Sermon for Sunday, February 4, 2024 || Epiphany 5B || Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39
A single, solitary verb in today’s Gospel reading got stuck in my mind this week, and this entire sermon has spun out from this one verb. It’s a sermon about the spiritual life, a sermon about how the spiritual life is not walked in a straight line, but in a spiral.
I’ll get to this special verb in a minute, but first let’s talk about Godly Play, this beautiful way we introduce the life and language of faith to the children of this church. Rather than teaching didactic lessons, Godly Play shares stories. The children sit in a circle with the storyteller and pay attention to the words of the story; the motions; the physical elements like sand, felt, and wooden figures; and even the silence in the midst of the story. After the story is finished, the adult mentor leads the children in a round of wondering, asking open-ended questions that purposefully do not have single correct answers in order to invite the children to put themselves into the story.
There are only so many Godly Play stories, so over the years the children hear the same stories multiple times. And this is where the genius of Godly Play shines through. The Godly Play ethos recognizes that spiritual development, like the calendar of the church year, is not a straight line, but a circle, or better yet, a spiral. Each time the child encounters the same story, the child is older. She has developed new ways of thinking and feeling. She is different each time she hears the story, and so the story encounters her in a new and deeper way. As the child spirals through the stories again and again, they serve as landmarks for her growing spiritual life.
We all can embrace this wisdom of Godly Play in our own spiritual lives, even as adults, for Jesus invites us to encounter the presence of God in the same way as children. And this brings to the pesky verb that stuck in my mind this week. The verb is “to hunt.”
Hunt.
Jesus has had an exhausting day and night of healing and casting out demons in the town of Capernaum. Mark tells us, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, [Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’”
Simon and his companions hunted for Jesus. This verb felt so strange to me when I read the Gospel this week that I had to look it up. And it turns out, this one instance is the only time in the entire New Testament that this verb occurs.* Simon and his companions hunted for Jesus.
The day before, the very day before, Jesus had called these guys from their fishing nets. He said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” They left their fathers and fellow fishermen, they left their livelihoods behind, and they followed Jesus. They followed him to the synagogue where he taught with authority, where he cast out an unclean spirit. They brought him to Simon’s house where he healed Simon’s mother-in-law of her fever. They watched Jesus healing and casting out demons all evening and into the night. And when Simon woke the next morning, Jesus was gone.
Now, Simon could have thought he dreamt the whole thing. He could have said, “Oh well,” and gone back to his fishing nets. But he sees his mother-in-law making breakfast and remembers how Jesus took her by the hand and helped her out of bed, how he healed her. And Simon says to himself, “I’ve got to find him.” So Simon gathers Andrew and James and John, and the four of them hunt for Jesus. Another translation says, they “tracked him down” (CEB). Jesus had found them. Then they lost Jesus. Then they found Jesus again. It’s a pretty good description of the movement of the spiritual life.
Throughout his days with Jesus and beyond, Simon, who becomes Peter, does not follow a straight line along his walk of faith. He moves forward, he backtracks, he gets lost, he gets found. Remember when he proclaims Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of the Living God? Then the next day, Jesus punctures his understanding of the Messiah by saying that he (Jesus) was going to die. “God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen to you!” Peter says. “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus responds. Simon Peter, whose mind and heart were elevated to divine things the day before, had become mired by the limits of human imagination.
Remember, also, that terrifying night of Jesus’ arrest. Simon Peter begins it by saying he would never abandon Jesus. He gets into a fight with those who come to arrest Jesus. And then when Simon’s own safety is on the line, he denies knowing Jesus three times. But soon after, in those wondrous days of Jesus walking the earth as the Risen One, Jesus invites Simon Peter to breakfast and they reaffirm their love for one another.
We often think of Simon Peter as an impetuous hothead. But I wonder if he’s not the most relatable character in the entire Gospel. For, like Simon Peter, we don’t live a spiritual life in a straight line from Point A to Point B. The spiritual life is not one of constant and steady improvement or enlightenment. No. The spiritual life is not a straight line, but a spiral. We circle around again and again, passing the same landmarks with each revolution. But each time we circle, we are different: sometimes more attentive, sometimes more distracted; sometimes more prepared to listen, sometimes less so. We seek. We find. We get lost. We are found. With each circle, we hope and pray that the spiral tightens closer to the Source of our life. For this Source is our gravity. You might think of a spiral as something that goes downward. But gravity doesn’t pull us down. Gravity pulls us towards the center. And our center is the God made known in the life of Jesus Christ our Savior.
If this is a desert season for you, then remember what the Prophet says in today’s lesson: “But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Take heart, for God was present to the Israelites in the desert. If this is a season on the mountaintop like it was for Simon Peter, James, and John when Jesus unveiled his true self to them, celebrate and sing for joy. But remember, also, the spiritual life is not lived on mountaintops alone. As we spiral closer to the center of our gravity, we will journey through deserts and over mountains. And no matter where we find ourselves, the gravity of God’s love and grace will draw us near.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
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