Handy Healers

Readings; Psalm 147:1-11, Isaiah 40:21-31, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, Mark 1:29-39
Preached at Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, NY, February 7th, 2021
COMMUNION SERVICE

In the neighborhood where I grew up if somebody was good at doing something they would often be described as being 'handy'.  If you were having a plumbing problem somebody would suggest, 'Give Joe a call he's pretty handy with the plumbing'. If you were buying a new car they would say, 'Take Harry with you, he's handy when it comes to negotiating a deal'.

I sometimes describe myself as a self-taught guitarist. That is highly inaccurate. It is not as if one day I bought a guitar, then a 'play in a day' book and the next I had it down.  I learned to play guitar in community. I had friends who were 'handy' when it came to playing, and sometimes a group of us would gather together in the front room at my parents’ house and learn from each other.

I went to a lot of concerts and tried to worm my way to the front so I could watch what the real guitar heroes were doing. Playing with others in a band taught me lessons I could never have learned if I'd never interacted with others. There were also those times I would just hide myself away and try to assimilate what I had seen and, in some way, reproduce it.

I recently read an autobiography of Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards. There was a lot in it I could not identify with. The way he often dealt with fame and fortune was to follow a path of overindulgence, in all sorts of ways. The late comedian Robin Williams once commented that if ever there was a nuclear war only two species on the planet would survive – cockroaches and Keith Richards.

Excesses aside, the part I could identify with was how he learned to play guitar through observation. He relates a number of times how he would be on tour and encounter some blues 'great' whose technique he was trying to master, and they would show him... 'Look, this is how the riff goes. Drop tune the B string, dampen the E, pull off on the D and there you have it ' Simple when you know how. Handy information to have if you are one of the Rolling Stones!

I have always thought that a great name for a church would be 'First Church of the Rolling Stones.' A central doctrine of our faith is the resurrection message that on Easter morning the women found the tomb was empty and because Jesus lived the stone had rolled aside. Our mission is to roll away the stones that prevent people from experiencing God's love, acceptance, and direction.

When you see the way people react under pressure, (Yes, even the rich and famous), how they become entwined in relationships that cause them great pain, get hooked on all kinds of addictive behaviors, never know who their friends are and or who is just using them... well... the message that Jesus Christ is the great healer and hope bringer is a good one to know about. 

I gave this sermon the title 'Handy Healers' because as disciples of Jesus we are called to become 'handy' when it comes to sharing the good, liberating, life giving news of the gospel.

Our passage from Mark this morning gives us a picture of the learning process of the first disciples. They never went to college or had degrees in theology, so you could say they were 'self-taught'. But the reality is that they had the greatest life-coach there has ever been in the person of Jesus Christ.

He teaches them in their own home. Their first lesson is very personal. Our passage today begins with the small band of disciples going to the house of Simon and Andrew. All is not well. Simon's mother-in-law is in bed with a fever. We have no idea how intense a fever it was or what had caused it, but it was debilitating enough to prevent her from taking the active role she wished to occupy in the family.

Jesus takes her by the hand, and in the literal sense of the word, He 'raises her up', a phrase that would come to have great significance for the disciples after the stone had been rolled away from Christ's tomb. She is restored to health and sets about taking care of her guests. The Greek word used for her service is 'diakoneo', from which we derive our word 'deacons'.

In a similar way as to how I learned to play guitar, the disciples are learning through observation. It is personal. They experience firsthand how Jesus can find us where we are, and through His healing love, restore us to full life. They see, through Simon's mother-in-law, that the right response to make to such a gift of grace is to seek to be of service to His Kingdom.

The road to being a handy healer begins at the personal level. We learn by observing how others are expressing their discipleship. But it moves into something public .As news about His ability becomes public knowledge we read 'At sundown, they brought to Him all who were sick or possessed...' and that 'He cured many who were sick with various disease and cast out many demons' (Mark 1:32, 34)

The disciples witness a master at work. Without a doubt they were kept busy trying to deal with the different needs of a great crowd of folk who had made their way to their door. Jesus would have dealt with each person and each situation differently. As they observed His techniques, they would be learning how to be handy healers.

When learning guitar, I used to go to concerts to observe masters at work. The disciples are in an unprecedented position to see the impact the Kingdom of God could have upon people’s lives. I also was able to improve my skills by being part of a group.

One of the reasons why involvement in a church community is important for spiritual growth is that is that we learn lessons in community that we can never learn if we practice our faith as purely a private affair. In his autobiography Keith Richards talks a lot about the tensions that existed between the different band members. Belonging to any kind of community is never easy. Our faith communities include people we would naturally gravitate towards and those who, except for coming to church, would never cross our paths.

Every person within a church community has their own issues, their own peculiarities, and their own agenda, their own political views, their own religious understanding.  We are not all on the same page, we do not all have the same needs, we do not all see life from the same perspective, we are all at different places in our pilgrimages of faith.

I understand why people sometimes say, 'Jesus I like, it's His followers I have a problem with!' In our culture of 'Me first!' the very idea of deliberately spending quality time with people who may not think our needs matter as much as theirs do, can seem a strange one.

That is why God calls us into community. It forces us to consider other people’s needs. We may even conclude, that their needs are so much greater than ours, that there are ways we could become handy healers in their situations. Who knows, maybe if we can model what being a community looks like, we could be a healing force for our whole community!

At which point maybe God smiles and says, “Yep, I think you are starting to get the hang of it now! I'll teach you things at a personal level that I want you to put into practice in the very public arena of a worshiping community.”

There is a third strand in this passage. Verse 35 “And in the morning... Jesus went to a deserted place and He prayed.” The disciples are confused by this action and they go looking for Him. Didn't He realize that everyone was searching for Him? When they find Him, He tells them that it was time to move on because there were other people who needed to learn about the Kingdom.

When learning guitar, it was great to sit around and jam with friends. It was great to go to concerts and observe the greats. It was great to play in a band with others and try to put a performance together. Yet there were also those times when you just had to go somewhere alone and assimilate everything you were learning.

Whilst our faith is nurtured in both personal and public settings, there also needs to be those times that are intensely private.  Jesus teaches us in Matthew 6:6 “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." (Matthew 6:6).  If the disciples were ever to become 'Handy Healers' they needed to understand the importance of having a secret place of prayer.

It was whilst in that secret place Jesus found the direction and empowerment, He needed to fulfill all that God was calling Him to do. If He needed a secret place, and tells us we need a secret place, then I 'm confident that means this is something we should pursue!

A special place in our life as a church community, and as individuals, is our communion table. We receive a personal invite from Jesus. “Remember me in this way.” We make public expression of our faith by communing together. We are one body in Christ. Communion, for many, is also an intensely private experience. It is where we express our personal desire to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

To recap or message today… learning to be handy at doing just about anything takes three things.

•    We learn from personal interaction with those who are closest to us.
•    We learn through public expression of our faith within a worshiping community.  
•    We consolidate all we are learning through taking our lives in private to God, spending some one-on-one time in God's presence so that we may be empowered, through the Holy Spirit, to be faithful servants of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Let us pray that, by following the example given us in Mark's gospel, we can, as disciples of Jesus, become 'handy' when it comes to sharing the good, liberating, life giving, healing news of the gospel.  And all to the glory of God. Amen.

The Reverend Adrian J. Pratt B.D.