Last Sunday's Sermons
February 5, 2012
Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39
Pr. Craig M. Mueller
[Listen to This Sermon]
THE FEVER OF LIFE
It’s Super Bowl Sunday. But the rare occurrence of football in a sermon, well, that was last week! Today’s theme: fevers. Something else I’ve never preached about. That’s not to say some of you may work yourselves into a fever later today as you drink a beer, cheer, and check out those famous commercials!
Think of the times you get a fever. A fever certainly gets our attention. It interrupts our fast-paced lives. It may keep us in bed. We may miss work. If it’s high enough, we may feel just plain miserable.
Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed with a fever in today’s gospel. Jesus takes her hand and lifts her up. At the beginning of Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ fame is spreading. He is gaining a reputation as a healer, a wonder worker. The whole city crowds around. The needs are overwhelming. So many broken bodies and broken spirits. Imagine them clamoring, reaching, crying out. And Jesus cures those who are sick or possessed by demons.
There’s another definition of fever that I alluded to earlier: a state of extreme agitation or excitement. It reminds me of the song that Michael Buble and so many others have recorded since it was written in 1956: Never know how much I love you / Never know how much I care / When you put your arms around me / I get a fever, that’s so hard to bear.
But you also wonder if our stressed-out lives have a certain fever pitch to them. Maybe you’ve heard the diagnosis by Dr. Andrew Weil, author of Spontaneous Happiness. He argues that depression is higher in industrial nations because the human body wasn’t designed for our modern post-industrial environment. We don’t spend enough time outside in nature, so we suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.” Studies show that time outdoors not only provides us with beauty and spiritual sustenance. It keeps our brains and nervous systems in good working order.
Yet Weil argues that what saturates our brains these days is an overabundance of information. Think of the time we spend on the Internet, texting and talking on cell phones, watching TV, attending to emails. You can see how this information overload can lead to fever pitch stress. How easily we become bored, or uncomfortable spending time unplugged or alone. How, in our anxious and stressful urban lives, we work ourselves into a fever.
Even Jesus needs to get away from it all. In order to have energy for the tasks ahead, he withdraws, goes to a deserted place, spends time in prayer. What brings renewal and refreshment to us? Nature? Worship? Time alone? The arts? Time with loved ones or even pets? Reading? Exercising?
Certainly God looks with compassion on a world with so many needs, so much sadness, so many burdens. So many people with out of-control lives. As the psalmist writes, “God heals the brokenhearted, binds up their wounds, lifts up the lowly.”
When your life is already overwhelming, you don’t want your pastor to make you feel guilty because you don’t light a candle and spend time in prayer. Yet, at the same time, if God calls us to change our hearts and lives, it may demand a rearrangement of our priorities. And perhaps even turning off the cell phone and email once in a while. And considering practices that will renew our spiritual lives, and our relationship with God.
Though for many here today, our disease—our dis-ease may be more emotional and spiritual, than physical—this relatively healthy congregation has had its share of grief the past weeks. A number of members have lost elderly parents. A young member faced the unexpected death of her brother. The terminal cancer diagnosis for Claire Evans has been very hard for a number in our community.
Yet strangely enough, sometimes illness—ours or another’s—makes us more attentive. More alive. More grateful for others. One man diagnosed with cancer said that after the initial shock, he stopped doing everything that wasn’t essential, that didn’t matter. His new life was actually vital and peaceful, he says. But then the doctors changed their mind. His disease was rare, but curable. As he tells it, “When I heard this over the telephone, I cried like a baby—because I was afraid my life would go back to the way it used to be.”1
John Updike makes a similar observation in his poem called “Fever”:
I have brought back a good message from the land of 102 degrees:
God exists.
I had seriously doubted it before;
but the bedposts spoke of it with utmost confidence …
and I have not slept so justly for years ….
but it is truth long known,
that some secrets are hidden from health.2
Isaiah calls us to raise our minds and hearts beyond the trivialities, and to remember the One who creates us and all things. Have you not seen? Have you not heard?
When our lives become unmanageable … when we don’t know where to turn … when our hearts are breaking … when we have run out of answers … when we are physically or emotionally exhausted … Isaiah’s words remind us of a God who promises to lift us up:
Those who wait upon 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.
In the 1800’s it was John Henry Cardinal Newman who penned the phrase “the fever of life” in a prayer beloved by many. Imagine it read at a funeral committal liturgy. Or in Compline, Prayer at the Close of the Day, right before bed. The prayer beautifully captures the rest, the peace, the healing that God alone can give:
O Lord, support us all the day long of this troubled life:
until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed,
the fever of life is over, and our work is done.
Then, in your mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,
and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
In worship we turn off our gadgets for a period. We wait upon the Lord. We come forward, hands open: the body and blood of Christ. Hearts open: new strength and purpose. No wonder the eucharist was once called the medicine of immortality. Amid the fever of life, may it bring health and salvation.
1Peter Senge and others, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Cambridge, MA: SoL, 2004 (25-26)
2John Updike. Collected Poems, 1953-1993. New York: Knopf, 1993 (28).
Download and print this sermon from our "Archived Sermons" link below.
See also: