Lent 2021
Healing Our Planet, Our Health, and Our Community
with a Simple Resolution
Lent is a time of contemplation and preparation for the coming of Easter, a time of making sacrifices and personal changes. The Psalmist tells us that “the Earth is the Lord’s” (Psalm 24); it is a gift meant for all of us to share and protect. Perhaps this year, our Lenten fasts can help us make progress toward one of the goals Pope Francis laid out in his encyclical letter on the care of our common home, Laudato Si. Francis reminds us of our ‘responsibility within creation, and duty towards nature and the Creator’ is an essential part of our faith (Laudato Si 64).
Often, we think of our personal health as an issue distinct from our planet’s health, but when it comes to diet, healthy food often helps make a healthier world. Much of this comes down to resources; a diet heavy in meats (particularly beef), fats, and sugars requires a production system that treads heavily on our planet. In contrast, a healthy plant-based diet puts much less strain on the Earth and its resources..
A simple calculation illustrates the stark difference between these diets. Compare the environmental footprint of a bowl of rice and beans versus a plate of beef, assuming they have equivalent amounts of protein: The serving of beef uses twenty-three times more land, consumes six times as much water, and emits twenty-one times as much greenhouse gas than a serving of rice and beans.
People may wonder, what they can do to help heal the planet? At the same time, they may feel a sense of despair that their individual actions are inconsequential in light of the enormity of the climate crisis. In fact, the good news is that one of the most consequential things anyone can do is personal wellbeing through a sustainable diet. Nothing is closer to us than the food we put into our bodies. The food that treads most lightly on our bodies also treads most lightly on the planet.
We cannot separate human health from the health of our communities, our resources and our world. As a community, it is important to think about and advocate for policies and practices that promote health and well-being at the individual, community and planetary levels.
Inside and Out
by BJ Brown
After that first day of Jesus’s public ministry, after Jesus casts out a demon from a man in the synagogue and a fever from Peter’s mother-in-law, and after spending long hours healing the ones who approached Simon’s house after sunset, the next morning he leaves Capernaum for the neighboring villages. And the very next thing that Mark tells us is that a man with leprosy throws himself at Jesus’ feet and asks to be healed.
The first reading for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time suggests a measure of the audacity of the man’s request. The lectionary’s selection from the book of Leviticus is part of a longer passage concerned with the role of religious authority in protecting the community’s health (a timely topic to return to on some other occasion!) According to the instructions in Leviticus, when the priests find that someone has a visible skin disease that can be passed on to others, they are to be completely cut off from the community. They are sent to “dwell apart” and they are to rend their garments as if in mourning, as if they were dead.
There is where the man who kneels at Jesus’s feet in the same Sunday’s gospel comes from. His request, “if you wish, you can make me clean” professes complete faith in Jesus’s healing power. And Jesus, “moved with pity,” does heal him. Jesus’s touch bridged all that separated the man from his community; Jesus’s word chased disease out of him just as the demons fled from the man in the synagogue and the fever left Peter’s mother-in-law.
Mark’s introduction of Jesus as a powerful healer is one thread tying together the three miracles of Mark 1:21-45, Mark’s account of the beginnings of Jesus’s public ministry that we’ve lingered over for the past three Sundays.
But these three stories are not just well-matched pearls on a string. Each one adds something to the composite picture, to the fullness of Mark’s gospel. What, then, does the story of the man with leprosy reveal?
Peter’s Mother-In-Law,
and Jesus and Us
by BJ Brown
Although her name is lost to us , Peter’s mother-in-law is the first woman we meet in the gospel of Mark. She is the first person Jesus touches in Mark’s gospel, the first he heals from disease–although, in Jesus’ time, there wasn’t the same bright line that we try to draw between demons and disease. So the three healings that come in quick succession at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry in this gospel belong together; they are all one story: the man in the synagogue, Peter’s mother-in-law, and the Galilean man with leprosy.
When Jesus enters Simon Peter’s house, he is told about Peter’s mother-in-law ‘immediately.’ He seems to go straight to her, taking her by the hand and raising her up–a way of describing her cure that makes us think of how he will be raised up from death. Her fever leaves–not unlike the way the demon fled from the man Jesus had met in the synagogue earlier in the day. After that, Peter’s mother-in-law begins to “wait” on Jesus and his disciples–or, as other translations have it, to “serve” them. Her actions seem to foreshadow the women who Mark will much later tell us don’t flee from Jesus’s crucifixion–Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome–who were also said to minister to Jesus (Mark 15:40). Peter’s mother-in-law’s service seems to exemplify the role that all of Jesus’s disciples are called to play.
So, is Peter’s mother-in-law really just like her son-in-law Simon, like his brother Andrew and James and John? Should she be counted among the very first disciples that Jesus called? Should we find in her a model and exemplar for the role that women can and should have among the followers of Jesus, even today?
Or is that an act of eisegesis–a way of examining the Scriptures for what I want to find, instead of reading for what the Scriptures reveal, so that I might examine myself in their light? When I focus closely on the three verses of Mark’s gospel about Peter’s mother-in-law alone, will I find everything there is to learn about her encounter with Jesus? Or might there be more to her story?
Let’s return to Mark’s gospel, then, and see what happens next–let’s consider the rest of the gospel reading for this Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, in Year B of the church’s cycle of Scripture readings.
His Ministry Begins:
Jesus Encounters
an Unclean Spirit
by BJ Brown
Lately I’ve been watching a lot of superhero movies. I guess I need to keep seeing the triumph of good over evil. But I’m not watching the multi-episode Marvel or Justice League franchises; I prefer stand-alone stories. I want to see evil overcome in a single story arc. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal of today’s gospel. It’s Jesus’s first public appearance after his baptism and after calling two sets of brothers as his first disciples. In his very first act of public ministry, Jesus casts out an unclean spirit with two short, sharp exclamations: “Quiet! Come out of him!”
But in truth, there’s more to the story that this passage of Mark’s gospel tells than a one quick, dramatic moment.
Today’s gospel (Mark 1:21-28) is the first of a three part series. Casting out this unclean spirit is immediately followed by part two, Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-29, next week’s gospel). Then after a very brief interlude for prayer, in part three Jesus heals a leper (Mark 1:40-45, the following week’s gospel). And so we have one of those scriptural sandwiches, a series of three stories with the middle one being the most important, the one that sheds light on the two stories that precede and follow it.
You might think then, that these twenty-four verses should be read all at once, as a single Sunday’s gospel, since they are meant to be understood together. But whatever committee composed our Sunday lectionary decided to read the three stories that make up Jesus’s first day of public ministry over the course of three weeks. They must have thought that each episode was worth lingering over, that each one on its own had something important to teach us. But what?
What do We Dream of?
God called Samuel in his dreams, repeatedly. It’s not surprising that God had to be so persistent. Samuel was young and “not yet familiar with the Lord.” Though he served the prophet Eli, Samuel was an unlikely candidate to become a prophet himself, since he was not Eli’s son and heir. Nonetheless, God called three times while Samuel was asleep in the temple. With the help of his master Eli, Samuel figured out what was going on and on the fourth call, he finally answered “Speak, for your servant is listening.” The Lord, we are told, remained with Samuel, “not permitting any word of his to be without effect.”
Joseph, the patron saint of our parish, also heard God speak in his dreams. Joseph did not permit the word he received to be without effect, following four divine commands that he received in his dreams to take Mary into his home, to flee with his wife and newborn son to Egypt, and finally to return and make a new home when and where it was safe to do so.
For Samuel and for Joseph, dreams were no idle matter. Dreams are where Samuel and Joseph encountered God, where they heard God speak. For Samuel and Joseph, sleep was a sacred space, a ‘liminal’ space, a threshold between what they heard in their dreams and effective action when they woke up.
We too are poised on a threshold, even, many possible thresholds. We are in between an uncontrolled pandemic and herd immunity. We are in between the results of November’s election, a mob siege of the US Capitol and the inauguration of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris. We are even in between in our parish community, between Christmas and Lent, and under the pastoral care of an interim administrator between pastors.
