Mark 1:29-39

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he 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.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout all Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Sermon Text

 Ministry is a complicated thing. As we look out in the community around us, we see all kinds of needs that need to be met. People are lonely, people are hungry, people need clothing, and people need to hear the Gospel. There are as many problems in the world as there are people and there is no way that one Church can meet every need that surrounds their building. If we tried, we would quickly find ourselves exhausted, defeated, and ultimately feel completely lost in the midst of the world’s trouble.

We are blessed in Harrison County to have churches that are active in their pursuit of ministry. There are people working together to tackle some of the biggest needs around us – food insecurity, access to health care, clothing, and so much more. You cannot throw a rock without having it land beside some part of God’s people doing the good work of God out in the world. We are blessed to have the Spirit leading all of God’s people toward something greater than just another week spent in just another set of meetings.

This collaboration is undergirded by individual churches that have their own focus and ministry. Some focus on recovery ministry, others on feeding programs, and others on fellowship. I’ve been blessed through going around our connection with an appreciation for just how diverse the work of the Church can be. From people in Wheeling providing lunch to seniors alongside card games and board games, to people down in the Coal Fields bringing hope into a world that’s horizons seem to close in all around them. Those focuses are able to reach out beyond the broad strokes of larger ministries, filling gaps and making the Kingdom fit like a glove into the world it seeks to give new life.

I think that there is a double-edged sword to the way we understand how ministry walks the line between broad goals that meet the needs of lots of people, and smaller ministries that seek to have greater impact for fewer people. On one hand, we are able to understand that too broad of a ministry scope will lead to running in circles and missing out on doing good work in favor of busy work, and so it is necessary to focus on smaller goals and works that have greater impact. Yet, to lift up the other hand, we are fully aware that focusing in on myopic ministries that only help certain people in certain ways runs the risk of us becoming complacent, saying our work is “good enough,” and eventually only doing things for ourselves.

Faith is always this tug of war between extremes, and it should not surprise us that ministry is not any different. The further we reach out, the more stretched thin we become. The more we contract, the more resources we have but the less we are sharing. The point of equilibrium, the ideal spot of impactful action reaching the correct scope of people – that is what ministry is always striving for. Always reaching a little further than our resources would comfortably allow us to, we trust in God’s provision. Always restraining ourselves from zealous burn-out, we trust that God will see God’s work done without us imploding ourselves.

In our scripture for today, Jesus demonstrates the importance of balance. We are told that he enters a town and seeks to stay with Simon’s family. Jesus heals her and she begins tending to them and welcomes them into her house. This may seem rude to our modern sensibilities, coming into a woman’s house and then within an hour of her being made well having her feeding you, but it was a different time. The biggest impact that came from this exchange was not that Jesus had a warm place to sleep and some food to eat, but that the neighbors quickly learned that a healer had come to town. Many of the people in town, struggling with a variety of problems, came to be healed by Jesus, to be saved as only he could save.

The night goes long, we are not told exactly when Jesus was able to go to sleep, but we know that he left early in the morning to rest. He retreated into the mountains and spent the early hours in prayer, in conversation with God, and foundational to both actions – resting. When the disciples finally found him, they told him that there was still plenty to do in town – but Jesus refused to go back down. Instead, he led the disciples to the next stop on their ministry tour, and then to the next, and the next, and the next.

Jesus could have stayed in the town and done an incredible amount of good. People would have traveled miles to come see him, but Jesus was not trying to set up a permanent place of ministry. Jesus was itinerant by design, not just by accident. He went from one place to another, seeking out the people who needed him, and then left when it was time for him to leave. As time went on, he established other ministers among his disciples to go out and revisit towns he had been to – as well as make new connections in new places. Jesus was modeling a ministry that we all could learn from.

In the modern era, when churches are stationary buildings, we cannot be fully itinerant as Jesus was. In the same way, we have far more people to minister to than he did. The average town in Jesus’s day was lucky to have a few hundred people in it – we minister to thousands. Yet, while the building cannot move – we certainly can. There is nothing that should be preventing us from going out to different areas of Clarksburg, to different neighborhoods on our side of the bridge, and doing things out there in the open!

Jesus intentionally never set up ministry so that people had to come to him, he was always on the move. Jesus never set up ministry so that only he was contributing, he made teams to do the work. Jesus had a focus – to proclaim the Gospel and heal the sick. Those things – movement, collaboration, and focus are all things we have to build our ministries off of. May God add to the work we do in this Church, sending us further out, building our teams up to be better, showing us a kind of focus about what the scope of our work includes. Let us pray that God will show us the way to chase our ministry wherever it might lead.