Epiphany 8

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Epiphany 8
PROPER: B
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: February 27,2000

TEXT: Mark 2:18-22 - The Issue of Fasting
Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they?”

See also: Hosea 2:14-23 - “You are my people” - “You are my God.”

ISSUE: Jesus and his disciples are questioned concerning why they do not fast. In response Jesus declares that people do not fast when the bridegroom is present with them. Mark’s Gospel account is declaring a new age, that surely God is with his people in Christ the bridegroom. The least, the last, the lost now have God’s attention. We’ve seen the sick healed, the outcasts restored, and Jesus eating with the tax collectors. There are times deserving of mourning and fasting in our lives, yet the message is clear, God is and shall be with and respond to human need. The Christian Community now acts accordingly with putting on the new garment and drink the new wine of hope.
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The lectionary readings provide us today with two very beautiful and complementary stories. The one from the Hebrew Scriptures is the story of Hosea, and the story from the Christian Scriptures tells of why it is that Jesus and his disciples do not fast. You will notice that the reading from Mark is full of wedding imagery: Jesus is seen as the bridegroom, and it deals with not patching up old garments, and putting old wine into new skins. Bridegrooms, appropriate wedding garments and fine wine were important to wedding feasts. The story of Hosea is also about an unusual wedding.
In the story of Hosea the prophet, the prophet is married to a prostitute, Gomer. Out of that relationship children are born that are given unusual names. One child is named Lo-ruhamah which means “unloved.” Another child’s name is Lo-ammi, which means “not my people”, (or not mine, or bastard, perhaps a child not belonging to the prophet Hosea because of his wife Gomer’s infidelity in the relationship.) The relationship between the prophet Hosea and his prostitute wife is a metaphor. It is a symbol of the relationship of God to the people of Israel. God seeks to claim this people as his own, to be the bridegroom of the people Israel. But Israel as a nation is unfaithful. They take on false gods, they are rebellious, and not responsive to the teaching and law of God. It is as if they no longer belong to him, that they are not God’s people and are unloved, in the sense that God’ judgment will be upon them. But in the story Hosea loves Gomer and does not divorce her. Hosea He contends with her unfaithfulness. Hosea’s relationship with Gomer is seen as God’s relationship with the unfaithfulness of Israel. God has great pity on Israel’s children: God says, “I will have pity on Lo-ruhamanh (the unloved, I will say to Lo-ammi (not my people), You are my people.” (Hosea 2:23) It is a beautiful story of God’s constant faithfulness and love of his people, as if they were his beloved bride and children.
Now let’s look at the Christian Scripture reading from Mark. John the Baptists disciples were known for their fasting. The Pharisees, leaders of Jesus’ time were also known for their extraordinary devotion to fasting. Fasting was required by the law only once a year, on the Day of the Atonement. However, rigorous pious Pharisees fasted twice a week, making a public demonstration of their piety. Fasting at the time was a means of communication. It was self-humbling and conveyed a sense of self-affliction and needfulness. It was closely related to mourning and grief. A fasting person wore torn clothing or sack cloth, did not eat or drink of course, didn’t sleep much, put on ashes to convey a gaunt look and dirty face. The fasting process, though somewhat foreign to us was to get attention. It was to express pain, suffering, and sinfulness, separation, alienation. John the Baptists disciples fasted to declare that the world needed to change. It needed to repent. The pharisee might fast to declare his need for God to forgive his sinfulness. The theory was that as people paid attention to those fasting, in mourning or bearing grief, how much more would God pay attention to them to offer his forgiveness and consolation. How much more would God pity them, love them, and call them his people.
In Mark’s Gospel account the issue is raised of Jesus and his disciples: Why don’t you fast like John’s disciples and the pharisees? What’s the answer? Mark’s Jesus makes the clever reply: “You don’t fast when the bridegroom is with you.” God is with you, God is among you. This is a time of feasting. God is now giving you his undivided attention. Don’t you see that the untouchable polluted, dirty, unholy leper was cleansed and restored to the community? Don’t you see that the lame man paralyzed in sin and alienation has been brought to my attention, and that he was raised up, forgiven, made whole, and returned to his people. Don’t you see, Jesus is saying, that those who are considered the unclean, the hated, the polluted, tax collectors, the impure, the disenfranchised, like Levi son of Alphaeus, are worthy to eat their meals with me. It’s time for the party, it’s time for the feast. Mark is telling us, not unlike the Hosea story, God in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, has come to be with his people. He is giving them the attention, the forgiveness, and the love they have longed for. They are invited into the banquet, into the feast. Don’t wear old patched garments; don’t put old wine into the new skins. The old garments will tear again, and the new wine will burst the old skins. This presence is something wonderful. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this. God in Christ has come to the lost the least and the last, to the unfaithful and the broken. He is raising them up with pity, compassion, and love.
Have you ever noticed just how many of the stories and parables that Jesus tells are related to partying and joy. The woman who finds her lost coin throws a party when it is found. The shepherd who finds the lost sheep throws a party. The father of the prodigal son, kills the fatted calf and has music and dancing when the lost son is returned. The parables of the wedding feasts tell of God’s gracious invitation to his people to enter into the feast. Over and over again, Jesus is telling or participating in meals and festivals that are joyful and encompassing of the lost and the dishonored. God has and is in Christ come to his people with great love and compassion. The old thinking that you have to fast to get God’s attention is like putting new patches on old garments, or like putting new wine in old skins. That’s not what a loving God demands. A new understanding of God being with his people now is the new way and hope. That’s the grand message of hope for the early Christian community. God is with his people.
How do we translate these wonderful and beautiful passages into our time and world? How do they speak to us? While we may like to think that God’s presence is always with us, fact of the matter is, there are times when we don’t feel that God is with us at all. We know times of loneliness, grief, pain, and suffering when God may seem so far away. There are times when life may not seem to have much meaning to us. There are times when we grieve and face loss. There are times of experiencing shame and guilt for things we’ve done or should have done and didn’t do. Think of what it must have been like for the Jews who suffered so in the experience of the holocaust. That experience was no party, and God must have seemed so very remote.
It is tragic to see people’s lives ruined by drug and alcohol addictions. It’s hard to see people’s lives become devastated by cancer, and other diseases. What a meaningless waste it was when we contemplate what happened at Columbine High School, or what happens to an innocent bystander child in some drug shoot out on our city streets. And we wonder where is God. These are the times of our lives when the bridegroom sure just doesn’t seem to be anywhere around. We plead in anyway we can. We need so desperately for God to pay attention to us. And so in subtle ways of sorrow and grief, in despairing we long for the presence of God. We long for God to have pity, to extend forgiveness, and compassion, to start a new age for us trapped in our old ways of depression, anger, fury, rage, pessimism, and cynicism. We may well feel like the some of the pharisees desperately fasting in an effort to get life right, and like John the Baptists disciples who had such an urgent need for the world to repent..
But again we have to take hold of what we believe. To a human condition in despair, Jesus, Son of God, child of God comes with great affection and love for those in desperate need. Jesus collected together disciples, partners, friends to join him in that mission to bring to people who felt alienated, sick, impure, the assurance that God was and is with them. Think of what it is like when someone you love dies. And then someone walks into the funeral home embraces you and listens to your grief with sensitivity and compassion. That is a healing experience. My point is that while we all have moments of grief or mourning, a sense of neediness, the Christian community brings the presence of Christ, the presence of God’s healing love to one another.
Church’s today, and I mean especially the people in them need to re-discover their sense of mission and purpose. We have to reclaim our sonship with Christ, our daughtership with Christ, our union with God in Christ so that we can be empathetic, sympathetic, compassionate with one another in such a way as to make the God we each trust and believe in a living reality to others in need. We need to pray for one another, visit the sick, care about people who have various problems. Each of us have our moments of feeling lost or alone, of being afraid, of being shamed or guilty. We have our moments of great need for help and healing. Thus, ministry to one another as Christ has ministered to us makes and builds the renewing understanding that God is with us, that there is compassion, forgiveness, and love. There is, indeed, a party of hope at the end of the fast. Christ living in all of us is the ever present bridegroom of hope that addresses our need for God.

Epiphany 6

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Epiphany 6
PROPER: B
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: February 13, 2000


TEXT: Mark 1:40-45 - “A Leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!”

See also 2 Kings 5:1-15ab- Elisha heals Naaman of his leprosy.

ISSUE: Jesus heals and restores the man excluded through the purity rules of his time. His leprosy (skin disorder) keeps him in the position of not being holy, as Israel is called to be holy. Yet Christ Jesus touches him at great risk to himself, not so much in terms of catching the disease, but as becoming himself unclean. In the world today we too need to be more concerned over asking God to direct us in our ministries to touch those who have become the untouchables, and the outcasts. We also need to come to Christ Jesus with the issues of our own lives as to in what way have we become physically, emotionally, spiritual outcasts. We need also dare to ask for restoration. Mark’s gospel account provides the hope, that God in Christ can will restore.
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