To me, the clear issue here is that word gets out about Jesus the miracle worker, and he is besieged by people. Broken, hurt, demon haunted people throng around him and the house he is in. It gets to be so much, eventually, that he flees. In the morning when it is still very dark, he heads out to a deserted place to pray.

But they hunt him down.

We can’t blame the people for this. They are sick and need healing. And he is the healer. But we understand Jesus, too.

Even the Son of God needs balance. He needs to pray.

Is there a message here about works of piety and works of mercy? Maybe. The bigger issue appears to be getting bogged down in one place. The needs are so great in Capernaum that he could stay there and never leave. He would not run out of hurt people.

But he came to proclaim the message to all the towns. He came to spread this message as wide as he could, to everyone who would hear it. He did not come to settle in where the people needed his healing power. He came to move about where people needed to hear his message.

On the move.

Being an introvert, I relate to the feeling like you need to get away. I can imagine Jesus sneaking away from Simon Peter’s house in the wee hours of the morning. The moon lighting the street where people lay down outside the door of the house. I can see him picking his way over and around sleeping children and adults. He had to get away, to an empty place, where he could pray.

[D]amaged people often come from families that worshiped a God of fear. Many disturbed people are drawn to religious communities in search of the God of love. Even when they begin to experience acceptance in your community they might treat you, the person they see as the representative of God, as if you were a stand-in for the fearful God of their childhood.

Anyone ever encounter anything like that?

Over at The Confessing Movement, Thomas Oden has an essay about schism, John Wesley, and the early Methodist movement. His basic thesis is that until the church requires he do something that violates his conscience, he views schism or separation as inflicting grave harm on the body of Christ and against biblical teaching.

Near the end of the essay, he lays out his personal decision.

My own decision about whether to leave the United Methodist Church hinges on this steady and clear conviction: As long as the classic Wesleyan doctrinal standards (Wesley’s Standard Sermons, Notes, and Doctrinal Minutes) are in place and constitutionally guaranteed, my intention is not to leave the church that baptized me and ordained me. Nothing that the political activists do will cause me to think that either my baptism or my ordination is deficient. But if the church requires of me some act to which I cannot in good conscience consent, I will, like Mr. Wesley, consider it “my bounden duty to separate from it without delay.” I hope and pray that such will not be required. For now I appeal to classic Wesleyan doctrinal standards on those matters of sexuality that are rending the body of Christ.

That such essays need to be written suggests to me that we are moving closer to a separation. I may be reading that wrong, though. I am fairly new to the fold.

No man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly called natural conscience. But this is not natural: It is more properly termed, preventing grace. Every man has a greater or lesser measure of this, which waiteth not for the call of man. Every one has, sooner or later, good desires; although the generality of men stifle them before they can strike deep root, or produce any considerable fruit. Every one has some measure of that light, some faint glimmering ray, which, sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh into the world.

– From John Wesley’s sermon “Working Out Our Own Salvation“

Part of the role of the church is to help people name grace in their midst. John Wesley’s understanding of preventing grace — which we have rechristened “prevenient” — is one such opportunity.

What the world calls “conscience,” the church names as grace. It is the gift of God, not our inbred goodness that troubles our souls when we do what we know we should not or leave undone the things we know we should. When we ache with compassion or burn with righteous anger at injustice, it is grace.

Of course, as Wesley notes, with the help of the world, we are very sophisticated at quenching the pangs of preventing grace. We drown them, rationalize them away, and ignore them with exceptional skill.

But behind all our games and sedation and deception lies grace. In every place and every breast God has planted grace. Belief matters nothing here. Before we believe, before we even hear something that calls for belief, grace has been at work and grace has been given.

I take his meaning to be in part that the pastor is the place where theology and what we call “real life” intersect. It is where people come to you with questions about their dead niece who was not a believer and their husband who cannot express love. It is where a church board frets over how to spend a limited budget and turns to you for some sage word. It is where someone proposes a hymn for worship or a book for Sunday School that commits theological malpractice. It is where a nasty letter shows up in your mailbox from someone who just heard you preach about loving each other and from the content of the letter clearly did not hear the sermon.

Even in my short time in this part-time roel as pastor, I have grown to appreciate the boots-on-the-ground theological work of the pastor. Being in the places where men, women, and children come into contact with each other and God shapes theological reflection in ways that reading books and talking around the seminar table — or the Internet connection — never could. At least not for me.

This is the great and messy gift of pastoral work. Sometimes I wish things could be more tidy, but I thank God for the mess all the same.

John Wesley followed Jesus when his heart was cold as a stone. He followed when he thought what Jesus wanted was hard work and sincere effort. He followed until his faith as nearly broken by failure and abandonment. And then Jesus came to life within his heart and the Holy Spirit came upon him with power, and he changed England.

How do we help United Methodists who have started this journey — like the disciples and John Wesley — but have not completed it?

This blog has an exceptionally good response to the whole matter.

In an interview published last week, she said this:

Demi added: ‘What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being love. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.’

The lectionary this week has me spending a lot of time pondering the man with the unclean spirit. I hear in Moore’s statement above a kindred spirit to the man in the gospel lesson this week.

We are not told whether the man with the unclean spirit has a mental or physical ailment. It may be that the spirit is hidden from others. Perhaps the congregation is stunned when the man bursts out because he seemed so “normal” up to that point.

Whatever the case, the exorcism in the middle of a Sabbath service stirs things up. And, I am told, for 21st century people stirs up all kinds of questions. People come to this text with questions about faith healing and science.

Are these questions getting in the way of Jesus and the gospel or are they the doorway to Jesus and the gospel?

How explicitly should the sermon engage these questions?

And how should they be engaged?

Since the next couple weeks with Mark we will be getting a series of healing stories, it might be best to bring these questions up and deal with them directly this Sunday. Or is this falling into a mistake by placing the emphasis on the wrong things?

These are some of the questions I’m thinking about and praying about this week thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary.