Sit with the Sick

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Even in the middle of a pandemic, Jesus calls us to join him in ministering to the spiritually sick around us.

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Our world is sick right now.
In case you missed it, there is a global pandemic that is taking its toll around the globe.
Our response to this disease has impacted almost every life in our church and community in a drastic way.
We have put in place protocols for cleaning, wearing masks, and maintaining distance as an attempt to slow the spread and minimize the impact of this disease, especially for our most vulnerable populations.
We have followed “stay at home” orders in attempts to allow our medical system to catch up to the demand.
Although we had escaped it for a long time, there are those in our congregation who have and are battling with COVID-19, with some even requiring hospitalization.
The impacts have been the most dramatic on our healthcare workers.
They are balancing higher patient loads with fewer people to care for them, all while pushing through the nagging fear that they too might get sick.
They have to be there, listening to every congested cough, and dealing not only with COVID, but with every conceivable disease.
Why do they do that?
Because they know they can help make others well.
That’s where we find Jesus this morning.
He isn’t an ICU nurse in a COVID unit, he isn’t a vaccine researcher working to find a way to lessen the impact.
Instead, we see him using this picture of fighting a disease to describe his role and ours.
This disease has been around almost as long as there have been people.
In fact, since shortly after God created Adam and Eve, this disease has impacted every human heart, including those alive today.
It is the disease of sin, that decision to turn from God’s plan to turn to doing our thing.
Sin in the heart causes us to be born spiritually dead, and it is ultimately the cause of our physical death.
Here is my challenge to us today: without trivializing or reducing the concerns over COVID-19, I want us to pull back for a minute and remember that there is an even greater challenge to those around us than just this disease.
It doesn’t get as much news coverage and may not be acknowledged in high-profile deaths, but it is one that impacts every human who has ever lived.
I want to challenge us to follow Jesus’ example and make sure that, as we take precautions during this pandemic, we also make sure you are looking up and around at the lives around us who are spiritually sick and need Jesus.
We are going to see that in Mark’s gospel this morning, so turn over to Mark 2:13
As you are turning there, let’s talk about what is going on in this book.
The book of Mark is one of the four books in the Bible that talk about Jesus’ earthly life and ministry.
By chapter two, Jesus has been teaching and preaching for a while, trouble is beginning to pop up.
What Jesus is saying and doing is causing conflict with the religious leaders, who are known as the scribes and the Pharisees.
Earlier in chapter 2, he made them mad by not only healing someone but also forgiving his sins.
Today, they are going to get mad at Jesus again, but as Jesus explains, he is doing exactly what he is supposed to do.
Not only that, he is modeling for us what we are supposed to do as well.
We, like Jesus, are supposed to sit with the sick.
I know that this may look different in our world right now, but we need to become intentional about cultivating relationships with those around us who don’t know Jesus.
In fact, if you remember nothing else from today’s message, it is that Jesus calls us to join him in sitting with the sick.
Let’s look at how Jesus sat with the sick in Mark 2:13-17.
Let’s walk through what happened. As Jesus was going through the area, teaching and preaching, he came across Levi at his toll booth and invited Levi to follow him, so Levi did.
Levi had a party at his house to celebrate Jesus being in town, and he invited the people he was close to.
That’s where the conflict really ramps up, because this wasn’t exactly the best crowd.
Jesus is sitting with the spiritually sick.
He is talking to, eating with, and hanging out around what Mark calls “tax collectors and sinners”. He has even called Levi (Matthew) to be one of his close followers, and he was a dreaded tax collector.
To everyone around them, it was obvious that these people weren’t right with God, and yet that’s right where Jesus went.
Let’s talk about the groups there that night.
First, the tax collectors.
At this point, the land of the nation of Israel had been divided into four kingdoms, and there were tolls, or taxes, to go from one to the other.
Levi and these other tax collectors were Jews who worked for the government over that region, which was the first strike against them. Most Jews didn’t like the people who were ruling over them, so in their mind, these tax collectors had sold out and were working for the enemy government.
To make matters worse, they had a nasty habit of using force and overcharging for taxes and lining their pockets with the extra.
So, they were doubly hated, both for selling out and for extorting their own people.
Then, we have the general term “sinners”.
This was a term the religious leaders used to describe those who weren’t devout adherents to the Law of God.
They were common people who hadn’t been taught what God expected of them and didn’t follow all the rules the Pharisees and scribes put in place.
If this was today, this would be people who either didn’t grow up in church or forgot what they had learned about how to at least look like you followed Jesus. Their sins were usually pretty noticeable, not hidden like the sins of the Pharisees.
There was another group who heard what was going on: the scribes and the Pharisees.
They may not have been actually invited to the party, but they caught wind of what was going on before the night was over.
As we already mentioned, they were the religious leaders of the day. They knew all kinds of facts about the Bible, and they were very careful to keep up a good, religious appearance.
They were like people who scrubbed the outside of a cup to keep it looking nice and shiny while they never clean the inside.
The religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees were super spiritual and wanted everybody to know it, but it was all about keeping up appearances.
Part of that involved staying away from people like tax collectors and sinners.
You couldn’t hang out with sinful people; it might give folks the wrong idea!
How do these folks react to what Jesus is doing? Read verse 16 again.
They are fighting him!
So, where do we find Jesus? Hanging out with the super spiritual or the obviously spiritually sick?
He is sitting with the sick because they recognize their need for the cure He offers. Look back at verse 17.
Jesus is obviously teaching us something as well through this.
Where do we need to be?
We need to be willing to sit with the sick.
As we see how Jesus interacted with Levi, who is also called Matthew, and his friends, we are going to draw out three principles on how to sit with the sick.
If we really love Jesus, we are going to be intentional about getting around those who don’t know him yet.
We aren’t calling them to follow us as our disciples; we are pointing them to the one who has healed us.
If you and I are going to sit with the sick like Jesus did, we first must…

1) Look out for the lost.

Go back to verse 14.
Did you notice how Jesus called Levi?
It was a very personal moment.
Jesus was doing everything else God called him to do.
He was teaching and preaching from town to town, and in the middle of it, as he was passing by, he sees Levi, or Matthew, sitting there, doing his job.
Think about that…he saw Matthew.
It wasn’t that Jesus just visually recognized that there was a person taking up money; he saw Matthew.
There is some indication that the word here may have meant more than just visually perceiving something and has the idea that Jesus took notice of Him.
Let me ask you: how many people do you see in a given week? What about in a day?
Not how many people are there in Walmart with you at the same time, not how many people do you see cut you off, but how many do you actually take notice of?
I’m not telling you to go sit on a bench and stare awkwardly; I am telling you to do what Jesus did—notice those around you!
What mood was the last cashier you had in? How about the people who were in front and behind you in line?
What can you tell me about your neighbors, or the people who work in the office next to yours?
How many people do you actually slow down long enough to see?
“Eh, I don’t have time for that.”
Jesus did!
In the middle of teaching and preaching, he stopped and dealt with one individual life.
That one life, by the way, would go on to write the longest of the four gospels, the book of Matthew.
If you and I are going to sit with the sick, we have to look out for those around us who may not know Jesus.
The places we go may not have as many people as they once did, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be on the lookout for those you run into.
Make the most of fleeting opportunities, like talking to the nurse who comes to open the door so you can come in for your appointment or striking up a conversation with the woman who brings your to-go order out.
You’ll be amazed at what doors God opens!
When Jesus saw Levi and called him, it forever changed Levi’s life! Do you believe that he can still do that today in the people around you?
When Jesus called him, Levi changed, and he wanted his friends to celebrate with him.
That’s why he invited them over for a party that evening, and that’s what we see next…

2) Don’t be scared to invest.

Read verse 15 again.
Jesus was eating a meal with “those people”. That’s one of the closest things you can do with someone else.
He didn’t just offer a token greeting, shake their hand, and then leave. He actually sat down with them and ate. He was in their home, sitting around their tables, spending time with them.
That could have even made Jesus ceremonially unclean!
Yet, what was Jesus’ priority? Was it to make sure all his church friends knew how good he was?
No! His priority was to sit with the sick.
Jesus wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to heal our souls.
He walked our dusty roads, touched lepers, paralytics, those possessed by demons, and those who were enslaved to sin.
He took time to invest in the lives of those who recognized their need for him.
How do we know that they recognized their need for Jesus, by the way? Because it says that “there were many who were following him.”
That phrase is used mainly to talk about people who commit their lives to following Jesus and becoming his disciples.
So many of those the world overlooks were the very ones who would follow Jesus.
As they walked with Jesus, they saw their own sin-sickness and turned to following him.
That happened as they sat across the table from him and shared a meal with him, where they could see who he really was.
Let me ask you: are you willing to invest in the lives of people around you?
We need to make the most of passing moments, but some of those passing moments need to turn into longer-term investments.
Are you willing to develop relationships with people you may not normally associate with so that you can point them to Christ?
Are you willing for people to possibly misunderstand and malign you for hanging out with “them”, whoever that is for you, or are you too afraid of what others might think or of what it might cost you?
I know that the pandemic and restrictions put a wrinkle in that, but we aren’t the first Christians in history to face diseases.
200 years after the Black Plague had taken the lives of almost half of the population of Europe, it reappeared in various cities in Germany.
Martin Luther, one of the great men in church history, wrote a letter to a friend on how to respond to the plague’s resurgence. Here is a piece of that letter:
“Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above.” [1]
There is a lot to unpack here, but we could summarize it like this: pray, take precautions to help slow the spread of disease, recognize God is ultimately in charge, and still maintain a willingness to recognize and help those in need around us.
We need to wrestle with this tension between protecting our lives and ministering to the lives around us, recognizing that good, godly people may come down in different places on some of these issues.
Some of us are more likely to throw caution to the wind and rush headlong into the fray, while others are more likely to withdraw completely from everyone and everything.
Where are you on that spectrum? Where do you need to be more cautious, or where do you need to ask God to open your eyes to the needs around you, to see what he sees?
Those who see things differently than you do may not always agree with the way you respond.
How do we handle that?
Jesus was willing to invest, regardless of what others said, which is why we draw our third principle…

3) Stay the course.

Look back at verses 16-17.
There were some super spiritual folks who didn’t understand what Jesus was up to and tried to correct him for it.
How did Jesus respond?
“Look guys, this is what I came to do. Sick people know they need a doctor, so I came for them.”
He didn’t waver, because he knew exactly what he was supposed to do and be.
I’m not advocating that you arrogantly ignore your brothers and sisters in Christ if they raise genuine concerns; what I am saying is that you need a firm grasp in your heart of the mission and purpose God has given you.
Others may see something you don’t see because you are too close to the situation. You may have convinced yourself that you are pursuing this relationship to win someone to Christ, but your friends can see more clearly that you have other motives.
However, there are times when people may misunderstand why you are developing a relationship with someone, going somewhere, doing something, and they may try to get you to stop.
After examining your heart and making sure your motives and actions align with what God says in his Word, you have to be willing to obey Christ, no matter what others say.
We go out from our worship services as people whose hearts have been transformed by the Gospel, the good news that Jesus loved us so much that he would take our disease of sin, die on the cross to break its power, and raise from the dead to show that he had overcome sin and death, and we’re trying to take as many people with us as we can.
We are the ones who have a true and lasting hope that transcends pandemics and political chaos.
It is our job to come alongside people and help them see what God can do for them, just like he has done for us.
See, Jesus uses the term “righteous” ironically here.
He isn’t saying that you can be good enough to save yourself; he’s saying that you can’t be made well until you realize you’re sick.
Like me, I’m sure you’ve heard stories of someone who ignored the symptoms of a disease so long that when it was finally diagnosed, it was too late.
They were sick; they just didn’t know it.
The Bible says that the same is true of all of us; we are all sick and in need of God to heal us.
Jeremiah 17:9 CSB
The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?
You and I are sick with a disease the Bible calls sin, and Jesus came to heal our sin-sick hearts.
It took Jesus dying in our place to save us, but he was willing to do whatever it took.
Are you willing to acknowledge that your heart is sick and turned inward instead of turned towards God?
Don’t be like the Pharisees, thinking you can clean up the outside without having God clean out your heart.
Once you acknowledge your sin and trust Christ, look for others. Don’t be afraid to invest in them, and stay the course, even when others misunderstand what you’re doing.
Endnote:
[1] https://olivesandcoffee.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Martin-Luther-Letter.pdf. Accessed 9 January 2021.
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