Come Away; Come Together
Mark 6:31
July 19, 2009
This is one of the great summer Sabbath passages in scripture. Jesus says, “hey guys, we need to get away for a while. I know a great little place out on the lake where no one ever goes. Let’s take a week off.”
Of course, the vacation plans didn’t quite go as expected. As so often happens, work went with them. Perhaps they made the classic mistake of taking their cell phones along, or checking the email every day, or calling back into the office to make sure the place wasn’t going all to hell in their absence.
Have you ever done that?
For those of us not named Jesus, it’s called a messiah complex – the belief that the world cannot get along without us for even just a little while.
Truth be told, many of us arrange our lives such that the people around us cannot get by without us. We engineer dependency, and elevate our own importance so that we can voice that classic American workaholic mantra: I just can’t get away.
Perhaps we do this to avoid the stark truth: none of us is indispensable; not only that, but at some point down the road, the world will go on just fine without us.
We are given only a little while, so the question becomes, “what are we doing with the time we have been given?”
After all, it is quite clearly true that the way you spend your time is the way you spend your life.
The truth that Jesus embodied was revealed not in miracles – after all, scripture and contemporaneous literature suggests that miracles were fairly run-of-the-mill in those days when people had what we might call a miraculous consciousness. No, the truth embodied in Jesus’ life came precisely, simply, in the manner of that life.
He lived always in community with others and in communion with God. It was his way. It was, as the author of John’s gospels puts it “the way, the truth, and the life.” And those who lived it became known simply as “people of the way.”
Jesus trusted those in community with him so much that he promised them that they would do greater things than he had, and in some sense that was true. He died with but a handful of faithful followers, most of them in hiding or on the run. But those followers – those people of the way – laid the foundation for a worldwide movement that reached every corner of the globe.
What has that way to teach us today? What has it to do with the lives of 21st century North Americans living in a time of economic turmoil, international unrest, global climate change and all the rest? What has it to do with the church at Clarendon in 2009? What has it to do with you and me and our families, our lives?
The lectionary passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is instructive. Writing to a community grappling with issues of diversity and inclusion – sound familiar? – Paul says this, paraphrasing:
Remember when you were strangers and outsiders? When you were out beyond the pale? But now, in Christ, you are brought near, you dwell in the center of the beloved community.
And quoting directly, this: “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
In Christ, Paul suggests, there is a new humanity – one humankind rather than many – and therefore the way to peace, to reconciliation, to community. Paul concludes this passage saying, “So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”
The crucial connection between the gospel reading from Mark and Paul’s words to the church at Ephesus – and the word of the Lord for us today – lies in their insistence on the importance of living in communities of compassion where self-reliance is replaced by mutuality and a bearing of each other’s burdens such that those who were divided become reconciled, those who were outsiders find a place at the table, those who are merely encountered along the way, who could be ignored and passed by, instead are honored. Rather than people in the way, they become people of the way – not as measured by confessions or conversions but in terms of human beings encountered and honored as fully human and created in the divine image.
As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”
Moreover, as Taylor points out, scripture speaks of loving the neighbor as the self just a few times; far more often it speaks of loving the stranger.
It was the plight of the stranger – not the ring of a cell phone underscoring his own importance – that cut short Jesus’ away time. He stopped to feed the hungry who lived on the wrong side of the tracks – or, in this case, the wrong side of the water.
The weight of this Biblical wisdom raises for me serious questions about the way we live our lives, about the kind of communities we create or fail to create.
Is Christian community transformative for us? Does our life in community help us stop along the way to reach out to the outsider? Does our common life welcome the stranger? Empower the powerless? Give voice to the voiceless?
Simply put, does life in Christian community help us honor the guy who picks up the trash? The girl at the checkout counter at the Giant? The teller at the bank? The annoying coworker? The grind of a boss? The unhelpful clerk at the bookstore or the coffee shop?
Does Christian community help us bear one another’s burdens such that individuals in community can get away when they need restoration and Sabbath time? Does community decenter us from the idolatry of individualism that is at the core of American culture, or do we practice community in ways that simply reinforce American mythology?
Perhaps, most simply given the text from Mark, how do we respond to Jesus’ invitation to come away for a while with him and to come together for a life as his followers?
Obviously, this string of questions is far more than we can hope to pin down in one morning, and, truthfully, it is more than a single passage of scripture – even one as rich as today’s – can honestly bear. Still, with the wisdom of scripture – the word of the Lord for us this morning – as our guide, let me pose a few questions for conversation this morning:
When has Christian community been most meaningful to you?
What practices of Christian community have been most powerful for you?
Can you name a way that you have been shaped or transformed by your life in Christian community?
July 19, 2009
This is one of the great summer Sabbath passages in scripture. Jesus says, “hey guys, we need to get away for a while. I know a great little place out on the lake where no one ever goes. Let’s take a week off.”
Of course, the vacation plans didn’t quite go as expected. As so often happens, work went with them. Perhaps they made the classic mistake of taking their cell phones along, or checking the email every day, or calling back into the office to make sure the place wasn’t going all to hell in their absence.
Have you ever done that?
For those of us not named Jesus, it’s called a messiah complex – the belief that the world cannot get along without us for even just a little while.
Truth be told, many of us arrange our lives such that the people around us cannot get by without us. We engineer dependency, and elevate our own importance so that we can voice that classic American workaholic mantra: I just can’t get away.
Perhaps we do this to avoid the stark truth: none of us is indispensable; not only that, but at some point down the road, the world will go on just fine without us.
We are given only a little while, so the question becomes, “what are we doing with the time we have been given?”
After all, it is quite clearly true that the way you spend your time is the way you spend your life.
The truth that Jesus embodied was revealed not in miracles – after all, scripture and contemporaneous literature suggests that miracles were fairly run-of-the-mill in those days when people had what we might call a miraculous consciousness. No, the truth embodied in Jesus’ life came precisely, simply, in the manner of that life.
He lived always in community with others and in communion with God. It was his way. It was, as the author of John’s gospels puts it “the way, the truth, and the life.” And those who lived it became known simply as “people of the way.”
Jesus trusted those in community with him so much that he promised them that they would do greater things than he had, and in some sense that was true. He died with but a handful of faithful followers, most of them in hiding or on the run. But those followers – those people of the way – laid the foundation for a worldwide movement that reached every corner of the globe.
What has that way to teach us today? What has it to do with the lives of 21st century North Americans living in a time of economic turmoil, international unrest, global climate change and all the rest? What has it to do with the church at Clarendon in 2009? What has it to do with you and me and our families, our lives?
The lectionary passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is instructive. Writing to a community grappling with issues of diversity and inclusion – sound familiar? – Paul says this, paraphrasing:
Remember when you were strangers and outsiders? When you were out beyond the pale? But now, in Christ, you are brought near, you dwell in the center of the beloved community.
And quoting directly, this: “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
In Christ, Paul suggests, there is a new humanity – one humankind rather than many – and therefore the way to peace, to reconciliation, to community. Paul concludes this passage saying, “So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”
The crucial connection between the gospel reading from Mark and Paul’s words to the church at Ephesus – and the word of the Lord for us today – lies in their insistence on the importance of living in communities of compassion where self-reliance is replaced by mutuality and a bearing of each other’s burdens such that those who were divided become reconciled, those who were outsiders find a place at the table, those who are merely encountered along the way, who could be ignored and passed by, instead are honored. Rather than people in the way, they become people of the way – not as measured by confessions or conversions but in terms of human beings encountered and honored as fully human and created in the divine image.
As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.”
Moreover, as Taylor points out, scripture speaks of loving the neighbor as the self just a few times; far more often it speaks of loving the stranger.
It was the plight of the stranger – not the ring of a cell phone underscoring his own importance – that cut short Jesus’ away time. He stopped to feed the hungry who lived on the wrong side of the tracks – or, in this case, the wrong side of the water.
The weight of this Biblical wisdom raises for me serious questions about the way we live our lives, about the kind of communities we create or fail to create.
Is Christian community transformative for us? Does our life in community help us stop along the way to reach out to the outsider? Does our common life welcome the stranger? Empower the powerless? Give voice to the voiceless?
Simply put, does life in Christian community help us honor the guy who picks up the trash? The girl at the checkout counter at the Giant? The teller at the bank? The annoying coworker? The grind of a boss? The unhelpful clerk at the bookstore or the coffee shop?
Does Christian community help us bear one another’s burdens such that individuals in community can get away when they need restoration and Sabbath time? Does community decenter us from the idolatry of individualism that is at the core of American culture, or do we practice community in ways that simply reinforce American mythology?
Perhaps, most simply given the text from Mark, how do we respond to Jesus’ invitation to come away for a while with him and to come together for a life as his followers?
Obviously, this string of questions is far more than we can hope to pin down in one morning, and, truthfully, it is more than a single passage of scripture – even one as rich as today’s – can honestly bear. Still, with the wisdom of scripture – the word of the Lord for us this morning – as our guide, let me pose a few questions for conversation this morning:
When has Christian community been most meaningful to you?
What practices of Christian community have been most powerful for you?
Can you name a way that you have been shaped or transformed by your life in Christian community?
posted by David Ensign at
10:31 AM
<< Home