July 18, 2021
/The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
THE REV. CANON JOANN SAYLORS
Reading today’s Gospel lesson – really, reading all of Mark’s Gospel - makes me think, “You know, Jesus is kind of a workaholic.”
Up to this point he’s been preaching, teaching, healing, driving out demons, sending out the disciples - doing everything at high speed, because everything he does he does “immediately.” By this point in his ministry, he’s got to be tired. And ditto for the disciples. They’ve been on crazy out of town trips, staying with people they barely know – that’s always exhausting – and teaching, healing, and casting out demons themselves.
Which is what makes one verse in our text so stand out for me: "And he said to them, 'Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.'" Rest. A break from all the bustle and activity. Rest. A chance to renew, to stop, to slow. Rest. An end of work, if only for a little while. Rest. An opportunity to stop doing that you may simply be. Rest. What a beautiful word!
So much is packed into Jesus' simple invitation and I have been a little surprised at my own very strong reaction to it. Maybe it’s because I’m about to start several weeks of time off. Maybe it’s that I have filled my life – for years, I suspect, but especially lately – with so much activity, so much work, so many obligations that the very idea of rest is enough to grab and take hold. Don't get me wrong: this isn't a complaint. I love my life and would rather be busy than not. Anyone who knows me much at all would back me up on that. But upon reflection – in the time stuck in traffic on 610 – it struck me. Somewhere in all the moving and learning and doing and traveling and visiting and all the other things that make up my blessedly hectic life, I may have forgotten how to rest. And I suspect that I'm not alone. Maybe you know someone like that too. Maybe you are someone like that. And I don’t even have children with schedules to manage. But I’ve seen my sister’s life. She’s a busy physician, and she juggles a lot of hours of work with all the support for activities that ambitious high school and now new college students have to juggle. The family goes from super early to crazy late. Trying to find one week to travel together in the summer is an ordeal in itself. So much for that family to do! And all families. They don’t have the time, in other words, to rest.
We're all familiar with commandment #4: keep the Sabbath holy. But lots of us interpret that as one in a list of nagging “do not’s” or with the assumption that keeping Sabbath just means coming to church. Professor Rolf Jacobson points out that this commandment would have been unbelievably good news when it was given. Think how a teaching like that would have sounded to people who were recently slaves, whose time was never their own, and who never, ever had a guaranteed period of rest. "Wait a minute," Jacobson imagines them saying, upon hearing the 10 Commandments read, "You mean we get to rest? We even have to rest?! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
I wonder why we don’t think of it that way. After all, more and more of us find ourselves trapped in a place a little bit like where the ancient Hebrews toiled. But there’s one important difference. Our bondage is self-constructed and self-imposed, which makes it a lot harder to notice, much less change. We are bound to ideas about success, which means we don’t put limits on our work. We are bound to ideas about our children having every opportunity possible, and so we schedule them into frantic lives and wonder why they have a hard time focusing. We are bound to the belief that what will help our churches grow is more ministry, more programs, more work.
But “he said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.’”
This is not just an invitation to take an afternoon off or go on vacation -- though those may be important elements -- this is an invitation to loosen our shackles and climb out of the cages we've constructed from a culturally-fed belief that more is the ticket to success of whatever kind and that work is the ticket to more. This is an invitation to rest - in God.
The lectionary puts together two pieces of Mark’s Gospel but takes out what is in between them: the feeding of the 5,000. We’ll pick it up next week from John’s Gospel instead. And what is the feeding of the 5,000 about but God’s abundance? About God taking the little bits each of us brings and to create great things? In God the not-enough becomes the more-than-enough. We have all we need and then some. And that's the key thing about Sabbath rest, I think --it invites a chance to step back and stand apart from all the things that usually drive and consume us that we might see this abundance. We have space and time to detect God's presence and providence and blessing, to experience a sense of contentment, and to give thanks.
But stepping back like that is hard to do. No wonder the Psalmist says quite honestly in Psalm 23 that the Lord didn't simply invite rest but rather confesses that the Lord "makes me lie down in green pastures." We are a people that desperately need rest yet resist it. And so the Lord has to command it.
“He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.’”
Ok, God says so. Rest. But then, if you’re like me, you hear that command, you agree with it in theory, but you have a hard time actually following it. So I look for loopholes. I say things like, ok, that’s all good, but that’s not what Jesus is modeling in our passage today. The disciples get back and they don’t even have a minute to eat, because of the crowds coming to see Jesus. Sure, Jesus invites the disciples to rest, and they retreat into the wilderness, but the crowd gets wind of it and actually beats them there. So Jesus skips the rest period and starts teaching. And the missing part of the text, as I said, is Jesus feeding 5,000 people. That may well be all about God’s abundance, but where’s the rest in it?
Is God sending a mixed message? Does Jesus really get to say one thing and do another? Good questions, if I do say so myself. And here’s how I think Mark’s Gospel answers them. Jesus does believe in rest and in Sabbath. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and he’s not interested in abolishing it. We have stories of Jesus being in the synagogue on the Sabbath. We also have stories of Jesus' struggles with religious leaders over how the Sabbath is to be observed. He seems to focus more on faithful behavior than on the exactly the right way to do Sabbath. Earlier in Mark's Gospel, Jesus teaches that Sabbath is a gift. It is a day to be freed from our labors to enjoy the creation and the Creator. He says, "The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath." The invitation of Jesus to his disciples to retire to a place where they can rest, take a deep breath, bond with one another and share in telling their stories is important for their well-being.
Jesus cares about rest. But even more than that, Jesus believes in caring for others. He is, after all, the shepherd to the flock, including the lost sheep. The commandments are a way God relates to us and cares for us, not an end in themselves.
So Jesus does take time to rest and to pray, he just doesn't do it when others are hungry or in need of healing.
After the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus sends his disciples ahead of him while he goes up on the mountain alone to pray. And this is a rhythm we see throughout his ministry, back and forth between serving and Sabbath. Time to care for others is followed by time to rest and hear God. That rhythm gets interrupted and those things get mixed together when the sheep most need their shepherd, but it’s still the underlying pattern of Jesus’ life, as it is meant to be the pattern for ours.
We don’t choose between work and rest, we balance them. Each is important in its appointed time. Being intentional about rest is being intentional about ministry. Ministry is just…work, when it hasn't been informed by the community's taking time to be still and know God. How can we have the strength do those many frankly challenging things God calls us to do and how can we discern how to do them faithfully if we don't pause to rest in God?
We should and will go forth from here to serve.
Let's just make sure that we heed Jesus' invitation from time to time too. “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.” Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. AMEN.