22 July 2012

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
22 July 2012


For the past several weeks in worship, our texts have been guiding us as we’ve been focusing on Biblical Giving and Biblical Living ... in other words, discipleship, hearing Jesus’ call to come and follow him, through the smooth times as well as those times of chaos.
We’ve also been seeing how our year-long focus on Baptism ... and this season’s Word, “flowing streams of living water,” ... can lead and guide us along the way.
For it’s our baptism ... not what we do, but what God does for us, that makes us members of the Church, disciples of Jesus, pilgrims who are seeking and finding along the way of Biblical Giving and Biblical Living ... let’s once again turn to our Catechetical Word, this morning on page 11, and recite it as written:

A Word from Luther’s Small Catechism on Holy Baptism:
What then is the significance of a baptism with water?
Baptism means that we hear the call daily to repent to God and our neighbor –
to confess the bad things we think and say and do. And daily through that repentance, God promises to forgive us, so that we may live new lives, for the sake of the world and each other.

This week’s Gospel, takes the pieces of Mark’s Word immediately preceding and following the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 (next week, we enter into John’s gospel’s series on the “Bread of Life” texts, so we’ll get that feeding story from John’s gospel next Sunday, in a Word brought by our bishop).
Without the “bread” in the middle, this may seem like just another week’s focus on Jesus’ healing, Jesus working, Jesus and the disciples being pressed by the crowds.
Ah, but then we’d be missing the whole point of this text, and the Word it brings to us about our discipleship walk with Jesus.
Namely ... the Word Jesus has for his disciples in the first few verses:

The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.
(Jesus) said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’

We take up here where we left off two weeks ago ... before last week’s chaos-laden interlude-word on the demise of John the Baptist ... here, now, the disciples have returned after Jesus’ sending them out two weeks ago, that sending out, as you may recall, which was a lesson for them (and us)in how Jesus teaches discipleship:

• I do, you watch;
• I do, you help;
• You do, I help;
• You do, I watch.

Right here at the beginning, this week, Jesus listens as the disciples tell him all about what it had been like, preaching, teaching, healing ... acting, Biblically living, in Jesus’ name.
And then it sounds like, he asks them to go away on vacation with him. Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.
Certainly we can understand taking a rest after a hard time of working. That’s what that word vacation literally means ... after days and weeks of busy-ness, we vacate, we empty, we want time for nothing, nothing at all.
Those Corona Beer ads on television illustrate this point perfectly ... when the commercial starts, someone or someones are busy busy busy ... but then magically, they’re transported away, to a scene full of ... nothing. Two chairs, on a tropical beach, people’s suntanned backs, knocking together a couple of Coronas. The ultimate vacation ... beer, and nothing.
But is that really what Jesus is inviting the disciples to do here? Come away with him, after they’ve been hard at work, no, to come away with him to just sit around and do nothing?
Let’s take a look at that word rest. Literally, its meaning is less like the Corona ad, but more like another ... Sabbath.
Ah, Sabbath. An much-misunderstood word in our Christian vocabulary.
Most of the time we hear “Sabbath,” we think of old times, Sabbath meaning Sunday, a day when the stores weren’t open and all you did was go to church and have a nice chicken and dumplings dinner. Quaint old days which are long gone now, because we need to shop and run errands and play sports and do all those other things on Sunday that we can’t do the rest of the week because we’re so, so busy busy busy with everything.
But that’s not what Sabbath means for Biblical Givers, Biblical Livers.
Neither does it mean the overly-legalistic view which Jesus spoke and acted against in the Gospels ... that rigid view held by the religious leaders of his day, Sabbath day being a day when absolutely nothing would be done or else it was against the Law ... God’s Law ... no healings, no miracles, nothing at all could Jesus “legally” do.
So what does Sabbath mean?
We get that word Sabbath from the Third Commandment, Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Martin Luther’s explanation fills out the explanation of holy a little more for us:

• We are to fear and love God, so that we do not despise preaching or God’s word, but instead keep that word holy and gladly hear and learn it.

Sabbath, then, isn’t vacation. It’s time, given by God, for re-freshment, re-energizing, re-connecting with God and others.
A professor of mine at Luther Seminary succinctly sums up this third commandment in light of the first two:

God made us for work and worship. And God also gives us a day off! Imagine that!
But as part of that day off, God wants to have a Word with us ... listen and learn.

Sabbath isn’t the end of anything ... the end of work, the end of a project, like the old song goes, “everybody’s working for the weekend.”
No, Sabbath ... the rest of God ... the rest into which Jesus invites his disciples in this text ... and, us as well, his disciples today, walking wet in his flowing streams of living water, living into his Biblical Giving and Biblical Living ... that Sabbath, that rest ... it is the starting place for our work.
Disciples, followers of Jesus, Biblical Givers and Biblical Livers ... they, we, rather than resting from our work, we work from our rest. Rest ... Sabbath ... comes first ... is the priority ... the place into which Jesus invites us first on our discipleship journey.
And yes, of course, there will be plenty of work to do along the way. There always, always is. Note how in the remaining verses of our Gospel reading, Jesus and the disciples barely get ashore, when they are met with all those people, with all their needs.
This kind of rest is the antidote for “burnout.” When we start with rest, real Sabbath rest, time spent with God in meditation, thought, worship ... time spent with others in community and conversation ... we’ll get to hear God’s voice, through others, helping us discover our gifts for serving. We will be encouraged, strengthened, given space and time to explore in the flowing streams of living water, living out our baptismal calling to service, doing what we’re gifted in rather than just because “someone needs to do it.”
And another word about that ... whole faith communities together can and do change because working from rest teaches us that there are seasons to this life of serving, Biblical Giving and Biblical Living. Here’s an example. Several years ago some of the leaders of Nativity wanted to get our congregation to participate in the ARISE program of feeding and serving homeless men in the Renton area. But we needed a champion or champions for the project ... and at that time there wasn’t anyone who stepped forward. So we decided that this must mean that it wasn’t Nativity’s time to serve in the ARISE program yet. And we waited. We waited and prayed until someone ... someones ... did come forward to help lead us into this way of serving here through food and fellowship with the homeless men of Renton.
Working from our rest allows us to do this ... to see our inability to participate ‘right now’ ... not as a “failure,” but instead, as an opportunity for us all to grow, in prayer, in conversation with each other, exploring our gifts and desires and different ways of how we feel called to serve.
And so that’s what this text calls us to, this week, as we conclude this month-long exploration of what it means to be Biblical Givers, Biblical Livers ... it all begins in our baptism, what Jesus does for us, that calls and gathers and feeds and strengthens and sends us forth, to give, to live, to serve in his name in the world.
And then ... we work from our rest. Sabbath comes first, time for God, time with God, prayer, worship, communion and community, from which we’re sent, refreshed, renewed for service, enlivened for Biblical Giving and Biblical Living, the discipleship walk into which we are called.
In Jesus’ name.
Amen.