Toward Sunday

We continue our four-week series, What Keeps You Awake At Night?, this week with focus on Mark 1.14-20.  We will transition to two worship gatherings on February 1.  The two worship gatherings, 9:30 am and 11:00 am, will both weave the same music and message.  Similarly, we will offer the same Godly Play and Nursery Care at 9:30 am and 11:00 am as we transition to two worship times in order to make room at The Table.

January 4    Matthew 2.1-12

January 11  Matthew 2.13-18

January 18  Matthew 2.19-23

January 25  Mark 1.14-20

Benedict Carey writes, “To hear some people tell it, a night’s sleep changed their world. It was reportedly during sleep that the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements tumbled into place. Friedrich August Kekule, a 19th-century chemist, said he worked out the chemical structure of the benzine ring — an important discovery — when he dreamed of a snake biting its tail. Athletes, including the golfer Jack Nicklaus, have also talked about insight coming during sleep. Slight corrections in technique are revealed; sand traps are averted; mountains move” (“An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play” published by New York Times on October 23, 2007).

Read Mark 1.14-20 aloud.

While this story is not directly linked to sleep, I wonder if the fishermen called by Jesus were perhaps weary from a night of fishing.  Something led them to abruptly leave all they’d known and follow Jesus. Jesus comes to them in a most mundane and unexpected moment. Jesus sees them.  And, Jesus calls them to follow.  The image in Mark’s Gospel feels dreamlike…it is as sparse in detail as it is abrupt in pace.  Often, this is precisely how God comes to us.   Simon and Andrew “immediately leave their nets and follow him” (1:18). Then, James and John, sons of Zebedee, leave their livelihood and their father and “immediately” follow this stranger (1:20).