Rest and Relaxation

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

I’ve just come back from a week with my wife’s family at Cape Hatteras, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  My father-in-law first drove down there with Meg and her sister Cathy forty-three years ago this summer, and it has been his summer vacation destination ever since.  I myself have gone twelve or thirteen times, including every summer but one since our daughter was born, so the place has become deeply familiar, and infused with happy memories.  The rhythm of our days there is a simple one.  By family custom, television and radio are not allowed, and our days revolve around eating, sleeping, reading, games, and conversation, and being on the beach or in the waves.  It is a place where I let go of responsibilities, where the deadlines and demands of being a parish priest and householder and citizen drift away and I can rest.

I am grateful to have had this opportunity once again, and I thank everyone who helped hold down the fort here at St. John’s while I was away.  I know that not everyone is as fortunate as I am, and there may be some of you here today whose financial strictures or work or family responsibilities make it impossible for you to take a real vacation.  So I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining when I say that for everything that is idyllic about our annual trip to the Outer Banks, it is not all rest and recreation.  There is also a fair amount of stress and strain involved, most of which has to do with getting there and back again.  There are two days of travel on either end, one day each way at crowded airports, and one on crowded highways, days of long lines at the security checkpoint, at the boarding gate and the car rental counter, days of waiting for a turn in the bathroom on airplanes and in gas stations and convenience stores; days of traffic jams on I-95 and the Capitol Beltway, and at the Hampton Roads Bridge and Tunnel.

And in the midst of so many thousands of complete strangers, when you, like every one of them, is thinking only of getting where you want to go as quickly as possible, it’s easy to stop thinking of them as persons just like yourself.  It’s easy to relate to them only as obstacles, as particles of interference that are causing friction and slowing you down and standing in the way of the few precious days of rest and solitude that you so need and deserve.  It’s easy to forget that each of them only wants the same thing you do—to get to a place where they can stop moving and lay down their burdens and rest.

When the book of Second Samuel says that the Lord gave David rest it doesn’t just mean he got a break from work and travel.  It means that he won a lasting victory that brought an end to violence, danger, and insecurity.  That is how a people weary of constant war and oppression think about rest.  We hear how when David had defeated all his enemies, and was settled in his palace and on his throne, he thought of the God who had won all this for him and decided to build him a place of his own.  It’s something any pious person might have done, not unlike those who, 159 years ago a week from Friday, finding themselves safely and prosperously settled here in Petaluma, decided to found St. John’s Episcopal Church.

But then God comes into the story and tells David that his thinking is too small.  David wants to put a punctuation mark on his success with this grand gesture of piety, to say to the world “here is David’s temple, where we worship David’s God.”  But God wants it understood that the rest that he is working for is not for David, but for the whole nation of Israel.  God knows that the politics of nations and the fortunes of kings are built on shifting sands.  So God will keep working, keep building, making a house where his holy name will be established forever.  It will not be an edifice of cedar and stone, but of flesh and blood, the royal house of David, and the sons of David will also be the Sons of God.  Their glory will not be in their personal power and accomplishments, but in their embodiment of God’s covenant promise to the whole people of Israel, the promise of rest.

This is one of the great guiding ideas of the Hebrew Scriptures, and in its essence it is not about David or his offspring.  We don’t even get out of Second Samuel before it becomes clear that they are not going to come close to living up to the ideal.  What it is is an idea about God, about God’s determination not to sit on the shelf in some little sideshow tent called “religion” but rather to stay involved in Israel’s politics.  God promises to keep showing up in the nitty gritty places where human beings work out their differences, and address their shared problems, and shape their institutions, gently, firmly, unwaveringly coaxing, and cajoling, and enticing, all of us together toward rest. 

As time went on, it became harder, not easier, to see how God is working to establish his kingdom in human affairs.   But the idea didn’t fade out, it just got more nuanced.  The prophets revealed that the keynote of God’s politics was not power, but justice and compassion for the poor and suffering.  The Hebrew sages developed the notion of wisdom, the art of bringing one’s own actions and thoughts into accord with God’s ongoing work of creating the world.  And it is this nuanced picture of God’s steadfast love, working through a chosen person to move the whole society, even the whole world, toward its long-awaited rest, that comes suddenly and startlingly to life when people encounter Jesus.       

The stories of the Gospel of Mark show Jesus confronting things about being human we would rather avoid.  And today we have another case of this, illustrated by the fact that when you try to go away on vacation, there’s a whole crowd of other people who go with you.  There is ultimately no peace, no rest for us, apart from the rest of everyone.  Jesus manifests this deep truth when he looks on the crowd and sees that they are like sheep without a shepherd.  His is not a detached observation, much less a calculation of opportunity—it is a realization of divine compassion, compassion that moves Jesus to the very core.

It is compassion that stirs him to act, to do something for these souls who are forgotten by their rulers and have lost their faith in God.   But he doesn’t organize them into an army, or a party, or a cult.  He doesn’t stir them up to violence or promise them power.  What he does do is to teach and to heal.  His teaching, according to Mark, is about the Kingdom of God, and he teaches it in parables.  He shows what the work of God in the world is like by comparing it to daily actions and ordinary things—a sower goes out to sow, a woman mixes leaven into the dough.  And in his healings Jesus doesn’t so much reach out to the sick as welcome them to him.  He goes among them, and they recognize the healing presence of God; they reach out in faith to touch it, even if it is only the fringe of his cloak, and by that faith and that touch they are healed.

As a community that carries on the work of Jesus, we are called to be more than a sanctuary, more than a quiet place apart from the world.  Which is not to say that we should not cultivate an atmosphere of prayerfulness and peace.  But the purpose of this sacred space is to be an arena for the practice of a deeper kind of politics than what usually passes for the word.  It is where we learn from the nitty-gritty of our relationships and the work we do together, to see the traces of God’s wisdom, justice, and compassion, so that we can teach others to see God’s work wherever it may appear.   We come in search of healing from the sickness of our souls, especially the illusions that we are separate from others, or in control of our salvation.  And when we touch the healing we seek, we sense in it a compelling invitation to the rest of the world, a call to live with all people as those with whom God dwells—a call to lead the world to its rest.    

Saving bodies

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

When I wake up in the morning I go to the bathroom, and I wash my face and hands.  I remove the mouth guard that protects my teeth from clenching during the night, and clean it with a special brush and put it away.  I go into the kitchen and fill a glass with water and have a good long drink.  I take a few minutes for my morning prayers, and then I get back to tending to needs of my body.  I heat water to cook oatmeal and for tea.  Then I go into the living room and roll out my yoga mat and stretch and breathe to loosen the stiffness and soreness of the night.  I turn off the oatmeal pot and cover it and go take a shower.  I wash my hair and shave.  I brush my hair and dress.  I eat my breakfast, brush my teeth, grab my wallet, my phone, and my keys, put on my shoes, and then I’m ready. 

I’m ready to go out into the world, to assume my public persona, to go to work, to be the person others know and expect me to be.   But in order to be him, I first have to care for my body.  I say “my body” because that’s the way we conventionally talk, but that makes it sound like this body is a thing that I own, like a hat or a car, as if there is a separate “I” who possesses it, when the truth of my experience is that I am my body.  And it’s also true that even something as undeniably my own as being this particular body is not left to me to negotiate in private; whether I want it to be or not, “my” body is public property.  Other people define and interpret my body. 

They evaluate me, according to cultural norms—by sex, age, height, and weight; by the color and texture of my skin, eyes, and hair; by the tenor of my voice and dexterity of my movements, by the functionality, or lack thereof, of my organs and limbs, and brain.  These are all keys for classifying me as this or that kind of person and for interpreting my behavior.  Am I beautiful or ugly?  Menacing or friendly?  Esteemed or shameful?  Am I normal and able and healthy and well, or am I somehow other, something less than these?  These are questions we don’t always get to answer for ourselves, and the answers that we get from others profoundly shape how we relate to ourselves.  They can turn our bodies into prisons, where, quite apart from any biological necessity, we are sentenced to humiliation, isolation, or even death.

The Gospel of Mark is mostly a series of Jesus’ encounters with aspects of human existence that we would rather not have to deal with.  In many cases these are stories of the suffering of a body, one possessed by a demon or afflicted with disease.  But these bodies don’t simply have a medical condition, because their physical or mental suffering is compounded, is multiplied, by social indifference, by prevailing attitudes of suspicion, disdain or fear.  Public interpretation devalues the suffering of these bodies and gives them scant comfort or remedy. 

Today’s Gospel story is about the healing of this kind of body.  It is really two stories, two healings, with the second sandwiched into the middle of the first, and by putting them together the Gospel writer makes them comment on each other.  In some ways the story about the little girl is the more dramatic—after all, Jesus raises her from the dead, but it the other encounter that is the meat in the sandwich.  The protagonist of this story is a woman whose body has betrayed her with an abnormal, continual menstrual flow.  Needless to say, this has made her unable to conceive and bear children, denying her a woman’s primary source of honor and value in the eyes of her society.

But more than that, the religious laws in the Book of Leviticus say that this bleeding makes her ritually impure—she is excluded from the worship of God in the temple.  Her impurity is considered contagious; you can catch it from contact with her body or her clothing or even a place where she has sat or lain down, and it takes time and special ceremonies to cleanse that impurity away.  She once had been a woman of means, because the story tells how she spent her money on painful and ineffective treatments from doctors until it was all gone.  By the time that she meets Jesus, she has suffered this condition, and the status of pariah that goes along with it, for twelve long and lonely years. 

Which are all the years that the young daughter of the leader of the synagogue has been alive, and the contrast between their stories is instructive.  When the little girl needs help it is her father who goes and falls at the feet of Jesus to plead with him to come.  And this is the way it is supposed to be done.  A woman in the ancient world was supposed to avoid interaction with men she didn’t know.  She kept to the company of women, and to the private sphere of her home, and it was the responsibility of her male relations, her father, brother, uncle, or husband, to  advocate for what she needed in the public realm.  But the woman with the bleeding has no one to plead her case.  So she has to take matters, quite literally, into her own hands. 

The initiative in the story is all hers, it is her faith that if she could just touch Jesus’ cloak, she could be healed.  And she does touch it, and at once she feels in her body that she has been made well.  Power passes from body to body, but it is not the contagion of impurity passing from her body to Jesus’, but a healing charge of spirit that flows from his to hers.  Jesus’ feels it, too, a touch different from all the other hands grasping at him in the crowd.  He stops, demanding to know who it was who touched him in that way.  And though she falls before him trembling with fear, he tells her she is no longer alone, no longer without a patron, that now she has an advocate and protector, for he calls her “Daughter”, and says her faith has made her well.  

The word that means “made well” can also be translated “saved”, and this is a story of what it means to be saved by Jesus.  It’s a salvation that has everything to do with faith, and that shouldn’t surprise us.  I’m sure we’ve all heard enough about being saved by grace through faith to know that’s what Christians are supposed to believe about salvation, even if we’re not sure exactly what it means.  But what might be less obvious or expected is that this is the salvation of bodies.  It is God’s presence in a human body, the body of Jesus, that the woman in the story puts her faith in.  In faith she reaches out to touch that salvation, and it comes with the healing of her body.

But it goes further than that; it is the salvation of her whole person, of a body that is not only inner  and private experience but also public belonging.  Jesus’ salvation replaces the old, oppressive and divisive cultural codes with a new and universal language of identity, so that everyone who has faith in him is a new person in a new society, a daughter or a son in the family of God, a citizen of the Kingdom of God.  This salvation is what St. Paul writes about in the Letter to the Galatians, of baptism into Christ that makes us one--“no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female.” 

This week a scant majority of the United States Supreme Court, added that we are also no longer straight and gay.  Old cultural norms that privilege certain kinds of bodies and denigrate others continue to fall away before the gospel’s universal affirmation of human freedom, responsibility, and love.  This is a vision of the salvation, not only of persons, but of the world.  In the church we have a name for this world, this community in which every body has a unique but equally valuable place.  We call it a body—the Body of Christ.