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Welcome to our liturgy this morning. We are so happy to spend this time with you. When we think of Jesus it’s easy to see him as fully-formed mystic, sure of his mission from the moment he rose out of the Jordan at his baptism. Today’s Gospel shows us a much more human Jesus; a young and zealous man who embraced a mission; a mission that still had something to teach him.
Opening Prayer: Holy One, we, like Jesus, seek to serve you with our lives. Help us to be open to all the possibilities. Help us to see our ministries in the broad spectrum of the way we live our lives every day. Amen.
Opening Song: Follow Your Heart’s Desire by Jan Phillips
Liturgy of the Word
First Reading: God Interrupting, by Brie Stoner
Brie Stoner shares her experience in the Living School as a mother of young children:
I was sitting in the women’s bathroom between sessions and had exactly thirteen minutes before the next talk to pump and dump my breast milk. Every woman walking by me would smile and exclaim how sweet it was that I was there, ask how old my baby was, and offer some kind of encouragement for the Herculean effort of simply being a mother.
I was so excited to have been admitted to the first class of the Living School and determined to somehow make it work even with a toddler and a nine-month-old at home. But as each day proceeded, the more uncertain I became: sure, I could have uninterrupted prayer sits here . . . here where the meals were provided for me and the dishes were picked up and cleaned by not-me. Here where I slept in a hotel bed (a whole bed to myself . . . just for me, with no one needing me, ever). Here where I had access to these wisdom teachers and a peaceful path through the Cottonwood bosque with a view of the Sandia mountains.
Finally, during one of James Finley’s sessions I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Jim, can we talk about how much harder all of this is when I’m back home? Because I get up sometimes at 5:00 a.m., desperate to have one prayer sit, and it’s like my kids have radar and inevitably one of them wakes up ten minutes later. I mean, where is the icon of the mystic with one baby on the hip, a toddler crying at their feet, cooking dinner with one hand, trying to finish work on a laptop with the other? Because that’s my real life.”
Jim said, “Ok, you be you and I’ll be God. And since I’m God, I’m watching you get up exhausted every morning, and I’m so touched that you want to spend this time with me. Really, I am! It just means the world to me. The thing is, I just can’t bear how much I love you. It’s too much! And so at a certain point I rush into the bodies of your children and wake them up because. . . .”
Jim paused. “Because I want to know what it feels like to be held by you.”
Yes, the interruption is the presence of God that I was so desperately trying to access in moments of stillness and silence. With or without the luxury of stillness and silence, God comes to us disguised as our very lives (as Paula D’Arcy has said). In my case, Jim helped me to discover how my path as an exhausted young parent was the monastery of my own transformation. If I learned to let my heart open enough, I just might begin to recognize each cry, each diaper change, every choo-choo play time request . . . all of it, as the startlingly stunning, diaphanous infusion of infinite love colliding into the small shape of my very finite and ordinary reality. There, at the intersection of everything, is God with us . . . wanting to be touched, noticed, nurtured . . . held by us. All we have to do is behold.
These are inspired words from Brie Stoner and we affirm them by saying, Amen.
Celtic Alleluia
Gospel: Mark 1:40-45 (From The Scholars Version)
Then a leper comes up to him, pleads with him, falls down on his knees, and says to him, “If you want to, you can make me clean.”
Although Jesus was indignant, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and says to him, “Okay—you’re clean!”
And right away the leprosy disappeared, and he was made clean. And Jesus snapped at him, and dismissed him curtly with this warning: “See that you don’t tell anyone anything, but go, have a priest examine your skin. Then offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as evidence of your cure.
But after he went out, he started telling everyone and spreading the story, so that Jesus could no longer enter a city openly, but had to stay out in the countryside. Yet they continued to come to him from everywhere.
These are inspired words from the Gospel attributed to Mark and we affirm them by saying, Amen.
Homily Starters:
Denise:
In many translations, including the one in the lectionary for this Sunday, Jesus is described as being “moved with pity” for the leper. However, that translation has been contested in recent years, and I have chosen to use the Scholars Version of Mark’s gospel this morning. This is the version compiled by the scholars of The Jesus Seminar in the 1990s and published in their book “The Five Gospels.” Here Jesus is moved to something closer to anger than pity. He is “indignant,” and later snaps at the leper. Why? What’s going on? This isn’t the Jesus we have come to know and love.
But when I spend some time thinking about it, I begin to understand. Jesus has so recently had a deeply mystical experience with the Holy One at his baptism when he heard the voice meant for him alone, “you are my beloved son.” And then off he went to his desert retreat, where he surely would have thought about what those words might mean in real life, and where he probably got some ideas about how his ministry might take shape. And then, when he hears that John has been arrested, Jesus immediately takes up that ministry the way he imagined it should be. He has pictured his ministry one way. Maybe he pictures himself as carrying John the Baptist’s call to repentance, to living the Kin-dom of God right there under the noses of the Roman occupiers, into the cities and towns of Galilee. But by golly, he keeps getting interrupted from his ministry by people who need healing. There was Simon’s mother-in-law, the man possessed by demons, and the paralyzed man, and many more. Soon crowds started coming to him for healing. Is this perhaps not what Jesus pictures his ministry to be? Is Jesus at the start of his ministry a bit like Jonah? Is the Holy One ordaining his ministry even as Jesus himself tries to define it differently? Is Jesus, in ordering the leper to tell no one, hoping to end the constant interruption from what he saw as his “real” ministry which was announcing the good news of the coming Kin-dom? Only to be thwarted by the now-healthy man’s spreading his own good news far and wide?
Is the young Jesus yet to learn that by exercising his gift of healing he is doing exactly what his mentor, John the Baptist did, just in a different way? By healing the mind and spirit of one person at a time, by allowing every one of them to be re-integrated into community, was he building the Kin-dom?
Like the young mother in the first reading, did Jesus, the fully human being Jesus, have to learn to see the face of God in the people who so needed him?
Gayle:
Brie Stoner's “AHA!” moment struck home with me. I have never been the contemplative sort and have always felt so inadequate because of that trait of mine. So, when she suggests that the Creator snuggles into the very human activities and demands of her young motherhood, I started itemizing the very mundane tasks I perform day to day and in doing so, I saw them in a new light. One in which those activities fall into the Creator's love. In other words, living out our very human lives is lifted into the spiritual realm by our very actions.
The interpretation that Denise found for us this morning shows Jesus, not just as 100% Divine but also as 100% human. The early days of his ministry are taking on a different purpose from the way he expected after hanging out with his cousin, John, and being baptized by him. Lizzie Berne DeGear suggests in her book, Jesus Found in Translation, that after Jesus was baptized, he alone heard the voice of God. Thus, unlike the age-old emphasis on Jesus being "outed" publicly by God as divine, it was both a human and a spiritual touch by the Creator to him alone, a profound experience of love.
So, moving on from his 40 days in the desert, Jesus was still figuring things out. His very human reaction to being seen as a "healer" was unexpected and he reacted in a human way with frustration or even annoyance. This makes Jesus a real flesh and blood person for me. By feeling and seeing the humanity of Jesus, we can accept our humanity, even in its rawest and most flawed ways, and see our humanity as holy. The voice of the Creator speaks through and in us over and over from within.
What do you think? How do today’s readings speak to you about the realities of your own ministry?
Statement of Faith
We believe in the Holy One, a divine mystery
beyond all definition and rational understanding,
the heart of all that has ever existed,
that exists now, or that ever will exist.
We believe in Jesus, messenger of the Divine Word,
bringer of healing, heart of Divine compassion,
bright star in the firmament of the Holy One's
prophets, mystics, and saints.
We believe that We are called to follow Jesus
as a vehicle of divine love,
a source of wisdom and truth,
and an instrument of peace in the world.
We believe in the Spirit of the Holy One,
the life that is our innermost life,
the breath moving in our being,
the depth living in each of us.
We believe that the Divine kin-dom is here and now,
stretched out all around us for those
with eyes to see it, hearts to receive it,
and hands to make it happen.
Prayers of the Community
As we prepare for this sacred meal, we are aware of our call to serve, and just as Jesus is anointed, so is each of us. We bring to this table our prayers for the community.
Prayers for the community.
We pray for these and all unspoken intentions. Amen.
Liturgy of the Eucharist
(Written by Jay Murnane)
Presider: Please join in praying the Eucharistic prayer together.
Blessed are you, Holy One, source of all creation. Through your goodness you made this world and called us to be Your co-creators. We give thanks for the diversity and beauty of life around us and within us.
We open our awareness to the goodness of all of creation and we remember our responsibility to serve. You invite us to build the earth into a community of love rooted in justice. You placed confidence in us, for you made us and you know that we are good.
In joy and in thanksgiving we join with all the faithful servants who have gone before us and we sing:
Holy, Holy, Holy by Karen Drucker
We thank you for Jesus, simple servant, lifting up the lowly, revealing you as God-With-Us, and revealing us as one with you and all of creation.
He lived among us to show us who we are and challenged us to know you. He taught us the strength of compassionate love.
Please extend your hands in blessing.
We are grateful for your Spirit at our Eucharistic Table and for this bread and wine which reminds us of our call to be the body of Christ in the world.
On the night before he died, Jesus gathered for supper with the people closest to him. Like the least of household servants, he washed their feet, so that they would re-member him.
When he returned to his place at the table, he lifted the bread, spoke the blessing, broke the bread and offered it to them saying:
Take and eat, this is my very self.
(pause)
Then he took the cup of the covenant, spoke the grace, and offered it to them saying:
Take and drink.
Whenever you remember me like this,
I am among you.
(pause)
What we have heard with our ears, we will live with our lives. As we share communion, we become Communion both love’s nourishment and love’s challenge.
You are called, consecrated and chosen to serve.
Please receive Communion.
Communion Meditation/Song: May the Christ Light Shine in You by Kathy Sherman https://youtu.be/tY0Rj9Yd2lk
Prayer after communion:
Holy One, we are willing to do everything Jesus did, to re-create the living presence of a love that does justice, of a compassion that heals and liberates, of a joy that generates hope, of a light that illumines people and confronts the darkness of every injustice and inequity.
We trust you to continue to share with us your own spirit, the spirit that animated Jesus, for it is through his life and teaching, all honor and glory is yours, O Holy One, forever and ever. Amen.
Let us pray as Jesus taught us:
Holy One, you are within, around and among us.
We celebrate your many names.
Your wisdom come; your will be done,
unfolding from the depths within us.
Each day you give us all that we need.
You remind us of our limits and we let go.
You support us in our power, and we act with courage.
For you are the dwelling place within us,
the empowerment around us,
and the celebration among us,
now and forever, Amen.
Adapted by Miriam Therese Winter
Blessing
Please raise your hands in Blessing:
May our lives reflect the love of the Holy One in whatever form that takes. May we have faith in our evolving ministries and missions as they take us closer and closer to the light of your truth. Amen.
Closing Song: Shine by Collective Soul
https://youtu.be/-bnIEs1n0vs
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For further reading on the textual research on this gospel:
This article presents very good arguments for both translations: https://bbhchurchconnection.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/was-jesus-angry-or-compassionate-according-to-mark-141-the-niv-vs-nlt/
Here’s another interpretation. Perhaps Jesus was angry at the fact that people were suffering from all of these illnesses. Also, a good point is made about the sort of role-reversal between the leper, who is now free to go anywhere he pleases, and Jesus, who now can’t enter a town freely because of his growing celebrity. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-after-epiphany-2/commentary-on-mark-140-45
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