"Man may work ‘till set of sun, but a woman’s work is never done."

"Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them."

We come to this text with twenty-first century sensibilities. Our sympathy goes out to the one who is sick, because we can imagine what that would be like, not feeling well enough even to get out of bed, and then have unexpected company arrive on your doorstep – why can’t they just leave me alone? And then to be healed – good! But then expected to get up right away and serve a meal. I’m sure for a lot of you who have been mothers you might be saying to yourself right about now, "Been there; done that."

I think of the parents who were showing their young son pictures of their wedding day, but the little boy was having a hard time understanding what the pictures were all about. Finally, a light went on in his little head, and he exclaimed to his father, "Oh, that’s the day Mommy came to work for us!"

But we have to hear this story from a little different angle. The crisis in the household is not that Peter might not be able to stick a frozen pizza in the oven and pop open a six-pack for his friends. No, the crisis is from the other side – that Peter’s mother-in-law, as the matriarch of the household, as the hostess with community responsibilities and an honored role to play, is isolated, absent, and unable – not just to do what she is "meant" to do (by the definitions of her own community), but she is unable to be who she is meant to be.

Again, separate this out from our own cultural presuppositions. This is not a text we would want to use to support some hierarchical theology of "a woman’s place is in the home," cooking and cleaning and that’s what God intended for her and for us and for all time. But take yourself out of your own twenty-first century life for just a moment and hear the text in its context of first century Israel. This illness that has come upon Peter’s mother-in-law – this fever – has broken community and has taken out one of its members; and that’s the crisis that Jesus and Peter and Andrew and James and John discover when they get home from the synagogue that day. If it were just a crisis of not having food on the table when the men get home, Jesus could have fixed that in an instant. Hand him a few crackers and a cup of water, and you know he could have created the finest Sabbath dinner out of that that Peter and Andrew and James and John had ever seen. But that’s not it – not it at all.

No – this fever has broken community, and Peter’s mother-in-law has lost her place. That’s the crisis that the healing power of Jesus’ touch is meant to cure. Illness healed – yes. But even more importantly in the story – community restored, and as a sign of the restoration that God has in mind for all humanity.

Because she is healed, she can reclaim her place among her family that day. She can take up again the service that would have provided fundamental meaning in her life.

Jesus does this again and again in his healing ministry, as it’s described in the gospels. He heals a man in a graveyard possessed by a demon, and sends him home. He heals a blind man, and gives him back to his family. He heals a leper or two, or even ten, and sends them back into their community. It seems to be not just the disease that Jesus is battling, but the relational consequences that go along with it.

I think that as much as things have changed in two thousand years, this much of the story is still very much the same. Illness and infirmity can bring with it two crises, apart from the sickness itself; consequences that can sometimes be even worse than the disease: isolation; and a loss of identity, or purpose. You know what I’m talking about. People get sick, and we put them into hospitals. People get old, and we put them into nursing centers. People lose their mobility, or even just their sense of hearing, and they can quickly become isolated; cut off, through no fault of their own, from family, from community, from meaningful human contact. And in the separation that comes, and in the isolation, people begin to feel useless, as though they no longer have any purpose to serve in this life.

I think this is one of the reasons that Jesus so often healed by touching people. Some of the people he would have been dealing with would not have had the sense of human touch for quite a while – those who were demon-possessed; those who were lepers; those who, in other ways, were considered religiously "unclean." All of them would have been "off limits" to their communities, and even to their families. Imagine living like that – no hugs, no handshakes, no shoulder rubs, no pats on the back. Babies who aren’t touched or held or rocked don’t develop well; adults also can be touch-deprived. Imagine living in a bubble like that.

Jesus got in trouble for healing people. He got in trouble with the authorities because he touched people who weren’t supposed to be touched. He got in trouble because healing on the Sabbath Day was considered a form of work, prohibited by the law of the land. But he judged – and we’d have to say rightly so – that breaking a person’s isolation and bringing them back into the relationships of community was more important than any of these other considerations.

Jesus took Peter’s mother-in-law by the hand, and he lifted her up. She was healed. And she was restored. And in that restoration to her family, to her community, she was then able to take her rightful place as the hostess of the meal. She took up her purpose. She served them. The Greek word there in the text is "ministered." She ministered to them. As Jesus had ministered to her, so she returns the favor. She takes up her calling.

The story goes in a couple of different directions from here. First, everybody in town shows up on the front porch, wanting to be touched by Jesus. It turns out that there are a lot of people in bad shape there, people who need to be ministered to – and so he does. And then, as nice as it might have been for Jesus to have stayed around for a while, to be the hometown hero, he recognizes that there are more people who need him than just the folks at Capernaum. And so on he goes, to the next town and to the next. And it won’t be long before he sends his disciples out, too, to multiply the compassion and the healing that has its root in him. The disciples, too, having been themselves touched, will now rise up and serve.

This is so fundamental to the story of Jesus. He is forever reaching out to the margins, finding the people who have lost their way, touching them, embracing them, bringing them in to this new community that forms around him; giving them both a place and a purpose, inviting them into a life of service.

This is so fundamental to the story of the Church - reaching out to the margins, finding the people who have lost their way, touching them, embracing them, bringing them into community; giving them a place and a purpose, inviting them into a life of service.

It’s what he came to do.

It’s what we’ve come to do.

Amen.

If you’re like several people I know, when we got to that part of the story, something inside of you said, "Hey! The poor lady has just been sick in bed with a fever. Give her a break! Give her a little time to herself to recover, before she has to go back to work!" But no – Simon Peter comes home, with his new friend Jesus, and Peter’s brother Andrew, and their two fishing buddies, James and John. They’ve been at the synagogue together for the morning worship service, and now they come back, hungry and undoubtedly looking for a nice Sabbath Day meal – only to find Peter’s wife’s mother sick with a fever. And so a bit of a crisis erupts in the household – but it’s not the crisis you might think it is.