Epiphany, 5B, February 7, 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.

O God of Blessing, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Our readings for today raise more questions than they give answers, but that’s okay with me because I love the questions. Our first reading, from the 40th chapter of Isaiah, follows the famous plea from God for comfort and consolation for a people who have been devastated and who are despairing.

“Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and call to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is more than fully paid…In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in a desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all people shall see it together. God is going to gather up the lambs and carry them and gently lead the mother sheep.

What we hear today in Isaiah is the last part of a tender overture to an opus of consolation, a love song written to bring relief to people who had been far from home, in exile in Babylon for more than half a century.

The great poet known as Second Isaiah is calling out to the people of God, in the midst of so much suffering and death, to look up at the eternal beauty of the starry sky and see what God has created. It reminds me of an Oscar Wilde quotation on a magnet in my study at home: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The great poet of Isaiah is cultivating some awe, wonder, and amazement with her command to “Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?” That’s the question from our first reading. “Who,” as some of you know, is one of the names of the Holy One in Hebrew scripture, according to Jewish mysticism tradition. “Who” is a name for God. If the question is “Who created these?” Then the answer is “Yes, of course!” (It’s like the question on our door sign that boldly declares, “Emmanuel Church – 150 plus years. Who would believe it?” The answer is, “Yes! Who would, and Who does believe in Emmanuel Church”.)

The great poet’s prescription for revival, for spiritual rejuvenation, for rekindled passion for the Holy One, is to look at the stars in the sky, which are not, as the Babylonians asserted, rival gods. Those beautiful stars are witnesses; they burn in testimony to the greatness of the Creator. Imagine that the Holy One is bigger than billions of stars that are light years apart from each other and from us. That means imagining that the Holy One is bigger than the current pandemic, the next war, or the next election; bigger than the next natural or unnatural disaster; bigger than the next cancer diagnosis, layoff, or divorce; bigger than life and bigger than death. Part of the prescription for consolation and revival is to be still and know the incomparability of the Holy One.

The wisdom of looking at the stars in the sky to get some perspective and rekindle passion for the Holy One is not as quaint as one might think. The poetic description of God, Who “stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in”, turns out to be amazingly close to a description of dark energy, which accelerates the expansion of the universe and which appears to have been made from nothing. In the mystical traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, God is nothing (no thing), and nothing is God. Some of you might remember a parishioner from about a dozen years ago whose post-doc work at MIT was to look for dark energy; her full-time job was looking for nothing! I used to tell her that she and I had that in common. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes that the author of the thirteenth-century Kabbalist text, the Zohar, makes Isaiah 40:26 “the linchpin for his whole introduction. He looks up to the sky, to what he calls ‘the place toward which all eyes gaze,’ and asks, ‘Who created these?’…The author of the Zohar answers the question by saying…[yes]…‘Who created these’.”

In our passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the question I hear comes in response to Paul’s assertion that he does what he does, not to make money, but for the sake of the Gospel, so that he might share its blessings. The question that this passage begs (in my mind) is, what are the blessings of the Gospel? Could you answer that question for yourselves? If I gave you a moment, could you name some blessings of the Gospel that you share in? What comes to mind first for you? What about compassion,  courage, freedom from fear of even death? What difference do the blessings of the Gospel make to you? For me, the blessings of the Gospel make all the difference in the world! I wonder, how can we, like Paul, tell about the blessings of the Gospel in words that make sense to other people in various other contexts or in other languages, especially other people in secular contexts, most importantly, in non-religious language. How can we tell about the blessings of the Gospel with our actions and our behaviors?

In Mark we hear about Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. The question here is, wait a minute, Peter was married? His wife’s mother is only mentioned in the Bible in this one place – but it’s a prominent place. Hers is the second healing and she is the first woman healed, according to Mark. Notice that we are still in the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark. In the first short chapter of Mark, Jesus has been baptized, has come out of quarantine in the wilderness, collected four friends, has gone to the synagogue to teach, has cleaned up the mess that a polluted spirit was making, and he has gone to Simon Peter’s mother-in-law’s house. Peter’s wife doesn’t get much mention in church tradition. But in Corinthians, just before the passage we heard today, Paul is arguing about the authority of those sent to preach the Gospel – that same word I mentioned last week – exousía – authority, freedom, license, power. Paul writes, “do we not have the authority (freedom, license, power) to be accompanied by a wife as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Peter?” He’s not talking about the past. It’s the middle of the first century – mid 50s, and Simon Peter and the others are being accompanied by women partners, and don’t they have the exousía to be? Paul wants to know. You probably don’t remember those verses from Corinthians because they’re never read in church according to the lectionary!

For many (including me) the story of the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is always a little worrisome. When talking about this part, many people I know start to shake their heads about the irony of this unnamed woman springing from her sickbed so that she can get dinner on the table for the guys, to serve them. But there’s another (and better) way to read this. The word that gets translated serve here is the same word for deacon in the church, which also gets translated as minister or deacon!  At the very least, it is a story of how she ministered to them. It is the same word that gets used just a few sentences before when Mark tells about the angels caring for Jesus in the wilderness; the angels ministered to him. Simon Peter’s mother-in-law ministered to Simon Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Jesus. When the very same word gets translated into English as minister when angels are doing it, deacon when men are doing it, but serve when a woman is doing it, it has a certain effect of downplaying her actions, doesn’t it? Mark, however, used the same word, and we can understand that he equated Simon Peter’s mother-in-law’s service to that of the angels with regard to treatment of Jesus. Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, the men, and the angels were all doing the same thing in that first chapter of Mark.

This could be a story about how Simon Peter’s mother-in-law became the first Jesus-following deacon after she was freed from her illness. The archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that Simon Peter’s house in Capernaum (literally, the Village of Compassion), where his mother-in-law lived, became a base of operation, where Jesus and his followers came often to rest, talk, and study. The idea is that her home became a house-church, which continued to function long after Jesus’ death, and this is a story about how it got started. Her home became a base from which Jesus and his followers went out to wider and wider territories to spread the message of the Gospel, the blessings of the Gospel. Her home became a base from which apostles were sent to remind people to keep looking at the stars, to not forget the goodness of God even in the midst of suffering and sorrow. Her home became a base from which apostles were sent to remind people to form and stay in community, to care for one another through thick and thin. That’s what we continue to do when we share the blessings of the Gospel in here and out there.

Sociologist (and Episcopalian) Brene Brown once gave a brief interview, in which she told about a personal crisis that drove her back to church after a long time away. She said that she hoped and expected that church would be like an epidural, make the pain stop, take it away. Instead, she said, she found out that the church is more like a midwife who stands next to you and says, “Push!” Church doesn’t take away the pain; it sits with you while you’re in pain, offers to hold your hand, and loves you through it. That is what we do at Emmanuel Church; we practice ways to be midwives to each other in here as well as out there in the wider world, in all the many and various gutters, to remind us another to look up at the stars and love the questions.

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