"At the House of Peter"

At the House of Peter
Mark 1:29-34


I’ve been to Capernaum.

It was an overcast and drizzly day.  The first part of the day, our tour group took a boat ride on Galilee Lake.  It is a lake, not a sea.  It just so happened a squall came up, whipping up some semi-truck sized waves.  While we were out in the middle of the lake, our tour guide, Joseph, a Palestinian Christian, came over the loudspeaker system on the boat.  He said, “I’m sorry, folks, but a storm has come up.  We’ll have to get out and walk from here.”  Then after a pause, he added, “Well, you are true believers aren’t you?”

At the end of the cruise we were to dock at Capernaum on the north end of Galilee Lake.  But the storm was severe enough that it capsized the dock.  We had to put back to shore where we started out.  Busses came to transport us to Capernaum.

There was still a fairly good rain coming down when we arrived.  Most people in the group ran out, snapped a few pictures and scurried back to the warmth of the bus.  I grew up in Seattle.  I’ve never let a little rain stop me from doing anything I wanted to do.  I figured I had come half way around the world to see the Holy Land.  I wasn’t going to be held back by the rain, or just settle looking at the sights from a rain spattered bus window.

Walking into Capernaum, the first building I came to was the ruins of the synagogue.  Most of the outer walls were gone, except the front wall.  The building looked to be about the same size as our sanctuary, but was rectangular in shape.  A row of stone pillars stood a quarter of the way into the interior on both sides.  Stone benches were all around the interior wall.  There were a couple of stone benches in the front.  I think I remember Joseph the tour guide saying those were reserved for dignitaries, Pharisees, or visiting Rabbi’s.  Jesus could have sat on one of those front stone benches.  The people who came for worship would have had to stand the entire service.

I stood in front, off to one side, trying to imagine Jesus sitting there, being introduced, and standing to address the worshippers.  Then, as Mark tells it, a man with an evil spirit came running in, frothing at the mouth with madness, screaming at Jesus at the top of his voice.  In my imagination, I watched the standing worshippers part like the Red Sea as the mad man stalked toward Jesus.  I watched Jesus standing calmly, but resolutely, as the man, nose-to-nose with Jesus, screamed in his face, “I know who you are: you are God’s holy messenger!”

Imagine what it would be like, to have someone screaming in your face.  Maybe some of you don’t have to imagine.  You’ve had someone berate you at point blank range.  And it wasn’t a madman.  It was someone you loved or you thought loved you.

The rain hitting my borrowed umbrella became a tense drumbeat, heightening the tension in the scene I was imagining.  I saw Jesus smile, then command the demon out of the man, leaving him limp, but free, at Jesus’ feet.

My heart was thumping as I walked back out down the middle of the rain soaked synagogue.  The vision I had just seen washed away like a water color painting.

I walked out and down the path towards the excavated town of Capernaum.  What first caught my eye was a huge sanctuary, round and modern, looking like some ET space ship hovering above a place in town.  Because Capernaum was the hometown of the apostle Peter, the building was a church that had been built in honor of him.  The altar inside sat on a glass floor.  Looking through the windowed floor, I could see right into what was believed to be Peter’s home.

The town was a honeycomb of interconnected homes that shared outer and inner walls.  Peter’s home was about the size of our chancel area here in the front of the sanctuary.  The whole town was about the size of the land our church and parking lot sits upon.  Narrow lanes made their way in and out of the honeycombed town.

Looking down through the glass altar floor, I imagined Peter’s mother-in-law curled up in a corner of the small room.  She was shivering from fever, covered by home spun blankets.  I saw Jesus come in, with Peter and the three other new disciples.  They followed Jesus with worried looks.  I saw Jesus stoop down, put out his hand and lift her up, free from her illness.

Then I watched as she became a whirlwind of activity.  She stoked the fire.  She peeled the potatoes.  She milked the goat.  She measured the flour.  She set the table.  She had been freed to carry out her service of the everyday, mundane tasks of a Palestinian woman.

I thought to myself that that is probably what I would do, what I would want if I was in the death grips of some illness.  I would long to be able to get back to my normal, everyday life as a Pastor.  I would long for my ordinary life; but after being healed, I would know it would be different.  I would be different.  A certain holiness would have been infused into my everyday because I had been healed.  That’s what I saw in Peter’s mother-in-law as I imagined her scurry about, a bit lighter in her step, music being hummed on her lips.

I walked out of the flying saucer sanctuary and strolled through the little town.  I finally came to, and stood in front of Peter’s house.  It was late afternoon.  The rain clouds gathered again.  My imagination caught hold.  I saw people coming from all over town, gathering with me in front of that door.  “All the people of the town gathered around the door of the house,” Mark the gospel writer wrote.  It would have been at least a couple of hundred people.  I was standing right in the middle of them.

So many hands, reaching, demanding, “Me, Jesus; touch me, Jesus; heal me, Jesus.”  All trying to seize the moment--a holy carpe diem.  There, in front of Peter’s house, Jesus is the moment they are trying to seize.  He touches them all, grasping each hand, holding on to them for a moment as if they are the only one.  He is oblivious to all the obvious others, looking into each individual’s eyes, healing them, calling out their demons.

In the push-and-shove of the crowd, I suddenly realize I am the only one who was not reaching out to be touched by Jesus.  My arms were slack at my side.  I was merely a spiritual voyeur.  I had come to the Holy Land looking for answers and peace.  The whole trip had fallen into my lap, a last minute gift from a minister friend in Georgia whose wife couldn’t go.  At that time in my life everything was crumbling.  I was standing on the threshold of a devastating divorce.  My preaching voice had gone dry.  I was angry about everything and didn’t know why.  Joy was just a word that followed “jowl” in the dictionary.

There I was, in the middle of the expectantly clamoring crowd, all of them demanding healing from Jesus.  But I stood as still as a pillar that I had just seen in the ruined synagogue.  I was too proud to reach out my hand.  These people had real problems--they were really sick, they were crazy with demons.  Me, I was just full of the crap of life that happens to everyone.

Then he was standing right in front of me.  Jesus had his hands steepled in front of his chin and lips like this.  He was staring at me.  Smiling an odd smile.  I couldn’t look at him.  I knew in my heart this is why I had come.  People who had been to Israel told me there would be holy moments, unexpected experiences of the sacred.  Here it was.  Here he was, staring me in the face and I couldn’t bear to look.  I felt the warmth of my tears beginning to mingle with the coldness of the raindrops on my face.

He simply asked, “What do you want?”
I shook my head, looking at the mud at my feet, and all’s I could mutter was, “I don’t know.”
“I know,” he said.  “I know what you need.”  He clasped the sides of my shoulders, I felt his strength, and I fell into his arms sobbing.  It was like all the pent up poison I had stored for years, tears from abuse, tears from loneliness, tears of rejection, tears of foolishness and failures, tears of sin, remorse and regret--all of it flowed out of me.  Tears I had never cried.  Tears I was never allowed to cry.  Tears I wouldn’t allow myself to cry.  It was like he was absorbing it all into himself.  There, in front of Peter’s house, standing with all the hungering others, I was being given what I needed most and wouldn’t reach out for.

As I was standing there, feeling the release from all my toxic tears, wondering why I had initially held back, why anyone would hold back from reaching out to Jesus, I heard my name being called.  It was my friend, Jay, saying the bus was getting ready to leave.  I said I’d be right there.  I was soaked and I was shivering.  But I realized the numbness that had been my character up to that day was gone.  I was beginning to feel alive.  “I am alive!”  I shouted up to the falling raindrops.  “Thank you, Jesus,” I whispered, facing the door of Peter’s home.

I picked up the umbrella, and ran back to the bus.