July 21, 2024 - The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Well, good morning, Epiphany. As you might have noticed in our bulletin today, the kids are now invited to join Miss Sheri out this door for a lesson and a snack, no pressure, but if you’d like to go now you can... We also have a new ambo, or pulpit, or lectern, or “stand” here... and I say “new,” but it’s only new to me... I brought it up from the church basement yesterday and Jim Stark helped me clean it up a bit. It’s not bad, I think? I hope it answers some of the sound problems we’ve had... I hope you can hear me... and it’s certainly taller. Maybe it brings more gravitas to the readings and the sermon? I don’t know. Just like our new children’s programming and the new seating arrangement at brunch and the announcements insert in your bulletin today, this is a fun new experiment... Lots of experimenting this summer. We’ll see how it goes.
In that spirit of experimentation, I want to start my sermon today with another experiment, one that will be pretty familiar actually to some of you... and one that I promise will make others of you deeply uncomfortable. Go with me on this...
I want to see how we all do with silence. (30 seconds of silence. Good luck.)
Alright, that was awkward. Awful for some of you? I did have 30 seconds set on a timer in my head, two rounds of the Lord's Prayer, so I knew where we were going. But I’d wager that for some of you that was just a terrible experience. I’m curious what came to mind for all of you in that time, other than just thinking I had lost my mind. For those of you who are experienced in Centering Prayer or Meditation, you might be more used to that than the rest of us... that group sits for nearly 30 minutes of silence, twice each week, here in the chancel behind me.
But the majority of us have forgotten how to really slow down, how to be present in our bodies, how to rest... especially when it is not planned. When we plan our silence, at least, we have some control over it. At that point, it’s just another thing structured into our busy lives... we know when it will begin and when it will end, and then we can move on to the other important things we have scheduled. But for those of us with smartphones, with AirPods or earbuds in our ears, those of us with young children, or even with radios in our cars... silence is often hard to come by.
I’ve been fascinated this week by a TED Talk from 2017. It was titled, “How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas,” and it was delivered by Manoush Zomorodi, a journalist turned full-time mother who I think is an NPR anchor now. Ms. Zomorodi tells a story of having her first child the same month that the first iPhone came out, and instead of receiving endless notifications from a device that lived in her pocket she received “constant notifications from a miserable colicky baby who would only sleep in a moving stroller.” As a journalist in the age of the internet, she was always thinking about her next story, even with her baby in tow... she said that once her baby grew up a bit, she was “on the playground and on Twitter at the same time,” which is something I can certainly relate to, filling the cracks in her day with headlines and text messages and photos. For her, eventually, that led to the realization that she was never bored anymore. She never experienced silence of any kind. She had rid herself of boredom entirely.
For some here today, that over-stimulation might be familiar, smartphones are even more common now than they were just a few years ago... but even if it’s not familiar, the point that she gets to in her TED Talk was this: creativity, imagination, deeper thinking... they all result from boredom, from silence, from taking time not being engaged.
You might now be wondering after some excruciating silence and this story about a TED Talk how that relates to our Gospel passage today or to the good news of Jesus that you come to church to hear. Well, peace and rest were themes in both our Old Testament and Epistle readings today, and they show up in the Gospel too.
This story in Mark 6 is about a Jesus who had begun his formal, earthly ministry just two Sundays ago in our lectionary... and it sounds like it’s going really well. Jesus sent out the twelve at the beginning of Mark 6, two by two like animals on the ark, and gave them specific instructions: take nothing but a staff and sandals and only one tunic; no bread, no bag, no money, no extra clothes. He gave them authority over unclean spirits, and they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. The twelve went out, and they did their job, and they did it well.
Our reading this week then starts with them returning to Jesus, telling him all they had done and taught, and Jesus, who had told them to get to work in the first place... he pulls what might be a bit of a surprise on them... instead of sending them back out to do more miraculous signs and wonders, Jesus takes care of them and says: “Come away to a deserted place and rest a while.” “Come away to a deserted place and rest a while.”
They take him up on the offer, of course, getting on a boat to go to the opposite shore... but their fame had grown too big... they had a bit of a first-century celebrity moment. People in need outraced the boat on foot to that “deserted place,” and when they arrived, a great crowd was already there, waiting for them to continue their work. Now, Jesus, being the very son of God himself, had compassion on them and continued doing what he was sent to do, teaching and healing without resting. But the apostles aren’t mentioned in the second half of the gospel reading today... they did not put their heads down and rally and drink some coffee and then continue working harder because the need was so great. We are left to assume that they actually rested.
Next week, we’ll read the story of the feeding of the five thousand, where Jesus continues to work miracles even when the disciples try to slow him down, to encourage him to rest. But this week, I just kept coming back to those first verses. “Come away... and rest a while.” Why? Didn’t Jesus know they could be doing more good work?
William Barclay, a popular 20th-century Scottish theologian, wrote that this passage of scripture best helps us understand the rhythm of the Christian life, even today. Christians, he writes, should be “continuously going into the presence of God from the presence of men and women and coming out into the presence of men and women from the presence of God.” This dynamic is like that of work and rest; we cannot work without ceasing or we will work ourselves to death, we need to rest to then continue to work.
If we translate that metaphor to the Christian life, we need alone time, quiet time with God... so that we can have time with others that is inspired by God’s spirit, so that we can do the work that God would have us do. We need to rest, and we need to find real rest in God.
American/Western culture, as you might know, is not a fan of real rest. Hustle culture has inspired many in my generation to look for ways to monetize even our hobbies, framing everything through a lens of success, accumulation, progress, and ambition. Others might hear voices that say efficiency is always the goal: we should maximize our time and we should always be productive, that’s the point of life. Being busy is now a badge of honor.
I will admit that much of Christian culture in the West has fully bought into those lies; hook, line, and sinker, and often without realizing it... at a deeper level, I think there are very few American Christians who truly believe, deep down, that they do not earn their salvation through their own good works or good behavior, that the gift freely given by Jesus is actually that, a gift... and we need simply accept it.
You might now be thinking, well sure, that sounds fine and good... but there is always something more we could be doing! Always someone we could be helping! Well, of course there is. But I am confident the apostles in the Gospel reading today had more they could have done too! And some of them, probably Peter at the least if you know his story, likely wanted to push back against Jesus, knowing there was more need out there. Instead, Jesus recognizes that they are doing really good work... and that they also need to take time to rest.
They needed time to be bored, to not be overstimulated, to not be fully scheduled, to not be fully engaged, to let their minds be free to wander, to fall asleep if they needed to, to look around at nature’s beauty, to sit in silence. They needed time to be with their God. They needed that relationship with the creator of the universe (who also rested by the way) to be strong and real, for so many reasons.
In the twenty-first century then, just as in the first, we all desperately need that time of rest as well. I pray that you can find time this week in this beautiful part of the country to experiment with resting in God, not trying to somehow earn your salvation, not being distracted by your phones or your to-do lists, but truly resting, knowing that Jesus wants us to... and that he will just keep on loving, you and others, while you rest in him. Amen.
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