The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 11B

Mark 6. 30-34, 53-56

Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.

Rest.

When I was a boy, maybe 9 or 10 years old, I lived in a mobile home park.  The lot next door had been empty for probably two years.  It was a place where my younger brother and I played all the time.  That empty lot became a battle ground fraught with danger, a desert where we could discover and unearth the mysteries of Ancient Egypt, and the surface of the moon full of wonder and imagination.  Then, that summer, an enormous truck came along pulling a brand new double-wide and parked it right there in the middle of our playground.

This new place came with something hardly seen at the time, a carport with a roof as high as the house – maybe higher.  My younger brother and I were amazed and curious what this thing could be for.  The new owners and my parents were friendly, and after a while I overheard a conversation about that carport.  The new guy, Joe was his name, was in his early 50s and had retired from a police force somewhere up north and had always dreamed of travelling with his family – a son slightly older than I and a teenage daughter.  He had taken a job doing security work so he could buy one of those big, fancy camper homes – you know, the ones as big as a charter bus with all the amenities of home.

Two years later, Joe had a massive heart attack.  He lived through it, but the brush with mortality gave him a new view of the world.  I can vividly remember him saying to my father, “I should have just gave up the camper and spent the last two years camping in a tent with my family.”  His drive for something bigger, better, flashier had made him forget what his real priorities were.

Rest. A break from all the bustle and activity. Rest. A chance to renew, to stop, to slow down. Rest. An end of work, if only for a little while. Rest. An opportunity to stop doing that you may simply be. Rest.

I was struck by a study out of UCLA from several years ago  that looked at the typical week of thirty-two middle class families in the Los Angeles area. The idea was to take a detailed snapshot of American family life early in the 21st century. The results, according to one researcher, were "disheartening." So consumed with working, collecting, amassing, and generally "getting ahead," they actually spent very little time together enjoying what they were working for. As reported by the Globe, Jeanne E. Arnold, lead author and a professor of anthropology at UCLA, shared her particular dismay at how little time family members spent outside: "Something like 50 of the 64 parents in our study never stepped outside in the course of about a week," she said. "When they gave us tours of their house they'd say, 'Here's the backyard, I don't have time to go there.' They were working a lot at home. Leisure time was spent in front of the TV or at the computer."

They don’t have time, in other words, to rest.

We're familiar with the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. But usually we interpret that in light of 1) a negative reaction to commandments and 2) the assumption that Sabbath means church. But, this commandment -- or, better, teaching -- would have been unbelievably good news to people who were recently slaves whose time was never their own and who never, ever had a guaranteed period of rest. "Wait a minute," you can imagine them saying when hearing the 10 Commandments read, "You mean we get to rest? We even have to rest? Hallelujah!"

I have this hunch that more and more of us find ourselves in a place not all that different from the Egypt where the ancient Hebrews languished. Except our slavery is self-constructed, self-imposed, and therefore far more difficult to detect or overcome. We are enslaved to notions of success, and therefore put few limits on work. We are enslaved to ideas about our children having every opportunity possible, and therefore schedule them into frenetic lives and wonder why they have a hard time focusing. We are enslaved to the belief that the only thing that will bring contentment is more -- more money, more space in our homes, more cars, more things to put on our resumes or in our closets, more.... Go ahead, name that thing you've fallen prey to wanting more of. And such levels of wanting, quite frankly, don't permit much time for anything but work.

In light of all this, listen again to Jesus' simple invitation to Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile. This is not just an invitation to take an afternoon off or go on vacation -- though those can be important parts of rest -- this is an invitation to loosen our shackles and climb out of the cages we've constructed from a culturally-fed belief that more is the ticket to happiness and that work is the ticket to more.

Now hear the opening verse of Psalm 23:  The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.  While we tend to focus so strongly on the powerful imagery of the first half of the verse, that imagery simply makes no sense apart from the second half of the verse. Because the Lord is my shepherd, that is, I shall not want. Because I trust God for my good, I shall not cave in to the loud din of my culture enticing me to want and want and want at every turn and corner of my life. Because God has promised to take care of me, I will get off the treadmill of work and accumulation so that I can rest, and notice the abundance, and rejoice.

And that's the key thing about Sabbath rest, I think -- it invites a chance to step back and stand apart from all the things that usually drive and consume us that we might detect God's presence and providence and blessing, experience a sense of contentment, and give thanks.

Christ came that we may have life and have it more abundantly.  Life is what we are meant to have more abundantly.  We often see “abundant” as a quantitative term, a term of multiplication; but God’s abundance is a term of quality, abundant life is life together, life with our loved ones, our families, our friends; a life more connected to God and one another.  The Gospel does not call us to have stuff and have it more abundantly, it calls us to life.

Make a commitment to yourself, to your family, to God that there is one thing you will not do this week: one evening you will shut down your computer or turn off your cell phone, one appointment you will refuse to make, one obligation or opportunity you will forgo. And also commit to one thing that you will do this week in order to rest: one walk you will take with a friend or spouse, one game you will play with a child or a neighbor, one opportunity you will take to sit, alone or with others, not in front of the television but simply to contemplate your blessings and abundance so that you can go to bed content and grateful.  Write these down and put them on your refrigerator, or computer monitor, or in your Bible – wherever you will see them to remind you that God calls you to abundant life.  

Come away, He says, to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.