He Bore Our Sicknesses

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to Saint Mark, the first chapter.

Immediately Jesus left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.

Now Simon's mother -in -law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her. And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons, and the whole city was gathered together at the door.

And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.

And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, Everyone is looking for you.

And he said to them, Let us go to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.

And he went throughout all of Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. Well, last week's gospel text was kind of harrowing if you think about it.

Demons in church. This week's gospel text seems to be a little less, well, ominous.

But I would argue it's quite as ominous as last week's text. Let me kind of explain here. So last week we noted that Christ went into the synagogue in Capernaum, and there a fellow manifested a demon and said,

We know who you are, Jesus. You're the Holy One of God. And Jesus told him to be quiet and cast the demon out.

And people were marveling that he spoke as one with authority and even cast out demons.

And right after that, the text says immediately, Jesus left the synagogue.

Now if you were to travel to Capernaum, I always travel there using Google Earth and other people's vacation photos, it's a little less expensive.

Well, you'll note that just a few blocks down the street from where the synagogue was, is the house of Simon, Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John.

So Jesus is heading over to their house. And it says this, Simon's mother -in -law lay ill with a fever.

And immediately they told him about her. We're going to pause there. We've got some work to do before we can move forward in this sermon.

But I want you to consider a few things here. Number one, we in our modern era, fevers can be something that is serious, but most of the time for us, it's not.

You'll note that this is the days before thermometers, before antibiotics, before Tylenol, before Advil.

But still, even in our time, in our time, fevers can be serious.

At the risk of giving too much information, a week and a half ago, my wife woke up with a fever.

My wife has had some complications in regards to COVID and other things. She woke up with a fever.

And I grew up in a medical family, and so I know a thing or two about managing a fever. Honey, you're going to need to drink lots of water.

Here's some Tylenol. Four hours later, we'll switch it out with some Advil, and we'll kind of be on the rotating thing and then constantly monitoring to see how things are progressing.

Well, first bout of Tylenol, it went okay. She still was maintaining a minor fever.

And by the time we switched over to Advil, ibuprofen, things started getting a little worse.

She was warming up, and that seemed to have no effect. So by the second round of Tylenol, we gave that to her and watched in the 30 -minute period where her temperature went from 102 to 104 .7.

And 104 .7 used to be a really good radio station back in LA on the FM side, but that's a whole other thing.

104 .7 is not a good thing as a fever, and I realized at that point something was amiss.

And so I said, honey, we're going to the hospital. And she didn't put up a fight. It was awesome.

So we went off to the hospital, and sure enough, they found the source of what was causing the problem. And they prescribed the proper medications and antibiotics to deal with the issue.

And it took a few days for things to settle down. And so my wife will tell you she feels like she dodged a bullet, that that was a pretty serious and painful event for her.

And so you'll note that even in our days, fevers can be quite the problem. But what do you do in a world where there are no antibiotics, where there is no

Advil, where there is no way to deal with these things? Fevers can be a, well, a life -threatening thing.

And I would note that in our cross -reference to this Gospel text in the Gospel of Luke, Luke makes it clear that not only does she have a fever, she had a really bad one, an extreme one.

This was a pretty severe fever that she was dealing with. Now, one of the other points

I would like to make in regard to this Gospel text is this, and that is that we don't know the name of Simon Peter's mother -in -law.

Now, I've noted that one of the things that the Gospel writers had a tendency to do, if they knew the names of the characters, especially if later during the time when the

Gospels were being written, they often recorded the names of the people who were healed by Jesus or had been taught by him, things like this.

In this particular regard, I'm kind of glad that they didn't give us Simon Peter's mother's name.

And there's a reason why I'm glad about it, because knowing how Rome has gone off the rails, you can already see what would have happened had we known the name of this woman, right?

Let me just give you a fictitious name. I'll use my grandmother -in -law's name, Gladys.

If her name was Gladys, that's not a Hebrew name, but if her name was Gladys, then

Rome to this day would have made Saint Gladys the patron saint of all women who have a fever.

And if you have a fever, you can pray to Saint Gladys, and she will heal you of your fevers. You know it's true.

This is what they've done. But here's the thing. I always kind of note this other thorny little issue, is that had they done that, had they actually known the name of this woman and beatified her and made her the patron saint of women who have fevers, they would have always had to deal with that thorny little bit of information that she was the mother -in -law of the first pope.

How do you explain that one? Because I only know of one way to get a mother -in -law.

I don't know of any other way to get one. There's only one way that I know of to get a mother -in -law, and that is you have to marry a gal.

It's usually a package deal. They come together. It's kind of fascinating. So you'll note that that's one of the things here.

But you're also going to note this, that Simon Peter's mother -in -law, who was ill with a fever, that there is no mention as to any kind of guilt on her part when it comes to having come sick.

Oftentimes when we deal with illnesses within our own lives, we kind of think that illnesses kind of work off of the idea of a quid pro quo.

I did something bad. God made me sick. Now that does happen, by the way, but it's actually more rare for that to happen.

Consider it this way, is that you think of somebody who maybe spent their adult life eating a lot of junk food and fast foods and things like this, and as a result of it, later in life they develop diabetes.

And so you can sit there and go, well, there may be a connection between the two, and oftentimes there is. Or you can think of people who are engaging in really gross sexual sins, and as a result of that, they incur a sexually transmitted disease, and we can say that there's a correlation there.

But the thing is that we are tempted, because we understand that we are sinners, we are tempted when we sin to think that it can be tied directly to an event, a sin, something that we've done wrong in our lives.

And that is actually a wrong way to think about it when we talk about illnesses in general.

And here's the reason why. If I could, I know I'm going to end up milking the fact that I had

COVID for all kinds of sermon illustrations, so my apologies here. You guys are going to learn more about COVID in the next few weeks than you ever wanted to know.

But I want you to think about this, all right? We're going to start with a statement that we all know how this statement ends.

I'm going to put a blank here, and you can fill in the blank. To err is human, right?

But may I strongly, vehemently oppose the concept. To err is not human.

God made us good. God made us in His image. And you'll note that in our experience, it appears as if to err is human.

But that's not true. So let me pull up the COVID illustration here.

I recently had COVID. Was COVID a natural part of my humanity?

No, COVID was an invader. COVID was a corruption of my body.

COVID was something that my body fought off. I was never COVID. COVID is never

Chris, all right? And if you've had COVID or any other disease, you can say the same thing about yourself. And here's what we must recognize, that sin is described in Scripture in those same kind of terms.

It is a corruption of our nature. It is not our nature.

We are by nature, after the fall, born sinners. But still, that is a corrupted nature that we've inherited from Adam and Eve.

And the condition, the illness is known as sin. Sin, that's the illness.

Sin is the illness. Now, oftentimes we talk about illnesses in terms of what is the root cause and what are the symptoms.

Well, the reason why we sin and the reason why we suffer many and various different kinds of diseases and maladies is because all of those are the symptoms of the big condition of the root cause known as sin.

Coming back to COVID, you'll note that if you were to look it up online, that COVID has a spectrum of symptoms.

And not any one person, no one person has them all. But what ends up happening is that there are some people who have no symptoms or some people who have mild symptoms.

And then you have people who have severe symptoms. And the symptoms can include a runny nose, you know, a fever.

It could also include a rash. It could include vomiting and diarrhea and then

COVID pneumonia. And the thing is, is that nobody can say, well, you only have a runny nose, even though you've tested positive for COVID.

That means you don't have COVID. Yeah, that's not how that works. So you'll note then that the condition that scripture teaches us that we all suffer from is that we all have a corrupted human nature.

We suffer from and have all tested positive for the disease known as sin.

And that disease manifests in our lives in all kinds of actual sins of thought, word, and deed.

And it also results in our bodies experiencing various and sundry diseases.

This is all the consequence and symptoms of sin. And so you'll note here, nothing is mentioned about Simon's mother -in -law having committed this sin.

Therefore, she is now suffering a fever. And so we can all then consider it this way. Every time each and every one of us falls ill, whether it's a cold or whether it's

COVID or maybe some long -term ailment like diabetes or cancer, that we recognize that each and every time that something like this happens to us, it's like a little mini death, if you would.

A reminder of our mortality, a reminder of the fact that we all have tested positive for sin.

And we all, as human beings, kind of have a natural fear, a loathing, something we don't want to have happen in our life, and that is to have that conversation with our doctor.

You know, if you're smart, and I'm not necessarily smart, if you're smart, you visit your doctor with some regularity, maybe once a year and all that kind of stuff.

It's kind of like taking your car into the shop to make sure you get a tune -up, at least that's what I've been told. But we all fear that one of those days, one of those years when we show up at the doctor's and they do all the blood work and they run all the tests every year to make sure everything is okay, we all fear that one conversation where they say, you know, we found something odd in your test results and we're going to need you to come in to have a discussion with you about them.

We all fear that conversation. Not only do we fear it, there's a second part to it, because the one conversation we don't want to have is for the doctor to look us in the eye and say, we've run the test, the results have come back, you're going to need to get your affairs in order because you haven't got long to live.

We all fear that. It's a conversation that none of us wants.

But I would argue something here, and that is that as a pastor,

I have to tell you the truth about the condition that you and I all suffer from.

And that is this, is because we have all tested positive for sin, because we have all failed to love

God with our whole heart, mind, body, soul, strength, because we have also egregiously failed to love others as ourselves and as Christ has loved us.

This is proof, the tests have come back, that you have all tested positive for sin and I hate to say this, you're going to need to get your affairs in order because you are going to die.

And you sit there and go, but wait, Christ is the great physician, this is a text about Jesus healing somebody, doesn't

Jesus always heal? No. And you're going to see that as this text develops.

Your condition is terminal, the wages of sin is death. You have rebelled against God, I have rebelled against God, we have earned the very death that God has promised to give us, and Christianity does not promise us that we will not experience the death that we deserve as the consequences of our sin.

In fact, Christianity and trust in Jesus is not the vaccine for sin.

That analogy doesn't hold. Instead, what Christ promises each of us, those who have been brought to penitent faith in Christ, who trust in Christ's vicarious work to save us from our sin, that he will bring us through death into life.

That's what's promised to all of us. And so you'll note here, one of the interesting things we see in our gospel text is this, and that is that Simon Peter's mother -in -law, she didn't decree, she didn't declare.

It doesn't even say that she prayed. In fact, you'll note this, she did nothing.

Jesus came to her. Instead, we learn this, that Peter and Andrew, James and John, they told

Jesus about her, and Jesus came to her. And I want you to consider this then.

When you see here that they told Jesus about Simon Peter's mother -in -law, see this as a form of prayer.

And it's really easy for us to say, but, but, but, but, but, but, but they got to see Jesus face to face.

They were in his presence. They could see him and they could know that he was hearing them.

Do you think when it comes to prayer that matters one whit? It doesn't.

Christ Jesus is our great high priest and our mediator before God. And the scriptures assure us that he hears us when we cry out to him.

And so you'll note then that even though we do not have the joy yet, and notice

I said yet, yet of seeing Christ face to face, we can too bring to Christ's attention those whom we love and care for, who are in need of the great physician to come and to touch them.

And here's the next part, which I think is so beautiful that I love this aspect of the gospel of Mark because these little details regarding Christ's tenderness and humanity really shine forth.

It says that Jesus came and he took her by the hand and he lifted her up.

I think about the text that's coming in a few months where Jesus goes to the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler, whose 12 -year -old little girl was at the point of death.

And she died while Jesus was on the way because, you know, that woman showed up with the issue of blood and caused a disturbance and a delay.

And Jesus wasn't able to get to Jairus' daughter before she slipped into the next world.

But Jesus tells Jairus, do not fear, only believe. And he goes into the inner room where the corpse of the little girl was and it says he took her by the hand.

He took her by the hand and he said these wonderfully, wonderfully tender words to her,

Talitha kumi, I say little girl arise. And she did. And she did.

And I would note something here, that Christ's hands have touched all of us who have been baptized.

In Colossians chapter 2, it says that each and every one of us, when we were baptized, we were circumcised with a circumcision made without human hands, the circumcision of Christ.

And so Christ's hand has touched every baptized believer already.

And Christ has called us already from the grave because in our baptisms we have been united with him in his death and his resurrection.

And Christ's tender hand has already touched you who are baptized into Christ.

So note then that Christ takes her by the hand, lifted her up, and the fever left her.

How could it not? And then note, it says she began to serve them.

And I would note, this is an appropriate thing. From time to time, I've noticed that Don Matheson here at Kongsvinger, he will send people away from the divine service by saying, go in peace, serve the

Lord. These are good words. These are good words. And you sit there and go, oh, well, that means you're ending on law.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that at all. You'll note that Paul emphatically states in Ephesians 2 that we are created in Christ Jesus for good works.

And this is what happens with all who are true Christians. Christ raises them up and they begin to serve

God and neighbor joyfully from their heart, doing the good works that Christ has called them to do.

That's a good point to make. And so you'll note then that after this, at that evening, word got out of what

Jesus had done to Simon Peter's mother -in -law in healing her. And that evening at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons.

And the whole city was gathered together at the door, and Jesus healed many who were sick with various diseases, cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew who he was.

Now it's important to note here that Jesus didn't then say, you know, I think it'd be a good idea if we eradicated disease within the

Middle East, and he didn't set up a tent healing revival there in Capernaum and turn

Capernaum into a pilgrimage site where if you had any kind of various illness or malady or demonic oppression that you can come and Jesus eradicate it.

If Jesus wanted to, he could have easily done that, but he didn't. Why?

That's not why he came. And this is where we must recognize then that signs and wonders are used to validate the message that is being taught.

Signs and wonders are not where the real power is, and giving people miraculous healing doesn't solve the actual root of the problem.

The root of the problem is sin. These are the symptoms. And I would note here that Jesus's healing of Simon Peter's mother -in -law was a temporary fix.

How do I know? Because she's been dead for two millennia. In other words, another illness came at a later date and she died.

But the question is, did she perish? Did she perish eternally? The answer is no.

She had faith in Christ. So you'll note then, here's an important thing for us to consider.

In our day, there are charismatics, people in the NAR and other wingnut wackerdoodles on TBN out there claiming that Christ always heals.

Everybody who comes to him, Jesus heals. This is, as I used to say in seventh grade, this is belogna.

This is not true. And this text of ours proves it emphatically.

I want you to consider what it says. So rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark,

Jesus departed and went out to a desolate place and there he prayed. This is a different sermon topic, but always consider the fact that Christ is a man of prayer.

The very Son of God in human flesh is a man of prayer. If the Son of God in human flesh is a man of prayer, we ought to be as well, people of prayer.

Prayer is very powerful, very potent, very important. And the devil would confuse us and misguide us and mislead us regarding prayer.

But like I said, that's a different sermon. But here's what it says. So it's early in the morning. They didn't have eggs and bacon because they were

Jewish, so I'm not sure what they were eating for breakfast. I just loathe and lament the fact that there was no bacon.

You couldn't smell the bacon being made there early in the morning. But maybe the eggs were coming up and,

I don't know, maybe some toast or a bagel or something. Who knows? But the point is, while it was still early,

Simon and those who were with them, they were searching for Jesus. And they found him and they said to him, everyone is looking for you.

At the breakfast hour, there was another crowd in front of Peter's house.

And Peter had to go hunting for Jesus and say, come on, it's time, let's get these people healed.

That's really what he's implying. But Jesus said to them, let us go on to the next town so that I may preach there also, for that is why

I came out. And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

And we know from earlier in this exact chapter of Mark that Jesus is a repentance preacher.

His message is repent and believe the good news, believe the gospel. And so you'll note then this,

Christ didn't come to set up a healings, signs and wonders show.

The signs and wonders validated the message that he preached. But the message he preached was the actual thing that was dealing with the root cause of all of these illnesses and demonic oppressions.

And the root cause is sin. Repent and believe the good news addresses the fact that each and every one of us have tested positive for sin.

And we need the comforting words of the gospel that in Jesus, there is forgiveness, mercy, grace, pardon, and peace.

And God has lavished this good news and this mercy upon us because of his great love for us.

It is the gospel that Scripture says is the power of God into salvation for all sinners who believe, you and I included.

Christ died for the ungodly, Paul says in Romans 4. And guess what?

We all qualify. And because we all qualify, then you'll note that it is through the preaching of the gospel that the root cause of our maladies is addressed.

It is only through the gospel then. And you'll note that that's the reason why Christ came out. And what did

Christ do? He preached repentance and he preached the forgiveness of sins. And after his death and his resurrection, he passed the mantle,

I'm going to use that term just to tweak some people, he passed that mantle on to his apostles and told them to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations beginning in Jerusalem.

And they did. And those apostles made disciples as Christ commanded them to do.

And those disciples made disciples who made disciples who made disciples. You and I are here today hearing the good news of the forgiveness of sins in Christ because we have been prayed for.

People have told us about, told Jesus about us, and Jesus has come to us, forgiven us, renewed us, strengthened us, feeds us, cares for us.

And you'll note then that this work then continues today. The preaching of the good news and through that preaching, we are made right with God.

And I would then note this. There is a text in Isaiah, in Isaiah 53, talking about how

Christ has borne our illnesses, how Christ has borne our diseases, and by his stripes we are healed.

And this I want to make clear is absolutely true. And that Christ wills for all who believe in him to be perfectly healthy, but not now.

Only on that day when he reaches out his hand and lifts each and every one of us out of the grave, the real grave that we are all heading to.

On that day we will be like him because we will see him as he is.

He will raise us in bodies that will have no sickness, no disease, and won't age so horribly the way we age.

Just look at me. I'm a train wreck, right? There's a day coming. And so note then that Christ truly has borne our sicknesses in himself and he truly wills for each and every one of us to be perfectly healthy.

Not now, then. And so take comfort, brothers and sisters, take comfort in the fact that Christ comes to us and he lifts us up and heals us of the fever of sin and all of its consequences.

And this he does out of his pure love, grace, and mercy that he's had on us.

Not because of anything that we've done, but because of everything that he has done. So this fifth

Sunday of the Epiphany, take comfort in these words. Take comfort in the fact that even if you're suffering physically in your body, that Christ has never left you or forsaken you, and that all the promises that you will someday rise from the dead are sure and true because you have been united with Christ and he has conquered sin, death, disease, and the devil.

In the name of Jesus, Amen. And again, that address is

Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744. We thank you for your support.

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