Coming and Going

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.19.2015;  Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 6:30-34; 53-56

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

We are a wildly mobile society, and when I was a kid, I remember how cool I used to think that was.  America, the land where you never ever have to get out of your car even for a moment!

You’d sit in the back of the car, and pull up to the bank teller, and there’d be this wild contraption with tubes and pneumatics and funky little plastic containers.   “Let me put it in,” you’d say, because there’s nothing more exciting than depositing checks.  Whoosh, it would go, up and away, zooming through pipes, and then...thunk...right down there in front of the teller.  Cool.  Then there’d be paperwork, ooh, paperwork, and you’d watch carefully as they loaded up the tube-pod with receipts...oh, the excitement...and, of course, a handful of lollipops.  Whoosh, thunk, there it was back to you, you still sitting there in the comfort of your car only now with lollipops.

And then, from there, to a magical speaker on the side of a Wendy’s, where a muffled voice would speak in some strange and alien tongue.  “Wrkrm deWerndacnnatkk’r rda?”  And by some miracle, your parents knew that language, and would request fries and burgers and drinks, which were there ready for you when you pulled around.  Amazing.

It felt miraculous, like you’d arrived in the land of the future.  Lollipops through tubes to the comfort of your air-conditioned car!  French fries and burgers, right there!  Wow!  So convenient! We must be right on the cusp of the future.  Or so it felt, when I was a child.

Now that I’m a grown up, I have a slightly more jaded view.  Slightly.

And it’s not because we can do less in our cars.  We can do so much more.  We can watch movies, not just one movie, but everyone watching a different movie on their very own screens.  Cars have their own built in WiFi hotspots, laced into the great global sprawl of the internet, so that you can stream Rhett and Link or play Clash of Clans from right there in the comfort of your captain’s chair.  There are vehicles with built in vacuum cleaners, perfect for sucking up errand french fries and lollipop wrappers, which apparently we need because--even though we have a perfectly good vacuum at home-- we’re driving so much that we may have forgotten where our home is.

We’re on the go, always and without ever slowing down, it seems, rushing from one event to another event to another, a people who’ve come to accept that meals are things that can be inhaled while in the wild scurry between a meeting and football and tae kwon do.  It’s just what we do, and we do it because everyone else does it, so of course it must be the way that we’re supposed to be.

The challenge, in our lives now, is that we have so many ways of doing so much so much faster that we feel compelled to chase after them every moment.  Life can overtake us, even in what should be the syrupy slowness of summer.

It is into this reality, which defines the existence of so many suburban souls these days, that today’s scripture wanders.

It’s a story about eating, it is, only the Revised Common Lectionary, that list of readings that’s used by Christians all around the world, leaves most of the eating out.  This is the story of the feeding of the five thousand, as Mark’s Gospel tells it.  You know, loaves and fishes and all that good stuff, only for some reason, today’s passage just completely deletes that bit.  It also completely deletes the familiar story of Jesus walking on water, as he comes skiing across the sea of Galillee without a tow boat.  Strange, that those are the bits we’d edit out.  It’s like a picture, in which the picture has been removed, and all we have left is a lovely frame.

Why?  Why remove it?

Well, so that we can see what the context was, see some of the rationale underlying the story, and to get a sense of what life was like for that first circle of souls who gathered around Jesus.

The answer to that question:  it was busy.  It was crazy busy.  The disciples have just returned from being sent out to spread the message of the Good News, a message that they somehow managed to convey without any comfort or luxury.  They went out with a staff and sandals and one outfit, and that was it.  And as a result, it got really busy, as more and more people have responded to the message of transformation they preached.  It was the mad rush of the crowd, the chasing after one thing and then another, to the point where the disciples didn’t even have enough time to sit and share a meal together.  “Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”

The answer Jesus had to offer them did not involve McDonalds drivethrough, mostly because I’m reasonably certain that McDonalds didn’t have a drivethrough until at least the year five hundred.  I think.  It’s been a bit since I ate there.

What Jesus says, instead, is this:

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

In Mark’s Gospel, the “deserted place” is described with the Greek word eremon, a word that surfaces repeatedly and with particular meaning.

It is to the eremon, to the “deserted place,” that Jesus goes when he needs to pray, center, and strengthen himself.  In Mark 6:35, we hear that he wakes early in the morning, after a wild and crowded day, and goes off to be alone for a while.  He evidently must have left his smartphone behind, because the disciples have no idea where he is or what he’s up to.  In the stories of Jesus going to prepare himself in the wilderness, the word used in Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel for “wilderness” is the same.  Eremon.  It’s a desolate place, a wilderness, and while we might find that idea a little threatening and dangerous, it is not presented as such in the New Testament.  The eremon is a place of refuge, a place of quiet and stillness, a place where the expectations and demands of normal life are removed.  It is the place where God speaks.

And here in the bustling rush of this city, this place where we are always on the go and always connected and always moving, where family life now requires scheduling software just to keep things on track, this reminder is pointed and deep.

Sure, things should have decelerated here around Washington, dropped down into a pace of existence that reflects the great sopping steambath of a Southern summer.  But thanks to air conditioning that fills our churches and homes and transport pods, it may be summertime, but the living ain’t easy.  We don’t slow down any more, not here, not in this place of wild busyness.  For many families, the summer involves a wild juggling of schedules, as our vans and SUVs fill with wrappers and drink cups from the processed food we barely have time to eat.  to the point where it becomes a topic of conversation, of scheduling one-upsmanship.  

I’ll hear it as I sit in the popped open hatchback of our car, as harried moms circulate from van to van and chitchat during one of the storm delays that have blighted almost all of the swim meets this summer.

“We haven’t sat down for dinner in a week,” one said, part of a little cluster nestled under the hatch of a minivan.  “And I’m scheduled or double-scheduled every night for the next ten days.”  She listed off the events, the various activities and demands, and the other moms nodded, and shared their stories, like athletes showing off scars.

In all of that, in all of our coming and going, I wonder if there is time to listen for meaning and purpose, to attend to anything other than the chasing about of life.

And here, just as he takes time to move into those empty, quiet spaces, Jesus invites us, and his disciples, to do the same.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.