The Episcopal Church of St. John Chrysostom - Delafield, Wisconsin
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – July 22, 2018
V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Ephesians 2:11-22/Mark 6:30-34, 53-56]
“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. Mark 6:31
R & R, rest and relaxation, it was the great goal of American society, especially post-World War II. As a result, we live in an incredible time. The labor-saving technologies we’ve developed have enabled us to work just about anywhere and at any time. Drive or walk down the street and there are people on the telephone, which is more a hand-held personal data device The laptop computer, along with the wireless internet connection keep us in touch with all the people and data we need to keep on working and in social contact. Add to that mix all the in-home devices, ‘smart’ vacuums, appliances, and on and on, that are meant to make life easier. They keep us in touch even when we’d rather be out of touch! So our great fight to move from the heavy work week of an agricultural economy has brought us beyond the forty hour week to the how-many-hours-are-there-in-the-week week!
Work, work, work – even while we’re “up north” or off wherever we may go to vacation, work is right there. What is more, we’ve even gotten to the point that we schedule our leisure time. We set up times for golf, for tennis, to work out, to swim, even to take a walk. Everything has to fit into a schedule and the schedule fits into the ever-looming, always present specter of what we need to accomplish in order to achieve what our society considers success. We’re not laboring in the fields or in the factories like we used to do, now we’re laboring everywhere and just about all the time – R and R seems almost as elusive for us as it did for our ancestors in the fields and the factories.
So Mark’s description of the experience Jesus and the disciples had on that long ago day in Galilee could easily describe many of us gathered here today. Not to mention those who are far too busy to come to church. “They did not have leisure even to eat.” Isn’t it sad that the drive-thru fast-food restaurant, “Grubhub,” “Blue Box,” and all of our labor-saving devices weren’t around in Jesus’ day? Maybe the Gospel would read differently? Maybe they would have ordered up dinner on the internet? Maybe they would have ‘DoorDash’ed for Chinese? And Jesus fed the five thousand – dim sum all around. I don’t think so.
What we’re hearing in the Gospel is the perennial situation of human beings who keep forgetting that God has made them with a spot inside themselves that can only be filled by God. There is a desire in us for a rest, a peace that all of the money success can buy can’t give us. The kind of leisure we’re looking for doesn’t come on a cruise, or doing a trip to a favorite spot, or even sitting by a lake with a good book – as good as all of those things are. In fact, sometimes our search for leisure, for rest, apart from nourishing our spirits is just one more sign of the deep need within us all.
I came across something from Mary Hinkle’s book, Signs of Belonging, which seems to make the point.
Most debilitating for the glorifying and enjoying of God is just the fact that “life happens.” Days fill up with small events, duties, and responsibilities until we have succumbed to the temptation, as Annie Dillard says, “to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.” We just don’t notice anything anymore. I once heard the Lutheran writer and teacher Gerhard Frost comment that he had asked a rancher how sheep get lost. “It’s easy,” the rancher replied. “They just put their heads down and nibble themselves lost.” [Signs of Belonging (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), p. 71]
How many of us are nibbling ourselves lost with all of the good and important and necessary things we have to do each day and each week? It’s easily done, God knows I know that from personal experience, and sometimes we need to be reminded that in the midst of life happening that there is more. There is more to life and more to us and just more, if we’ll only take the time to step back, slow down, and realize it.
One of the reasons I’m grateful for the Lectionary, both the weekly three-year cycle that we tend to use here, and the daily one that informs my personal prayer and meditation, is that it forces me to read and look at Scripture I might otherwise ignore. There is a lot of good material in Mark’s Gospel that I can sink my teeth into and just slip past the text we read today. However, how can any of it honestly make sense unless I’ve heard, and listened deeply, to the invitation Jesus makes to his disciples, “come apart and rest”? That invitation is as surely to me and to you as it was to them. They needed to get away, debrief, and make sense of what was going on as “life happened” around them. They needed to remember anew what was important, what the real priorities are as “life happens” – and so do we.
One of the best books that I know on prayer is by the late Russian bishop Anthony Bloom. Beginning to Pray addresses how we can sort out what is really important in the midst of busy lives. One of the first things Bloom does is to remind us that God is always there for us. We may open ourselves for an hour a week or even an hour a day, but we have to remember that God is there, waiting for all the others. Part of our “coming apart” has to be realizing the presence of God that is always there and beginning to raise our consciousness to experience or be aware of that Divine presence. Part of it is just allowing ourselves to stand in the present and open ourselves to the “now” of God in that moment. When Bloom talks about the intersection of time and eternity in the now he sounds like someone who wrote two hundred years earlier, Jean-Pierre de Caussade,
who described it as the “sacrament of the present moment.”
How do we come to appreciate this? We stop, Bloom says, and allow ourselves to do nothing. We place ourselves in the presence of God, at the intersection of time and eternity, and discover what it means to be in the “now.” What it takes to do this is five minutes of leisure that we can guarantee will not be interrupted – read that we will not allow to be interrupted. Here is the moment, as little as three and a half or five minutes Bloom says, that can allow us to begin to get in touch with who we are and with who God is. We don’t need to do elaborate prayers. Bloom says that we sit down and say to ourselves, “‘I am seated, I am doing nothing, I will do nothing for five minutes,’ and then relax and continually throughout this time (one or two minutes is the most you will be able to endure to begin with) realise, ‘I am here in the presence of God, in my own presence and in the presence of the furniture that is around me, just still, moving nowhere.’” [Beginning to Pray (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), p.85] Once we can come to a still point in the midst of our lives we can open ourselves to see the Divine presence all around us all the rest of the hours of our day, and we need to do that, because life happens and God is there in the midst of it.
If you want proof of that all you have to do is look at the text from Mark. “And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.” They did what Jesus asked. And, to the best of our ability, here we are, aren’t we? I know many people come here of a Sunday morning seeking a “spiritual tune-up,” a little quiet time, something to fill them up again before they go out and back at it again. However, in the process we can fall into another trap which is just as problematic for our living our lives toward God and one another and growing in unity with God. That trap is thinking that this is the only place where I can get the fill-up or thinking that it is only in structured settings, like a retreat or a get-away, that I can get “spiritual.” Moments of prayer are sources of spiritual connection, so are times away, but they’re not the only source.
Look at the next line in the text, “Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” While they were going off the deserted place life happened. People recognized Jesus and the disciples, who had just returned from a preaching mission, and they came looking for them. What did Jesus do? He taught them. Was Jesus breaking his own rule? I don’t think so, but perhaps we are getting a different insight into how we are to approach the balance between sanctification – making our lives holy – and service.
Living it out means that we become instruments of reconciliation, who actively work to heal all antagonisms, divisions, inequality, injustice, and egoism. To “be in Christ,” is to see this and to do something about it, wherever we are. So, we come apart so that we can go back into the midst of life happening all around us and see God at work right in the middle of it. As life happens and all of the busyness crowds in around us we can find the still-point, the calm center, God. When we come to understand this, begin to live in the “now” of God’s presence we will learn that R and R might mean ‘rest and relaxation’ at the outset, but in its fullness it is ‘renewal and reconciliation.’ Regardless of where we are on the R and R meaning chart, we should take some regularly and make the world a different place as a result of it.