Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 6;30-34, 53-56

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

It’s perfect verse for the middle of July.  Summer has settled in. Likely we’ve noticed that the light is shrinking but we have a couple of weeks before we jump in Minnesota despair. “It’s almost time for the state fair.  The summer is over.” It’s also the perfect verse to address a lot of things right now.

I was interested in this word “deserted.” It sent me back to the Greek text of the Bible. The word gets translated a variety of ways into English:  lonely, quiet, secluded, remote, desolate, wilderness, desert, uninhabited. Interestingly, I considered this word in my office, which is the last room in our office suite. No one just walks past my door.

It’s a nice room with windows that look to the east and south. It does feel out of the way.  There’s even an escape door to a back stairway.  When I get to heaven I want to talk with Pastor Clifford Ansgar Nelson, who imagined the design.

People often comment that it feels spacious and calm. I’ve tried to make it that way. It’s sort of a spiritual practice.  I curate the space. Yes, my desk usually looks like that. Now, lest you begin to imagine that I’m really like that, I need to tell you about two drawers in that giant desk. I did not open those drawers and take a picture. They are place where I quickly stuff things before an appointment. They contain my stack.  Those drawers are unorganized, chaotic, and it makes me feel anxious and overwhelmed when I open it.

It’s the story of two worlds.  Maybe you recognize them. One that is often overwhelming and for which we don’t feel prepared.  It’s the world of “too much.”  The clean desk is, in a way, my spiritual practice. And it requires constant curating and attention, because those drawers have a power that is bigger than the papers in them.

The disciples have just been out practicing the Jesus thing: loving, healing, welcoming, being wide-hearted, connecting, exorcising (with an o not an e), and being present. They have a lot to tell Jesus.  We find out in other verses that it was hard and didn’t always go that well.

Come away to an uninhabited place, Jesus tells them.  I like “uninhabited” as a translation. A place where we haven’t tamed the land or paved over nature or built any buildings. Come away to a place without long-standing structures, the kind that were built to control or limit or define; a place where all the established habits that wound can be examined; where we risk stepping out of the bubbles of blind agreement; a place that’s free of what truly makes us tired, or angry, or fearful, a place where we can touch God’s wild heart; a place calm enough that we can take a breath. Jesus is telling his disciples, and no doubt feeling himself, that if they are to continue on the path before them, they must find ways to step out, put it all down, and find what’s true again.  I think he is also telling them that they have the capacity, the creativity, the gifts to curate this different space.

That’s gospel right now.  In the space between political conventions. In the space of Gaza’s devastation. In the space of boiling hot cities and fiercer storms.  In the space of a mass communication that will not allow us any peace.  And I’ll stop.  We don’t need the list.  Many of us know our bottom drawers of stacks and issues and habits and pressures all too well, even if we don’t let anyone see them.

On July 21, 2024, we need Jesus telling us, “If you’re going to survive, much less imagine and build alternative structures of mercy and justice, you’ve simply got to find ways to step away from it all.”  We tend to become the thing we focus on the most. The more we perseverate the wiring in our brain becomes more like barbed wire. Jesus knows that the world-as-it-has-been constructed is killing us and every created thing.

By this point in Mark’s gospel, he knows that it will kill him, too. He also knows that he will rise again. He certainly doesn’t go into the deserted place because he’s in denial or running away. He compassionately and gently holds this world and God’s wild and unlimited imagination together.

Of course, it gets interrupted.  It always does. The crowds follow him. No wonder people started calling him divine.  His ability to move from a real need to rest to compassionate action in the space of a breath is spectacular. The disciples, and likely us, perhaps can’t move that fast from rest to openness.  But I think Jesus isn’t suggesting speed, he’s suggesting possibility. We were made to find God; made to be aware of that presence; made to have an imagination that is alive outside what the world builds; born to be wild.

I do not want to sound glib here, as if it’s just so easy to step out of the anxiety that some of us carry.  Or to suggest that everyone has the privilege of taking a vacation or heading to the lake or the spa. Or have a schedule that isn’t dictated by another or by forces outside our control.

Jesus is telling all of us that we are already captured by a bigger and more lifegiving story. What we need is to find some ways to curate and inhabit a space that’s a little easier for us to touch that.  What kind of space, literally and figuratively, do you need to access the love that is already underneath you?  It’s probably a little different for all of us.  Downsizing, de-cluttering, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” (It’s a thing for real; it’s a TV series).  It may be re-arranging something in the yard or in your brain. Maybe it’s stepping out of the news cycle for a time or calling someone who isn’t as anxious as you are, or admitting that you are powerless in your additive habits. What is one thing to curate a space that lets the God who loves you so much emerge in the wild and beautiful depths of who you are?  For this week folks, just one thing.

We’re in this together, too.  It takes an entire community to discover how to rest.  Notice that Jesus doesn’t send them alone as individuals but as a group.  Turns out there is no desolate and empty place. Christ is there.  Christ is always there.

I cried last week while praying the Great Thanksgiving, the long prayer at the blessing of bread and wine.  Often we hardly notice the words, but this time, a line got me. Listen for it today.

The heaven and earth are full of your glory.

It’s in the present tense.  Not past; not future.  The present tense.

Come to this place.  Come to the table. Now.