+Thursday was the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple. A significant day in our church year, the Presentation (this year) marks the mid point of Epiphany. A point when we turn from the celebration of the Nativity and that cute baby lying in a manger, to the adulthood of Jesus, to the ministry of the Man brought to us as God in the flesh. It’s a subtle shift, but now our attention, turns toward that long walk to Jerusalem where we, along with Jesus will climb the hill of Calvary, cry out at Golgotha and rest in that freshly hewn tomb: Our Epiphany journey has left Christmas behind and is headed toward Lent and Easter. There’s a sadness to this shift, and there’s also a pressure—a pressure to get the work of Jesus going…. For suddenly it seems like time is running short. The pressure, on this 5th Sunday of Epiphany, is on….
And Jesus has been busy:
He’s taught in the synagogue, he’s exorcised demons, and, above all else, he’s formed a community: calling Andrew and Simon Peter, James and John, Nathanael and countless others, to leave their old life and to follow him. It’s been a busy time. Today, Jesus, and the others walk over to Simon Peter’s house for dinner, where, we can only suppose, Jesus figured he could get some rest and rejuvenation—but once there he discovers Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is ill and in need of his healing touch. Word spreads and instead of a restful Sabbath afternoon, Jesus spends the day healing sickness and casting out demons. Suddenly the community Jesus has so carefully formed may be getting a bit confining, so, early the next morning, Jesus sets out to find a quiet place to pray, to have some Jesus and God time.
After a day like he’d had, he needed to be in the quiet presence of the holy. For even the most community-minded savior needs some unplugged, quiet time.
But it’s not to be. Simon Peter and the rest come rushing up to Jesus, after apparently spending some time looking for him. As commentator Pastor Delmer Chilton puts it, Simon and his companions come upon Jesus “like a herd of zealous church secretaries. When they find him sitting quietly alone they say, ‘Good, you’re not busy. Everybody is searching.’ ” You see, it’s hard for people to realize that the work of community requires that all members of the community, take time away from the community, recharging their batteries, allowing the Holy to take hold once again.
Making ourselves available to God, listening for God’s call to us, living into the mission, the vocation of that Call is the task of each and every Christian. And it’s the task Jesus is outlining in today’s Gospel. You see, when Simon Peter and the others clamor for Jesus to return to Capernaum Jesus, quietly yet firmly says, “Yes, we should be on or way, but not back there. For the work I have come to do is for everyone…. we must move on, spreading the Good News to neighboring towns and villages. “But,” I can just hear the disciples imploring, “what about my cousin? My brother in law, my neighbor, what about OUR PEOPLE?”
Undeterred, Jesus moves on, for what He knows is this: His mission will only work if his followers –his community-- pick it up and carry it on.
The mission of Jesus, his work, is not the work of one individual. It is the effect the work of Jesus has on countless others. The key is how the mission takes hold, takes on a life of it’s own. They key to Jesus’ mission is the community he and then his followers, formed. And continue to form.
This, my friends is, the Original Web of Grace.
Bishop Bill is a great fan of the Web of Grace as the way forward in this diocese. With apologies to our dear Bishop let me offer a synopsis of his “web of grace” :
--God has a vested interest in us, and is involved in giving us every opportunity to experience God’s presence right here and right now.
--That presence is God’s grace and
--We get a steady dose of that grace through the Word and the Sacraments…
--Which is what we, as a community of faith, get here every week.
---Strengthened through this nourishment we can live more fully into what and who God intends us to be. Therefore, to truly be God’s instruments in this world [and isn’t that what Jesus came to teach us, once and for all?] we must regularly gather in community; for when we do that, this web of grace is strengthened, the web of grace expands, and God’s mission, as given to us in the person of Jesus Christ, is fulfilled.
As we wind down toward the last three weeks of Epiphany, as we turn our focus away from the miracle of God come to us in the flesh and toward the miracle of the empty tomb, we need to settle into our identity as Christians, as followers of this man from Nazareth, as members of a Web of Grace which is the Church of the Good Shepherd [Ascension]. …Which is the CED…. which is the Diocese of WNY…which is the Episcopal Church USA, which is the Anglican Communion, which is the whole of Christendom, which is the whole of God’s miraculous and loving creation…. and do the work Jesus began, and we’ve inherited.
Jesus has been busy this Epiphany, busy setting up a community, a web of grace, which continually strives to shatter the veil of darkness and despair which afflicts so many of God’s children. A web of grace which never stops evolving and adjusting. A web of grace that is always looking for new ways to bring the Holy into this world.
Bringing the Holy into the world. That’s the whole point isn’t it?
Quiet time, sitting in and with the Holy doesn’t look like much. We don’t look particularly busy when we’re listening for God… reading the Bible….praying the psalms….contemplating an icon or just sitting in silence, waiting…
But all of us, not just the Savior of the world, need time to turn off, to tune down, to recharge and renew. We all need, as Jesus tried, to be unavailable.
For only in being unavailable to the world do we make ourselves available to the Holy.
Now wait a minute Cathy, didn’t you just spend 10 minutes talking about the importance of community? And now you’re talking about solitude. Which is it?
It’s both.
Every community of faith relies on the sum of its parts to prosper, to flourish, to grow. So as individual members of this community of faith, as cogs in the Web of Grace begun by Jesus over 2000 years ago, we must, as Jesus modeled for us, take time to let God have God’s way with us.
For once we make ourselves available to the Holy, once the Holy is given free reign to occupy every corner of our soul, then we return to community, where this presence of the Holy will spread, where the grace of God will do its best work. Where we will, rejuvenated and re-energized, do the work, Jesus has given to do. +
©The Rev’d C
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