In the Congregational tradition, there are only two acts in a church for which we formally reserve the term “sacrament.”  

Maybe we should have a little pop quiz! 

Raise your hand if you know the only two church things in our tradition that we officially refer to as sacraments. (No, you don’t have to.) 

Baptism and Holy Communion.  

As you can see from your bulletin, we will be serving Communion in just a little while, so you’ll get one of them in this morning.   

So: fine, technically, there are only two.  

But after doing this a while, I would also say that we Congregationalists may only recognize two sacraments, but we have a lot of things that come pretty close.  

And of all of those other things that we do, the church’s annual meeting is surely one.  

That may sound like an exaggeration.  

Yet when our tradition began, it was not obvious to many people that any churchgoer should have much of a voice, much less a vote, in what or how things were done.

The notion that the Holy Spirit would guide the churches to lead themselves was held by most to be a recipe for chaos rather than new life.  

Some earlier experiments along those lines had turned out to be cautionary tales in that respect.  

Nevertheless, they persisted.  

In fact, the longer they did, the clearer they were that their original insight drove a lot of important, ongoing reflection into how far a congregation might press the point of who had a voice, and how such perspectives served the greater good.  

As a result, the Congregationalists were early, and often the very first denomination to open their pulpits to many who were not only voiceless, but often, literally voteless within the larger society of their times.  

This is a point of pride for us. 

Truth be told, it’s also an ongoing challenge. 

If it’s truly a principle we still seek to live by, it demands that we ask ourselves who might be without voice in our time, and in our own church today, and how we might challenge ourselves to notice, to listen, and to grow from their particular witness.  

That’s not easy. 

It might make it sound like church is supposed to be some sort of continuous open mic night until Jesus returns.  

The actual vision for the church is much more subtle. 

It starts by knowing both that first, listening without love so quickly falls into judgment, and second, that love without listening is so blandly sentimental.  

Our tradition urges us to hold together both listening and love, to let them nurture (or, switching metaphors, to sharpen) one another. 

Our tradition reminds us that in the moments when we do hold listening and love together, God can seem particularly present. 

These are the times when, like Moses at the burning bush, we sense that our own feet have ventured onto holy ground. 

The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who started as a Unitarian preacher and just sort of kept going further and further out there, might not have entirely agreed.

He once said that he liked “the silent church before the music begins better than any preaching.”  

Much later, the writer Kurt Vonnegut sounded a similar idea, arguing, “People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.” 

(No offense taken, guys, I know what you mean.) 

By contrast, the early 20^th century evangelist Billy Sunday used to say, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.” 

It’s not often that I find myself disagreeing with Emerson or Vonnegut and teaming up with Billy Sunday. 

I emphatically agree that we need more silence and more daydreaming in our lives—time and space for inspiration—of course we do. 

But the church has always understood that we need to be called out of ourselves before we’re called back in, and so part of what that means is that just sitting here, even in a place as beautiful as this one, is not enough by itself to teach us how to be Christians.  

I think Billy Sunday is onto something there. 

Where I would add to that is just to say: if we can’t listen to and learn from voices other than our own, we have no genuine hope of listening to and learning from the voice that is greater than all other voices, including even our own.  

Congregationalism has taught me that.  

Certainly, it has offered me opportunity after opportunity to practice that kind of listening.  

Our Annual Meeting today is another such opportunity. 

It is so woven into our way of being church that we literally cannot be church without it—without your voting on our own leaders, the allocations they suggest from our own resources, and endorsing and enacting the way they propose to live into God’s mission here and now.  

Now, it goes without saying that Peter and the early disciples were also committed Congregationalists…well, at least I think they were.  

The gospels show us that all along the way, they seem to have had many ideas about where they thought Jesus ought to go and what he ought to do.  

It took them a while to learn to listen. 

They don’t listen very easily to Jesus. 

They don’t much listen those they encountered along the way—all those people they were initially inclined to dismiss. 

On Easter morning and the days to follow, it will become clear that they don’t even listen to each other.  

It’s worth noting that Jesus made a point of stopping and greeting, healing and including all kinds of people—offering an ongoing lesson in what God’s great community was called to look like. 

The invitation to join was always open. 

It takes the disciples awhile to catch on.  

No wonder then that, as our passage this morning makes clear, from early on in Jesus’ ministry, this work is already exhausting. 

It takes a great deal out of Jesus, personally, in ways that even his closest followers don’t seem to realize.  

Really listening, true attunement, takes a lot of focus, and they are only just beginning, and there is a long, long way to go.  

Yet if we read the story closely, this may not be true of everyone.  

We only see her for a brief moment, but I wonder if Peter’s mother-in-law points to a more developed form of discipleship. 

We’re told that she is stick in bed with a fever, and that Jesus is brought to her bedside.  

He takes her by the hand, we’re told, and lifts her up—gestures of care that, if you think about it, we also use to describe how it feels when someone listens to us. 

It’s language we use to describe when someone responds to what ails us.  

“He took me by the hand.” 

“He lifted me up.” 

Clearly, there is something profound that happens in their encounter.  

Like Peter dropping his nets to follow, his mother-in-law rises to serve.

Mark doesn’t call particular attention to it, and maybe he deliberately leaves it for us to discover, but in any case, it’s worth noting that she actually feeds Jesus.  

She serves him.  She welcomes him.  She attends to his needs.

To put it slightly differently, unlike the other disciples at this stage, she is attuned to Jesus.  

She’s listening and responding in a way that’s different from the way that they do, and frankly, more advanced.  

In contrast to them, she responds, not by dropping her nets, as it were, but by picking them up.  

Right away, she lets herself be claimed by the work of service to the people right in front of her.  

In a way the others won’t get until much later, she knows when she’s standing on holy ground, holding together listening and love in the name of a better world.

She’s called out of herself, only to be called right back in. 

But notice: she’s called back in, already different than she was before, already transformed, already more equipped to encounter and respond to the need around her than she was before. 

In this moment, she even picks up on the unspoken need of Jesus himself. 

As we seek to hold together listening and love, may we also learn to hear the spoken and the unspoken, and come to know the presence of God.  

Amen.