For the Anonymous ones, the Simon Peter's Mother-in-Laws

On Sunday, I preached a sermon about Simon Peter's mother-in-law, healed from a fever, rising from her sickbed to serve.  Instead of the kind of feminist outrage I would have channeled in my younger years, I decided to talk about Simon Peter's mother-in-law as one of the first to understand the appropriate response to the miracle of new/healed life that Jesus offers:  to serve others.

Later in the Gospel text for Sunday (Mark 1: 29-39), Simon Peter and his companions hunt for Jesus, who has retreated to pray.  Note that verb:  hunt.  It's much more hostile in the original language than how we might interpret it:  the disciples are concerned because Jesus didn't leave a note about where he has gone.  No, it's not that at all.  One Bible scholar posited that it shows that Simon Peter wants to control Jesus, and since we see this behavior throughout the Gospels, I'm inclined to believe it.

We have two people bookending the Gospel text, and I pointed out that the Church has prioritized Simon Peter, who goes on to fame as one of the church fathers.  But what's unspoken is the people who did the work along the way, people who might have been women:  by hosting the travelers, by paying for the ministry, by opening their homes for church meetings, by staying behind and caring for the community that the apostles formed. Perhaps Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is the first one of these.

I didn't come up with a satisfactory conclusion until Sunday morning.  I had thought about going with a reminder that we are called to serve.  But then, I thought about all the ways that the people of Faith Lutheran already serve and how they might feel by me exhorting them to serve.  So I concluded this way, a way that felt immensely better:

This lectionary text comes to us in a time when many of us are creating annual reports for places where we work or worship. It’s a time when many of us are assembling documents to pay our taxes. It’s a time of Super Bowls, of remembering that human societies celebrate the rich, the famous, the big in number, the powerful. Along comes this text to remind us that God does not raise us from our sick beds so that we can go out and earn more money. Jesus does not cast out and silence the noisy demons so that we can tell ourselves how worthless we are.

I spent last week reading Faith Lutheran’s annual report, and I continue to be impressed with how much this worship community does. I know that in the metrics of both the ELCA and the larger Church world, we are a very small congregation. I know that there are Simon Peters who would wish for bigger and better things. But I when I look out, I see Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, the people who serve each other and serve the larger community. Like Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, we may feel like we are overlooked and even nameless. But rest assured, God’s mission is being fulfilled here, right here, in this place in the mountains of Tennessee. Keep up the good work—may your light continue to shine as you serve.