Facebook Collaboration on a Sermon

Last week I was having a tough time trying to put my thoughts together for a sermon, and I put up a facebook status that said I was needing the "Sermonator" to ghost write for me. I got several responses from friends, some delightfully facetious, including one from my dear friend, Paige, who is a writer by trade, that said, simply, "You rang?" There were a couple of posts that, together, got me thinking in a productive direction. The sermon below is the result. It's not exactly what I preached, but it's the manuscript I took to the ambo, with a couple of revisions that attempt to get closer to what I actually said.

And, by the way, our parish was able to send some desperately needed assistance to the LAMB Institute this week thanks to the generosity of some folks who heard this sermon, and to the generosity of many parishioners and community members who have supported other fundraising efforts at church.

Texts: Ephesians 2:1-11; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56.

Do you ever engage in the thought experiment that produced the term “Six Degrees of Separation?” The idea is that the human family truly is more tightly connected than we usually imagine it is. For example: Many of you know my daughter Anna, who has shaken the hand of the President of the United States. The President has met the Queen of England, who is the grandmother of Prince William, who is the son of Princess Diana, who had met and shaken the gloved hand of Michael Jackson. Usually we play this game with famous people. But we can just as easily play it this way:

Leamarie True (choir member, indefatigable supporter of the Trio Coffee House, our parishioner who has been to Honduras twice on mission trips) went to Honduras with a St. David’s parishioner named Amanda Scott. Amanda keeps in close touch with a woman named Suzy McCall, who is Field Director of the LAMB Institute, and who cares for children who somehow find themselves homeless on the streets of Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital. Suzy knows an unnamed member of Tegucigalpa’s equivalent of DFACS, who was contacted by another unnamed individual, who discovered a pair of twin girls, who appear to be about fifteen months old, literally abandoned in a pigpen, trying to compete with the pigs for food. How many degrees of separation is there between you and these two precious children? Of course, Suzy will find a way to make sure the children don’t fall through the cracks.

The email that told us about them also gives us an idea of how Suzy somehow manages, on faith and prayer, to provide a loving home to her own seven adopted children, ages 2 to 24, while at the same time operating a school, a day care center, and a children’s home; and providing leadership and educational training to a staff of wonderful young adults who work in the school with her. Just put the words “LAMB Institute Honduras” into a search engine when you get home, and you can see the amazing things that Suzy is up to.

We can look at the enormous and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that Suzy and the staff face; and we wonder how she finds the strength to go on. She’s recently had to cancel plans to return to the USA for a time of retreat and respite, because the money just isn’t there.

Suzy’s ministry is truly Christ-like. She longs, with all her heart, to model what she does in Honduras on the ministry of Jesus. And as soon as you decide to live this way, as soon as you realize that Jesus calls you to be his eyes and ears and hands and feet in the place where you find yourself, your heart begins to burst as you see the needs. Our reading today from the Gospel of Mark tells us that people flocked to Jesus, and if they just touched the hem of his garment, they were healed. I hear this reading and think about these twins, and about being the Body of Christ and I feel like the chain of the degrees of separation begins with us, having grabbed onto the hem of Jesus’ robe, reaching out to bring that healing to the ones we are called to serve.

They are here as well as in Honduras. You know this if you volunteer through Good Samaritan or CARES or ACES or Angels on Horseback or the Thrift Store, or mentor children, or serve as CASA volunteers, or tutor at the Joy House: you find your heart strings constantly tugged. In doing this work, we hear stories that touch our hearts because there soon develops a flesh and blood connection between ourselves and the people we serve. We see glimmers of hope that maybe things can change with wise and loving intervention.

And there are also days when Holy Family folks wonder why they don’t just pack it in, and spend all day on the golf course instead. People who care can fall victim to compassion fatigue. The problems just don’t seem to quit. One can begin to feel, like Dr. Laura used to say, that no good deed goes unpunished. As Good Sam develops a reputation for being an effective deliverer of medical care, for example, more and more people come. And the work expands.

There’s a lot of joking in this parish, especially as we have seen so many folks facing surgeries to repair hearts, knees, backs, and hips, that growing old is not for wimps. Neither is being a Christian. Following Jesus is not easy. Following Jesus is not a hobby that we take up like raising Dalmations or Chinese cooking or wood-working. It is a way of life, a way of seeing and being in the world that will wear you out and that will break your heart.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark shows Jesus and the disciples with every intention of taking a break to catch their breath. “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while,” Jesus says.

The disciples needed a rest. They had just heard tell of the horrifically violent death of their friend and fellow servant of God, John the Baptist. The story reached Jesus and his disciples just after they had been engaged in a period of intense ministry: traveling through Palestine, teaching and healing. They were tired and emotionally vulnerable. It was time for them to be getting some rest and a restored perspective on their mission.

Jesus said: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” So they headed across the lake by boat. As it turned out, they didn’t get much time to relax this day. By the time they were at their destination, crowds were waiting for them.

Jesus saw the crowds with compassionate eyes. He saw them as sheep without a shepherd. Mark’s analogy here is apt: the Hebrew Bible has a long tradition of referring to the rulers of Israel as shepherds; and some were faithful, but others were more like Herod. The kind of man who could commit the horrible violence of beheading John on a whim, and subjecting a young girl most likely to nightmares for the rest of her life, was not, in Jesus’ eyes, a faithful shepherd. This was the entree, perhaps, for his teaching that day. It ran long into the afternoon.

It was a huge crowd that gathered. You’ll notice that today’s reading has a gap in it. We move from the 35th to the 50th verse of this 6th chapter of Mark. What we miss is the feeding of the 5000 and the story of Jesus walking on water. We will spend the next five weeks taking a little break from the Gospel of Mark and hearing these events narrated from the point of view of the Gospel of John. So we’ll have more time to consider these events and their meaning later this summer. But what we have before us today is a very important picture of the way Jesus conducted his ministry. We need to see the pattern and apply it to our own lives if we are to be faithful followers of Jesus. It is a pattern that helps us to steer between two common but destructive ways of living: overestimating the importance of our own contributions to the Kingdom of God, on the one hand; and, on the other, seeing our Christian faith as little more than a stress-reduction program.

Jesus, as a faithful Jew, knew the weekly pattern of six days of work and a day of Sabbath rest. He also had a day-to-day pattern of alternately seeking solitude for prayer, and compassionate engagement with the people who needed him. When the disciples and Jesus got to the other side of the Lake, they discovered that they had to postpone the rest. But the pattern of Jesus that we see in the Gospel of Mark shows us that, although this was one time when he did not manage to get away, Jesus did regularly make time in his day for solitude and prayer and rest.

Most of us can look at our own lives and say, truthfully, that our work is so demanding and so satisfying that there’s not enough time in the day to get it done. The in-box is never empty. There is always more we should be doing. We can exhaust ourselves doing important work, work we know we are called to do. We can look at what our competitors do, and we can say, if we are to stay in the game ourselves, that there IS no time for rest. We can do that for a while. But then one day the fun goes out of the work, we find we are no longer making progress. We stop caring. We lose our creative edge. We need to take time out, to come away and rest awhile. When we rest, when we make a quiet place in our lives to listen to God, to become again aware of his love and his care, then we can go back refreshed and ready to serve again. So this is the first mistake, perhaps the most classically American mistake: to think we don’t have time for rest or solitude.

But there’s an equally tempting alternate point of view that is also a mistake. And that is to think it is the purpose or function of our Christian faith to make us feel better, to offer us a kind of stress-reduction program. Our time with God does give us a refuge from the storms out in the world. We can seek the quiet and the peace of a Sunday morning in worship, or a Saturday afternoon out in the woods on the Pavilion, with our sisters and brothers about whom we care so deeply. But the time away, so nourishing, so wonderful, is not the end in itself; the time away is to charge us up to jump back into the fray, to jump back into compassionate engagement with the people that God puts in our path.

We follow Jesus because he calls us. We follow Jesus because it is the right thing to do. We rest in order to be better equipped to serve. We rest in order to be able to work. We do not engage in religious practices primarily in order to find peace of mind, as a kind of religious hobby, or even a kind of mental health aid.

But if we seek to follow this pattern of work and rest, where, to be honest, work has the primary focus… lo and behold! we discover, as the writer of Ephesians did, in the thick of all this overwhelming need and exhausting work, that we also have peace, and membership in a family that is eternal and all-embracing. We discover that, metaphorically speaking, we are being built into a temple where joyous union with God occurs. And from this safe and beautiful place we are launched out again on journeys in a world that is hungry and thirsty and hurting, where twins just a couple of months younger than my own beloved grandchild Lillian, are abandoned in a pigpen in Honduras. The work never ends. There are always more people to love in Christ’s name.
Following Jesus is not for wimps. The work is hard. It will demand more than all we have to give. But we are promised times of rest and refreshment. We come away and rest, not as an end, but as a means: a means to continue to be effective servants of Jesus. We are just the latest link in the chain that runs back to the hem of the garment of Jesus—back to the power of God to bring hope and light and justice and love to those who need it most.