Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
“Parks and Re-Creation”
July 22, 2018
Twenty-four hours after our last Sunday worship service together back in mid-May, the lapping waves and smell of the sea called and I answered. Upon arriving at the Marie Joseph Spiritual Center on the Maine coast to begin my two month sabbatical, I was immediately struck once again by vastness. To walk on a beach and view nothing but water and sky for as far as the eye can see is to begin to release for a time all that I was stepping away from for two months. Sister Claire as spiritual director there helped me let go of “out there” and open myself up to the God that surrounds and upholds and works from within and without by encouraging me to use particular scripture passages as a way to enter into my time apart. I sat with Psalm 139 and felt the comfort of being known by God. I was pulled in by the call and response of the blind Bartimaeus and healing Jesus. I went back and forth between busy Martha and adoring Mary when Jesus came to visit. A spectacular rainbow a little before sunset on the second night of my stay there seemed a telling sign of the beauty that was to come in big and small ways over the following weeks. I also came to realize once again how interconnected we all are when I sat down for dinner the second night there and found out that the woman across from me who was staying at the center with a group of amateur artists from Massachusetts had lived here in Arlington in the cottage behind the Hull House during her first year of marriage back in 1950 and she had been a volunteer at the library back then and distinctly remembers shaking Rockwell Kent’s hand.
If anyone ever needed some time to rest it would have been the disciples and Jesus at this point in their lives. John the Baptist had just been beheaded and buried and the disciples have carried this sad news to Jesus. Their ministry with Jesus has made them so much in demand that they are not even able to eat quietly and so they take their rest in preparation for the work they have ahead of them – feeding and healing and teaching.
Rest is viewed in scripture as restorative for the body and the mind and as necessary as air to breathe and water to drink. Rest is built in as the ultimate part of the creation story and is reinforced in the form of the Sabbath day apart, important for both humans, even servants, as well as animals in Exodus (23:12) so that they “may be refreshed.”
To step off the familiarly busy routine of work for a prolonged rest took a bit of intentional disconnecting for me and along the way I was reminded that there was an intricately designed and yet simply beautiful world to see and listen to and experience fully without always thinking about the next sermon to compose or piece of writing to finish or email to respond to or call or visit to make or meeting to attend. To be in the moment – that is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of rest. Rest is freedom. We know how tempting it can be to want to hit the snooze button some mornings so as to delay for 5 minutes more the pull of the world and the work of the day that beckons us. Even those in bondage in Egypt needed rest to keep their eyes on the prize of freedom. As one writer put it, “Rest is a form of freedom – from work, from human striving and acquisitiveness, from worldly preoccupations.” (Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, 711-12)
Although I came back with literally hundreds of photos of my time away, I have none of me sleeping. Instead what I have are beautiful images of those places and people who refreshed my soul. For two and a half weeks my husband Roger and I got caught up in the beauty of the western part of our nation. We breathed in the crisp air, encountered a lot of snow on a white knuckle ride through the high peaks even in spite of it being late May and found ourselves in awe at the splendor of Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, experiencing the words of the great American naturalist and author Enos Mills who said a century ago, “Within National Parks is room – glorious room – room in which to find ourselves, in which to think and hope, to dream and plan, to rest and resolve.”
Our travels took us to places where towns of any size – and they always put the population of them in Wyoming and Montana on signs that proclaimed proudly that this was the home to 127 or 304 or 73 souls, often with only a post office and convenience store/gas station as the extent of what one might call commerce. Our travels took us through different Native American reservations and miles of National Forests that took our breath away. And one morning we stopped for breakfast in Paradise – Paradise, Montana that is and as we left that small town we came to Clark’s Fork. In a diner in tiny Sprague, Washington we overheard the man at the table next to us tell his companion, over a stack of pancakes that, “You’re heading into God’s country” and we smiled in silent agreement.
Jesus knows how vital true rest is in order to then meet the needs of those around him with compassion. The world filled with violence and desperation and divisiveness is a world in great need of the compassion that Jesus offers. I may have been able to, each day, find ways to disconnect, but I continued to be a part of our troubled world, even when overlooking the majestic Pacific Ocean from the stunning lookout position at Yaquina Head Lighthouse in Oregon while also taking in the close-up view immediately below us of scores of seals and their pups through a telescope offered by a couple who were volunteering at this national park, one of whom was born and raised down Route 7 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We still learned, through a slightly different lens than we would hear in Vermont, of the troubling news at our southern border and the fates of separated families. We were still privy to eroding national relationships with our neighbors and allies and tenuous talks with old enemies.
Somehow being at rest – sometimes at home in a recliner reading one of many books or halfway around the world in beautiful Croatia – it felt that there was even more time to consider the place of compassion to which Jesus is calling us. I wish I was returning to you having discovered the magic bullet to heal our broken world but, alas, I have not. What became clear, though, as I visited some other churches and took time to observe people more deeply in cities and small towns is that compassion comes in many forms.
The Greek word for compassion has within it the root word for intestines. That means that compassion comes from the gut. When we learn of someone’s suffering and pain, compassion is what makes us hurt also. In The Message version of Mark that I just read, Eugene Peterson proclaims that Jesus’ heart broke when he saw their need. In a nation and world where the ugly vitriol between neighbors and co-workers and within families is slicing us wide open, now is not the time to grow weary. Rest for the work of binding up wounds and bringing a measure of relief to the hurting is critical. It is tempting to want to put our hearts in hermetically sealed boxes to save them for when the yelling and finger pointing stop but our compassion, in small daily acts, is needed right now as a balm. The hungry, homeless and hurting in our midst are here. Compassion is the work of the church – for the child going without, for the parent who only wants to provide for their family, for the family who is at their wits end over the opioid addiction of their loved one, for the woman trying to get away from her batterer, for the young person lost in the corrections system, the senior who faces the prospect of a nursing home alone and so many others. We must seek out new ways to, offer compassion to the vulnerable, bearing in mind our rapidly changing world as well as the changing face and image of church.
All this work, though, requires self-care. Jesus modeled that with his call to rest and the opportunities he himself took to find a quiet space in the midst of so much need. As one fellow pastor described it, “Our productivity flows out of our rest. We don’t rest from work; we work from our rest.” (Jayson D. Bradley on Twitter, 7/21/18) The balance of compassion and rest is to be how we will best serve God, in Jesus’ name. Amen and amen.