A reading of the holy gospel according to Mark. This of of course is continuing from the readings we have been using from Saint Mark. Jesus left the synagogue. Remember, was preaching. He rose there and spoke and what he spoke was so significant because his hearer said, he spoke with authority.
So Jesus left the synagogue. It's up in Capernaum, up in the Northwest corner of the lake. And he entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. Just picked them as his four apostles. Now Simon's mother-in-law lay sick with a fever, and immediately they told Jesus about her.
Jesus came over and took the woman by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her. And she's then served the others. That evening at sundown, they brought to Jesus all who were sick or possessed with demons. The whole city was gathered together about the door. Jesus healed many who were sick with various diseases.
He cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him. In the morning, a great while before day, Jesus rose up and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed alone. Simon and those who were with him followed him. And they found Jesus and said to him, everybody's looking for you. But Jesus said to them, let us go to the next towns that I may preach there also.
For that is why I came out. And Jesus went throughout Galilee preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. And this is the gospel of the lord. In In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Let me remind you of it of what I said on more than one occasion.
Our blessed lord, time and time again, withdrew by himself alone to a solitary place where he prayed. I stress that because today we hear so much having to do with community prayer praying, social worship, doing things together, and all of that sort of thing. And that is all very good, remember. But the point is there's another side to religion. And the basic, the absolutely essential side is that religion is a personal thing.
There's no such thing as collective religion anymore than there's collective salvation or collective baptism or collective anything. And so here we have a here we have if only you could hold it in your mind. Here we have our blessed lord who's just chosen his four disciples, chosen them. They just left everything and followed him. And he goes into the house and he cures Peter's mother-in-law.
The whole town comes around. Notice the emphasis on this demon business. Whatever it was, there were a lot of demons around in those days because Christ threw a lot of them out. And one of the aspects of this which always puzzles me is that invariably he commands the demons, whatever it is, that they should keep silent, that they mustn't shout abroad who he is, and the text says because they knew who he was. The demons did.
And plenty of other people didn't. The demons had some way of knowing or or some approach to the problem which others didn't have. I don't know. It's all miss to me, it's a a lot of it's very mysterious. But the point I want to make this morning is this dualism in our Lord's worship or in his relationship to his father.
Notice he goes into the synagogues. Christianity began in the synagogue and it stayed there for years. And of course, it it caused problems. Read it in the book of the acts. But so that we have our lord here giving us the example of worship of god.
It isn't an either or thing. It isn't that we do it all at all times and exclusively as a community or as a group or a congregation or what have you. Or on the other hand that we all become hermits, isolate ourselves from our brethren, and be anchorites or something of that sort. Both extremes have existed and still exist, but you see again, you see again how in a way it makes life easier if you simplify it. As I've said many times, when you're faced with a problem, it simplifies the problem to say it is nothing but that.
Because if something is nothing but that, then you know what you're facing. You can come to grips with it. You can hold it and you could see where it stands. You could see how it contradicts or is in a contrary of everything else. It So that this was Freud's great point.
This terrific simplification of the enormous complexity of human conduct. See, when you can say in any face of a complex situation that it is nothing but, you've taken a long long step towards a simplification of the solution. Whether it'll be the right one or not, that is something else. And so our blessed lord, as in so many other things, he doesn't merely tell us what to do. He showed us.
And if we're Christians, we follow Jesus Christ. Christ. I think that's a pretty self evident proposition. And our blessed lord therefore notice that he did not shortchange or bypass public worship. You cannot fault him on that at all.
From the from the time he is born until he is crucified on the cross, he fulfills the law as a good practicing orthodox Jew. At the same time, at the same time, notice how he separates himself from the crowd, goes out by himself alone to be with his heavenly father in the solitude of his own soul. And this is the pattern for us. We we to worship God, we have to do it in the totality of our being. And while we are individual beings, at the same time we are social beings.
We need our brethren. Our brethren need us if we're going to be human. Remember, when men and women in religious orders or outside of religious orders have withdrawn from society in a healthy way, it isn't because they despise society, it's because they loved it. They loved their human, their fellow human being. They were very much part of that community.
That I mean, notice the word I put it when it's a healthy situation because that kind of thing is not always healthy. Because you see to a certain extent when a human being voluntarily excludes himself from association with his fellow human beings, it is to some extent inhuman. He's acting against his nature. And so our blessed Lord here shows us what how we should do it, And the church has always been this way. The church I say, what churchmen have done at times, that's something else.
But the but the church of Jesus Christ in her official teaching has always always always had a very sensible, rational attitude towards it. Emphasizing on the one hand, all the adjuncts, adjuncts, not essentials, the adjuncts of religion to help us worship God better in art, in music, in literature, investments in in in in all that we can bring into man's operation, into his actions to make him help him to worship God better with his fellow human being. With his fellow human being. We find strength in doing things together. We find encouragement.
We find perseverance. We find the burden lighter when we do it together. And yet, we have to be reminded that in all of this, there's a danger. The mass can become nothing but a theatrical show. A church which is supposed to encourage me to worship God may simply become just as much a work of art as a museum down on the mall.
Music which should enthuse it should raise my heart and my soul and my mind to God can simply be something that would be more appropriate in the Kennedy Center. There's the danger. We have to come to grips with this and to realize that religion is a personal thing. It's going to be a better thing when I do it with other persons, but it's got to be personal with me if it counts. There is no collective salvation.
There is no collective in the sense of a collectivity worship of God. The only reality you have are I don't care how many thousands of human beings may be congregated in Saint Peter's Square or down on the mall as we used to have it in the fall or feast of Christ the king. Count your thousands, but the only reality there is the reality of the individual man and woman, boy and girl, young man and young woman. That's the reality. And the reality of their worship is the reality which each one of them gives personally to God almighty.
And all of this you see is that is the the personal religion. The raising of the mind and the heart to God to acknowledge him, to love him, to serve him with repentance, with gratitude. This is religion. This is religion and worship and it's got to come from a human being. But all of this is accentuated.
It's made easier. It's made more it's made more human when we do it together. And so the church brings us together and brings together everything which will help us to do the job better because we can't escape the first commandment. I am the lord your god. You shall not have other gods before me.
And that's the rub. It's so easy to have other gods before god. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen.