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.
