Sermon: Filling the Empty World

Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)

15th Sunday After Pentecost
September 13, 2009

"Filling the Empty World"

Mark 6:30-46

Prayer:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our minds and hearts gathered here this day be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.  

This passage reminds me of our congregation in so many ways:  busy disciples come together from many different directions, with many different projects and passions, inside and outside our work as a church.  Mark says so “many were coming and going… they had no leisure even to eat.”  Sounds like a day at the Barn, or one of my 14-hour work days!  Or maybe one of yours?  The world can be a voracious monster sometimes – it will consume all the energy we give it and still come back ravenous, hungry for more.  Doesn’t it seem that way to you sometimes?  The world’s enormous need often seems to overpower our human capacity to give and give and give and give.

That’s how it must have seemed to the disciples of Jesus at this point in their ministry.  Up to Mark chapter 6, they had been busy, busy, busy.  Last spring, our Bible study classes were amazed at the hectic pace that drives Mark’s gospel.  Pick up your Bible sometime, even if you can’t join our Sunday night Mark class this fall, and at least skim through the first 6 or 7 chapters of Mark.  It’s a quick read, because in Mark, things all happen “immediately.”  Bible scholars and readers have long admired the teachings of Matthew (like “turn the other cheek,” “go the second mile,” “love your enemy”), the parables of Luke (like the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan), and the elegant language of John (like what we read at Christmas, “In the beginning was the word…”). But Mark (the shortest of the 4 gospels) is not typically named as anyone’s favorite, though I think it should be.  If Matthew is the great teacher, Luke the “great physician,” and John the great poet, Mark is the great action movie director!  Mark is exciting!

According to Mark, everywhere Jesus goes in his ministry, he is mobbed by huge crowds.  Mark chapter 2 begins, “When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. ²So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door…”  And that’s when, you may remember, the crowds actually took the roof off his house to lower their paralyzed friend down to Jesus to be healed.  And it doesn’t get any better in chapter 3, where we read, “⁷Jesus departed with his disciples to the sea, and a great multitude from Galilee followed him; ⁸hearing all that he was doing, they came to him in great numbers from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon.”  If you remember from last week’s lesson, that’s the Lebanese beach area where the Syrophoenician woman interrupted his vacation and argued (successfully) with him to heal her mentally ill daughter.  We read, “⁹He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, so that they would not crush him; ¹⁰for he had cured many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him.”  Can you imagine?  The crowds might crush him?  You get that?  He was standing with the sea at his back, crowds on the shore, and he had to have a boat ready to help him escape if they mobbed him.  It really was “Jesus Christ Superstar.”  He had to call the disciples up to a mountaintop to find enough solitude to begin teaching them. 

We read that when “he went home; ²⁰… the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat.” Jesus and his disciples knew what it was to never have a moment’s peace, to have the world’s demands coming at them nonstop, 24-7.  Not only that, they knew their lives were in danger, as both the elders of the Jewish religious establishment and King Herod and other Roman collaborators were out to get them.  The story right before today’s lesson is the beheading of John the Baptist – their former leader.  These guys were not going to the wilderness like Gandhi, they went more like Jesse James!  We can see why Jesus – after listening to their stories, the disciples no doubt interrupting each other to tell “him all that they had done and taught” – we can see why Jesus responds with this invitation: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” 

Wouldn’t we all enjoy accepting that invitation from Jesus?  “Come away,” my friends, “and rest a while.”  Can we hear our “still speaking” God asking us that when we too have been “coming and going” with “no leisure even to eat”?  Don’t we sometimes feel just as those thousands of followers of Jesus must have felt – hungry and thirsty for a word of hope, hungry and thirsty for spiritual renewal, hungry and thirsty for food and drink, sharing with our fellow pilgrims on the way?  It’s OK.  We can stop to rest with Jesus.  We can sit down and share Word and prayer and worship with our friends right here in this good church.  We can trust that in accepting the care of Christ, we will be fed.

I told Church Council that I was inspired during my summer vacation to share with you this fall in adult education from a favorite book of mine – written by a former seminary professor and friend from California, Flora Wuellner.  Her book, Feed My Shepherds, is really aimed at us clergy types – encouraging us to take time for rest and prayer – but in our busy church of so many hard-working volunteers, I saw in it important lessons for all of us.  If you don’t have time to join us on Thursday mornings for prayers at 8:45 or for our fall Spiritual Renewal classes at 9:30, this time we’ll be posting the prayer exercises on our website for you to use when you do have a moment to rest – last week’s lesson is already there.  If you hear Jesus call you to “Come away, …and rest a while,” consider following him to just a 20-minute on-line retreat.  Or you may have already discovered your own best way to find Sabbath time, to rest, recharge, and pray.  At one time for me, it was swimming at the Y.  My mom liked to talk to Jesus in the kitchen – I can remember her having some heated discussions with him about me, when I was a teenager!  For others, spiritual renewal comes from gardening, or reading, or playing with a child.  Or just preparing and eating food with friends and family.

Through the lens of our new vision – Make Jesus Your Mentor: Pray, Share, Welcome, taking the “Pray” aspect first doesn’t mean we STOP all the important work we do together as a church.  It might just mean we increase our awareness and willingness to get refueled spiritually so we have the energy to do all that we want to do. At this time of year, our engines are revving up – Church School and choirs all are resuming just as our Yankee Fair enters its final phase of recruiting the army of volunteers it takes to make it so successful every fall.  Not only that, we have Anniversary Campaign projects going on and a new refugee family in our cottage.  We have too much important work to do, like those first disciples, to try to do it all while “running on empty.”

And yet, for some reason, even though many of us would follow Jesus into any challenge or take on any task for his church, we are reluctant to follow him to prayer or to study.  We don’t always recognize the importance of connecting with Word and Spirit to getting our tasks of ministry done.  If it’s any consolation, the disciples struggled with this too – and they had seen Jesus perform miracles of healing and spiritual renewal with their own eyes.  Remember today’s miracle, “feeding the 5,000,” wouldn’t have happened if Jesus had listened to his tired disciples tell him it was impossible.  They begged him to just send the crowds away.  For once, they wanted Jesus to accept the practical solution:  send the crowds away to shop for their own food.  Don’t we know that exhausted feeling, when we’re ready to quit, because we’re sure we have not more ounce of energy to give? 

Listen to what Jesus says they should do.  I like to call this miracle not “the feeding of the 5,000” but “the miracle of the small groups,” or perhaps, for us Congregationalists, the “miracle of the committees and subcommittees.”  He gets them to come together and rest, and to help each other.  Isn’t this how the miracle of our Yankee Fair happens?  No one person, or even 4 Fair Chairs, could do it alone.  It takes all of us, working in small groups. Mark says, “³⁹he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. ⁴⁰So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties.”  He had to order them to sit down on the grass together, though. That so reminds me of that one phrase in the 23^rd Psalm:  “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”  God has to order us and make us rest sometimes.  To God, we must look like stubborn toddlers refusing to nap!  But when we push ourselves beyond our limits, or try to do things all by ourselves, it makes us more likely to burn out.  It is then that people end up resigning from church commitments and ministries.  So if you ever find that happening to you, remember the happy ending to this story:  From the hand of Jesus, from the companionship of others, from the work of Christ’s blessing, “⁴²All ate and were filled.”  When we allow Jesus to fill us, we are able to participate in God’s great work of building the Kingdom, filling an empty world. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

Mark 6:30-56

³⁰The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. ³¹He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. ³²And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. ³³Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. ³⁴As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. ³⁵When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; ³⁶send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” ³⁷But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” ³⁸And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.” When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” ³⁹Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. ⁴⁰So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. ⁴¹Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. ⁴²And all ate and were filled; ⁴³and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. ⁴⁴Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.

⁴⁵Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. ⁴⁶After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray.