christ rose from death to life.
There are times when we come to the table worn out and tired, in need of Sabbath and restoration. There are times when we are frustrated that the world is the way it is. There are times when we come to this table inspired. There are times when we are confused. There are times when we come feeling lonely, or we carry a burden.
We come to this table remembering the promise that God is the one who makes us new. A few centuries after Jesus, St. Irenaeus wrote “The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.” We come to this table to behold God. We come to be fully alive in the presence of God here and everywhere we go. We do not come alone. We come to this table together, as one body, one community, to be lifted up to God in communion. We lift our hearts to the Lord together.
At this table Christ can lift us up. As we gather by this table, we give thanks to God, we are renewed and empowered by Christ to live as God’s people.
Then, like my wife’s friend, like Simon’s mother-in-law, we go from this table to the world we live in. To Royal Oak, or Troy, to Detroit, Southfield, Walled Lake, Birmingham and all the places we go. Our communion with God does not end once the cup has been lifted and passed. Communion with God continues into our lives at home, and school, and work, to wherever we gather with people. And there, we live in service to the people in our lives and our community and beyond. No fancy words are required, we live our communion with God by living the faith God gave to us to live. We glorify God when we serve family and friends, classmates and co-workers. When we serve those with needs, for employment, housing, food, friendship, prayer.
We live this out by no power of our own, but by God’s transforming love. God reaches out to us that we too might live our faith in service of others. Here in this space we gather to give our lives to God, to behold and glorify God, that we might live more fully by faith. And by that faith, that all might know.
May it be so, today, tomorrow, and every one of our days. Amen.
1In the original Greek text. See the Resurrection story in Mark 16:6
2Mark 10:45 (New Revised Standard Version)