7.22.12
Proper 11B
Mark 6:30-34; 53-56
I bet that most of you grew up having meals together as a family. That’s just the way things were. Perhaps you even instilled that value in your children. Come six o’clock (or whatever the time was), it was dinner time, and that meant setting everything else aside and spending time with the family. Maybe that was a time for children to talk about their school day. Maybe it was a time for Mom and Dad to catch up on the day’s events. It was definitely a time to make sure all bodies were well fed. But of course, it was more than that. It was a time to connect together, a time when the soul was fed. Many of you grew up in a time when mealtime was about much more than convenience-- a time when going to McDonalds was a rare treat.
Certainly though, as Bob Dylan sang, “The times, they are a’ changin’.” No longer do families regularly gather for meals. If they do, it’s only for a hurried few minutes between frantic activities. Corporate folks each lunch at their desks, if they eat lunch at all. Kids grab poptarts on their way out the door to school. Even full-grown adults who ought to know better, simply grab a cup of coffee and call it breakfast--which I say as someone who actually does that several times a week. Researchers tell us that this trend is in large part to blame for the obesity epidemic that we are facing. But I’d bet something else too. I’d bet it’s also part of the reason there is so much dissatisfaction with life. People are just too busy to enjoy it. It doesn’t sound like this new trend of busyness is all its cracked up to be.
Maybe, though, it’s not as new as we think it is. I’ve read this passage countless times, and never have I noticed the verse that says, “For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”
My first thought was “What in the world were they so busy doing?” I was having a pretty hard time imagining that they were as busy as any of us. We just seem to have more “stuff” to do. Even those of you that are “retired” tell me that you are busier now than you ever have been in your life. What could the disciples possibly have been doing that could compete with taking trips and watching grandkids sports activities and volunteering?
But somehow they were just this busy. If they thought being a disciple was going to be mostly a social club-- as if they were just going to hang out with Jesus and recline at his feet, it seems they were quite mistaken. And you can imagine that to keep going at such a pace would be completely draining. Certainly, they were quickly becoming candidates for disciple burnout.
Now, there is something interesting happening in the story. We hear that “Many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them.” These people are like music fans-- they learned where Jesus was going to be touring next, and rushed out there, camping out for days before Jesus got there, just so they could have the best chance of getting close to Jesus. Somehow, they didn’t get the memo that Jesus wasn’t a rockstar.
I feel sorry for them because they don’t get Jesus--they’re just groupies. They want to be a part of a movement. They want to be seen, as much as they want to see. But the truth is, maybe my heart should be breaking for them because there is something much more important about them that they model for us. They are desperate for Jesus. They want a relationship. They want healing. They want a savior. They would do whatever it took to be close to Jesus. And maybe this is a little bit different from what we know-- it’s been generations since people were pouring into the church trying to find Jesus. I’ve never preached at a place where people were fighting to get to the front pews so that they could listen closely for the sounds of Christ. And only once in my life has someone ever grabbed my hand and demanded that I tell them about Jesus.
The crowd was hungry. The disciples were hungry. But what about us? Do we have that same hunger?
Maybe the problem isn’t that we are not as hungry as these people were. The problem is that we don’t know we are as hungry as they were.
The people who were rushing around, trying to grab onto whatever they could that was part of Jesus-- those people knew they were hungry. They knew that Jesus had something that they wanted, something that they couldn’t find anywhere else, and they were going to do whatever it took to get it. They knew that their hunger was great.
But what about us? We have much that “feeds” us. We look to each other for companionship. We look to the media for entertainment. We have jobs or grandkids that fill the void of being needed. We volunteer so as to give something back. It feels like our lives are very full indeed. But something is “off”-- there’s a hunger that we can never quite satisfy, a thirst that doesn’t lesson no matter what we drink.
Oh, we are hungry alright, but sometimes it’s hard to recognize the hunger pangs.
Have you ever gotten so involved in a project or in work or in whatever else that you just plumb forgot to eat? You were so focused on what you were doing that you didn’t notice you were hungry? Donovan did that just yesterday-- he left a little before 8 to do his radio show, and didn’t come home until after six...and hadn’t eaten at all. Now I know that his body tried several times to tell him that he was hungry, but he was too busy to notice. But once he stopped working, he suddenly realized that he was really, really hungry.
Maybe we are just as hungry as those early church folks that wanted just a little piece of Jesus, but are so busy and filled with so much that we don’t recognize our severe hunger.
And how does Jesus respond to those people, and to us? With compassion. By recognizing that they are “sheep without a shepherd.” A shepherd, after all, keeps the sheep safe...even from themselves. A shepherd set a schedule for the day-- ordering when it was time to move from here to there, when it was time to stay put, when it was time to eat and drink.
We’ve willingly put ourselves under the governance of the shepherd. We practice goodness and kindness. We try to love our neighbor as ourselves. But still, we are like the tired disciples, because the world, not the shepherd sets our schedules. All the disciples were doing was trying to grow the church, and meet the demands of the church that had already grown. And instead of saying “Good job, disciples-- you’ve given your all to the kingdom” he says something else. He invites them to “Come away and rest.” He invites them to come to a place where he can tend to them.
One of the Ten Commandments is to rest regularly-- and that would have been great news to a slave. However, so much of our slavery is self imposed that we have no idea how to start for that to be good news. We’re slaves to money, to the notion of more, to the idea of being and having and doing. And Jesus still invites, “come away by yourselves and rest.”
Maybe the invitation isn’t telling us to take a vacation or even telling us to take a nap (though maybe the invitation includes those things.) Maybe it’s to unbind ourselves from all that holds us captive-- all the things that keep us from realizing that our hunger is for Christ. Maybe it’s an invitation to delight in the simple green pastures where Christ wants to lead us. Maybe it’s an invitation for us to say for ourselves, “You are my shepherd. I shall not run around like a crazy person. I shall not fill my life so full that I can’t notice I’m hungry for you. And I shall not hunger for the things that don’t satisfy.”
And maybe that’s a commitment we have to make for ourselves. Over and over. Everyday. Several times a day.
YOU are my shepherd.
You ARE my shepherd.
You are MY shepherd.
You are my SHEPHERD.
You make me lie down in green pastures. I shall not want.
This is a story about hungry people that are fed. It’s a story about ill people who are made well. It’s a story about us.
It’s a glorious invitation to a glorious life. It’s the best news to the people who are hungering for more than what the world can offer.
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