Re-united with Old Friends

Sunday afternoon the movers dropped off all the things from my house and office in Georgia that I thought would be useful or fun to have in the 1000 square foot apartment here in Orlando that I will be sharing for the foreseeable future with my husband and youngest son. About two thirds of the boxes that left Jasper actually went into storage here in a weather-controlled storage unit a couple of miles from the apartment.

Two walls of our bedroom (apart from doors and windows) are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. For the first time in many years, I have nearly all of my "literature" books close at hand. Those who saw my FaceBook post yesterday know that I was struggling to focus on getting all those books on the shelves in some orderly fashion, when what I really wanted to do was to read, to re-acquaint myself with old friends, to make another attempt at making friends with some of the books about which I've had "good intentions" (sometimes for decades!), to make new friends, even to have a good argument with some of the writers with whom I have a bone to pick.

My present unemployed status has given me an amazing opportunity to read widely without having to produce any "work product." No sermons, no adult education class outlines, no formal continuing education, college, or seminary papers. This gives me a degree of freedom which is making my head spin. This is more freedom than I know what to do with! My Hebrew Bible and several grammars and lexica (lexicons??) are on the shelf, as is my side-by-side Greek and Latin New Testament. I could re-establish my former habit of reading the Daily Office lectionary in Hebrew and Greek. Volume 2 of my Oxford edition of War and Peace, which I read on the Schwinn Airdyne one winter when the little ones were napping and the big ones were at school is right there, beckoning. I remember spending EXTRA time on the stationary bike because I got so caught up in Tolstoy. But I lent my father the first volume. I think Volume 1 is in the boxes of books from my parents' home that I put into storage. If we're talking Big Projects, Anthony Powell's series, Dance to the Music of Time is on the shelves, too, as is Proust.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some small books that I loved and that are worthy of further attention. Marguerite Yourcenar's novellas are surely worth a second read. And all that poetry! Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, R.S. Thomas, Billy Collins, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman (whose work I've barely spent any time with!). And a bunch of Shakespeare plays I'd love to read again.

I'd like to spend some more time with Augustine's City of God and On the Trinity. I remember once discovering in Trinity a passage in which Augustine is listing the amazing things in the world, including a friend of his who can fart tunes. I've never been able to find it again. (Did I dream it??)

I'm ready to re-consider the works of some of the feminist theologians I discovered over the years and put aside to read "when I had time." In particular, in light of my growing interest in Mary, the Mother of Jesus, I'm looking forward to sitting with these sisters, arguing with them, being instructed by them, being disturbed by them, growing and stretching as I consider their work.

Something a couple of days ago sent me to C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce. It is short, brilliant, stylized, with all the virtues and flaws of Lewis. I found my heart rejoicing as Lewis writes of the possibility of the most ordinary human beings, basking in God's love and goodness, yielding to God's grace. Of non-Orthodox writers I've read, he perhaps comes closest to being an exponent of the Orthodox notion of "divinization." Lewis is also at his best in his trenchant capturing of the banality of evil in domestic dialogues between "well-meaning" spouses and old friends who cling to old hurts, who elevate "mother love" or romantic love to idolatrous heights. He's spot on, and though his dialogues are dated and very regional, one can easily recognize the types in 21st century America. His image of heaven as infinitely more "real" than Hell is marvelous, as is his way of summarizing the limitations both of the doctrines of free will, choice, and predestination in light of the perspectival problems of time and eternity. Lewis puts into the mouth of his Guide for his tour of Heaven, George MacDonald, these magnificent words:

"Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "N future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. and that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven," and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.
...There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened."

I, like George MacDonald himself, hope that salvation is universal, and that nobody ultimately chooses Hell. But I see Lewis's point. The choice must be there, truly offered.

Anyhow, reading this short work by Lewis makes me think I need to add Dante's Divine Comedy to my "read soon" list. I have Robert Pinsky's translation of Inferno.

The Orlando Chapter(s)

This beautiful Sunday morning, having arrived late last night "permanently" in Orlando, I walked to the Cathedral, almost on time for the 8 am Eucharist. The lector was reading the passage from Revelation appointed for this 5th Sunday of Easter. The psalm, Psalm 100, always brings me back to my childhood chorister days, when we sang "O be joyful, joyful in the Lord, all ye lands!" Then, reading a shorter portion from the same passage of John's Gospel that we hear on Maundy Thursday, the Deacon proclaimed the words of Jesus: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." The preacher quoted the late 2nd Century Father of the Church, Tertullian, who, in his Apology, remarked that it was observed in the Roman Empire that the Christians loved one another, and shared all things in common-- except their wives. (The feminist listener in me wondered about the language that simply assumed that those engaged in this apologetic conversation were males.) He commented that these Christians were living in this community-building way at a time when the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble, when the fabric of all the formerly strong institutions was starting to fray.

I was almost beginning to let down my guard and think that I might hear a sermon in this cathedral that didn't derive its primary energy from being against liberals, gays, or abortion. I should have seen it coming....

The Canon continued. We are in an age that is much like the end of the Roman Empire. The institutions of our day and age are also crumbling. The Church tends to grow and thrive when it is persecuted. The institutions of the family, of marriage, and of Nationhood are being assailed, and the Church has the responsibility for living differently, lovingly, showing a "better way."

I agree--almost. But I deplore this use of insider code-language. I am pretty sure that the Canon really believes that what threatens marriage is any definition of such a union that could extend it to committed and faithful life partners of the same sex. I am pretty sure that the Canon really believes that what threatens the family today is any definition of family that could extend to configurations other than husband-wife-children. About our nation--I don't know what he thinks, but I might venture to guess that he thinks that a concept of us as anything other than a Christian Nation, a Light Set upon a Hill, would threaten a true understanding of American Nationhood.

I am excited about the possibility of the Church showing the world a Different Way to love one another in our marriages and families, and in how we live as citizens of the United States while owing a higher allegiance to the Reign of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.
What if we turned away from the values of a Consumer Culture?
What if we were to strive for a balance between work and family that allows time for conversation, laughter, the sharing of dreams for the future, and stories of our past--regardless of whether there are two mommies, two daddies, or a mommy and a daddy in the family?
What if we were to turn off the TV, to refuse to let advertisers dictate to us what kinds of bodies are attractive, to remember, as the Beatles famously said, that "money can't buy love"?
What if we elect and support government officials that don't assume that the American Way is the only way, and that our nation's self-interest is not the final arbiter of what is right and good in the world, that the United States must have an endless and easy supply of consumer goods and oil at all costs?

So....I'm starting to develop a hypothesis about preaching. Most of us who preach, even those of us who are in traditions that preach from a lectionary, find in the texts confirmation of the things we already believe. I walked in too late to notice whether the Cathedral used the Revised Common Lectionary reading from Acts this morning or the Book of Common Prayer Lectionary. The RCL reading is a passage about Peter's encounter with Cornelius, the Gentile. If ever there was a passage that shows a person's beliefs blown wide open and re-oriented by an encounter with God, it is this story of Peter and Cornelius. This encounter radically changed how Peter read and interpreted his Bible. A whole category of people: Gentiles, who had once seemed to be beyond his concern, beyond God's love and care, designated ritually "unclean"--now were on the same side of the clean/unclean divide that had loomed so large in his religious landscape.

When I read these passages, I see how God calls us as Christians, by virtue of his radically different kind of love, to function as agents of transformation. I would prayerfully consider whether we may be called to lead the way in recognizing that the blessings of marriage and family might now be extended in Christ's name to couples without regard for the gender of the partners.

But, I confess, I brought these ideas to the lectionary readings, too.

How do we clergy prayerfully prepare to preach in such a way that we are as open to the Spirit of God teaching us new ways to love, leading us to see whole new categories of people whom God calls us to walk with as sisters and brothers? How do we remain open to the possibility that, in addressing our sinfulness and our own darkened minds, God may turn our hearts and minds in a whole new direction? And, having let these texts speak to our hearts, how do we craft a sermon or homily that invites our hearers to meet God by "chewing" on those same texts? How do we do this while humbly leaving open a place for God's Spirit to be at work in our hearers' lives? Every preacher has had the experience of having someone mention at the back of the church that they thought the sermon was just for them, that it blessed and encouraged them--but the sermon that the parishioner heard was not the one the preacher remembers preaching.

Springtime

We are just about to arrive at the Vernal Equinox. Astronomically speaking, spring begins in the next day or so. When I drove to Orlando from Jasper, I was intrigued to see how much further spring had progressed as I headed south. This got me thinking about the years of my childhood when I lived in Wisconsin. The winters were cold and much longer than even the unusually long winter we experienced this year in North Georgia. When the snow finally melted, we would sneak outside in our shorts to ride our bikes. It might only be 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but we were sure summer was coming. There were hints even before the snow melted that spring was on the way. I wrote the poem below, prompted by an image of my father on Sunday afternoon in late winter, writing to his brothers in Saskatchewan. I didn't realize it was about springtime and hope until I'd nearly finished it. My father struggled some with depression, but he was also a man who believed one should always have hope.

On Sunday Afternoons

On Sunday afternoons my father sat
with clipboard on his lap, and fountain pen.
His carbon paper, crinkly-blue from weeks
of use, was interleaved between the sheets
of typing paper, watermarked and smooth.
Each week he wrote his brothers far away
in Canada—with carbon copies for
his sister, in Tacoma, where she lived.
His tie was off, his dress shirt sleeves rolled up
still. (Dad washed dishes, Mom went off to rest,
we sisters dried. Those years we were too small
to reach the shelves that stored our Sunday plates.)
My sister had her crayons, and I a book.
We took them to the rug at Daddy’s feet.

So, from Wisconsin—which was cold enough—
he’d make response to Halvard’s spidery script
reporting days of Thirty Two Below,
that soon the skating rink he’d built us girls
beside the driveway, banking up the snow
and flooding it a little more each night,
would be a Lost Cause. And the crocuses
were poking up their heads; and robins, too,
were flying south in flocks—he’d counted ten
last evening, chirping near the maple tree.
And then he’d add that he was sad to hear
that Aaron’s dad was laid up once again
with flu—and hoped pneumonia wouldn’t lay
him low again, like last year. And, he hoped,
that Phil and Halvard managed to succeed
in fixing that old seed drill one more time.
And, please greet Pastor John. And give his best,
besides, to Ioleen, and let her know
that we all prayed for her, and hoped that soon
the Baby would be born, and all be well.
Aloud, he’d read us what he’d written down.

We marveled that our Dad could write these things
With squiggly lines on paper with his pen.
We sisters knew that then our dad would say,
“Let’s go outside and see if we can make
just one last snowman. Bring a carrot out,
that old, moth-eaten scarf, two mismatched gloves,
and no! You may NOT have my hat. Let’s see
what we can do outside to give your Mom
a rest.” We never thought that she would have
those dripping piles of mittens, snow pants, scarves
and hats to deal with when we came back in
our faces red, our laughing voices shrill.
The sun was going down. Our mother’s nap
was over. Soon the day of rest would yield
to weekday tasks.
--but now we basked in love.

Justice, Mercy, and the task of Church

At a retreat for Episcopal clergy from the Diocese of Atlanta last month, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the disconnect between what the Church is and what many parishioners, accustomed to a consumer model, expect.


T. S. Eliot once was commissioned to write a play called "The Rock." It was to be performed, I believe, to raise money for a church in London. He suppressed the publication of the entire piece, but the Choruses from "The Rock" appear in The Complete Poems and Plays. There is a lot of polemic about the movement of the church out into the suburbs, where the comfortable bourgeoisie were congregating, at the cost of abandoning some inner city parishes that were doing important work. These choruses were written in the 1930's, but they speak to our condition in the 21st century, as well. While consumerism and a sort of pernicious cynicism are more developed in our own time, Eliot saw and commented on the beginning of this trend. He decried the increasing irrelevancy of the Church, both in the city, largely empty on Sundays; and in the suburbs, where people, exhausted by long commutes and long working hours, had no energy for or interest in attending Sunday worship. I quote only two little segments from this long poem.


The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.


And later...


A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

...Why should men love the Church? why should they love her laws?
She tells the of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.


The Church, says Eliot, "is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft." Robert Frost said something similar at the very end of his life, in a letter he dictated just before he died: "How can we be just in a world that needs mercy and merciful in a world that needs justice." (Quoted in Harold Bloom's introductory essay to Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Robert Frost 2003. Bloom is explicit that this apparent question was dictated as a statement. Hmmm....)

This brings me to the Collect in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer for the Fifth Sunday in Lent:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: "Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The task of the Church is to turn us from "decent godless people" into people who "love what [God] commands, and desire what [God] promises." That transformation happens as we journey by way of the Cross.

Bejeweled

Bejeweled


When my heart gets too full of joy
and the words long to spill out
in torrents of love and delight…
when my heart gets too full of longing
for the fire of the Spirit…
when my heart breaks in prayer
for us poor banished children of Eve,
here’s how the Devil, in my 21st century world,
conspires against me:
He makes it easy to while away my time
--God’s time given to me as a great gift--
playing, instead, a banal game on my computer,
specifically, Bejeweled Blitz.
Its “jewels” cascade in gaudy,
even ugly, plops, onto the screen
where I must group them into threes, fours, or fives
where I must match green ersatz emeralds, tawdry brown topaz, or gaudy yellow coins.

If I am cooperating especially well
with the Powers of Darkness,
the sound will be on,
and an imperious stentorian voice
will call out “One Minute!”
before metallic, ringing sound effects
accompany the rain of bright plastic forms,
and, as I match them, they disappear, explode,
or coalesce into burning jewels or mysterious pearlescent boxes;
and the Voice utters ridiculously encouraging commentary:
“Excellent!” “Awesome!”
Thirty or so minutes later, it dawns on me that

I have been bejeweled.
Thirty minutes, in which to live in gratitude,
in which to see the beauty of a topaz-winged flying bird,
in which to feel the gentle breeze in a sapphire sky,
in which to write a note to a friend whose love and loyalty are worth more than gold,
in which to make loving order in my home…

Gone.
Wasted.
Score two hundred thirty three thousand for that wily Satan.

Heschel, Prayer, and Home

I'm writing from Wayne's apartment in Orlando. I got here last night to surprise him for his birthday. He got here in December, and it is a perfect environment for him to create beautiful and functional software. He can walk to the grocery store, the bank, the cathedral where he sings tenor in the choir, the public library... He can get out and take a brisk walk around Lake Eola if he finds that his mind is getting sleepy or distracted. He can drive to the University of Central Florida for research that he can't do online.

Paul is living here with him, attending the Motorcycle Mechanics' Institute and working part time at a sub shop for pocket and gas money.

This is my fourth visit. It's still "visit," though I may well be living here soon. Last fall I hit the perfect storm in my parish. Gender, politics, the anxieties of our region's financial climate, leadership style--all conspired to make it possible for a vocal and influential minority in my parish to force me out of my role as rector. My last Sunday was January 24th. My diocesan bishop was very supportive during the crisis, and I believe he will continue to be helpful to the parish as they look at some of the systemic issues that led to this outcome.

The county where my former parish is located is quite small and rural. Consequently, the set of my friends and the set of my parishioners is very nearly overlapping. The Episcopal Church wisely expects former rectors to stay out of the business of their former parishes, giving time for parish leadership and new clergy to establish their own leadership and authority without interference. This means that, at the moment, encounters with parishioners are more than a little bit awkward for me (and probably for them). It is time for me to get out of Dodge.

So I have been cleaning, organizing, and sorting things in my Jasper house. Every day I was making trips to the storage unit, to the dump (we don't have garbage service in Jasper), and to the Thrift Store. The painter is coming Monday. We will need to re-carpet the upstairs, do some rudimentary landscape spiffing up, "stage" the house, and get it on the market.

Jasper is not really my home any more. Orlando is not quite my home, either. The last hymn in the Lutheran Hymnal that we used in 3rd and 4th grade at Zion Lutheran School in Hinsdale, Illinois was not a German hymn. It was an English hymn by Arthur Sullivan: "I'm but a stranger here; Heaven is my home. Earth is a desert drear; Heaven is my home. Danger and sorrow stand round me on every hand. Heaven is my Fatherland, Heaven is my home."

So this morning, reading at random in one of the books I gave Wayne for his birthday, a collection of essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel, I read:

Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. all things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home. Weary, sobbing, the soul, after roaming through a world festered with aimlessness, falsehoods, and absurdidies, seeks a moment in which to gather up its scattered life, in which to divest itself of enforced pretensions and camouflage, in which to simplify complexities, in which to call forhelp without being a coward. Such a home is prayer. Continuity, permanence, intimacy, authenticity, earnestness are its attrivutes. for the soul, home is where prayer is.

...Everybody must build his own home; everybody must guard the independence and the privacy of his prayers. It is the source of security for the integrity of conscience, for whatever inkling we attain of eternity. At home I have a Father who judges and cares, who has regard for me, and, when I fail and go astray, misses me. i will never give up my home.
What is a soul without prayer? A soul runaway or a soul evicted from its own home. To those who have abandoned their home: The road ma be hard and dark and far, yet do not be afraid to steer back. If you prize grace and eternal meaning, you will discover them upon arrival. (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,, pp. 258-9)

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.