Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 6:1-13

The other day I read another article on replacing the “Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key with “America the Beautiful” by Katherine Lee Bates as the National Anthem. You’ve probably heard all the arguments. The current national anthem is hard to sing. It’s a war song, highlighting battle and victory as the key attributes of being patriotic. “America the Beautiful,” on the other hand, focuses on the powerful beauty of the land: purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain. The song suggests that patriotism is the exercise of liberation from oppression, “O beautiful for heroes proved; In liberating strife, who more than self their country love, and mercy more than life!”

I’m not going to weigh into the argument. I will admit that I’m one of the few who actually sing the “Star Spangled Banner” at a Twins Game, at least until, “the land of the free,” when I decide that dropping back is probably a better way of loving my neighbor than forging ahead and risking a “bomb bursting in air.”

The article did make me read all the verses of the “Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful,” both of which have many more verses than most of us know. This time, however, I was struck by the simple opening phrase, “Oh Beautiful for spacious skies.” I remember finally understanding spacious skies when we moved to the upper Midwest and went on a trip to North Dakota to see De Smet, where Darin served as a pastoral intern. Standing outside the little prairie church, with the characteristic wind making the clothes on the line across the street parallel to the ground, I understood “big sky.” It was stunning. There was nothing from horizon to horizon, not even a tree, just the wide expanse of blue drawing you upward and in.

I’ve always liked playing around with words, probably a gift from my mother. “Spacious” has held on to me for two reasons. One, what if spaciousness is a quality that is beautiful in its own right and is a sign that we have understood the wideness of freedom, justice, and sacrifice. Peace, goodness, crowned with “brotherhood,” or beloved community to use Martin Luther King’s more inclusive phrase, from horizon to horizon, coast to coast, not one thing standing in its way. If being spacious is how one is patriotic, I’ll fly the flag.

The second reason is because, at the same time, I was thinking about today’s gospel text. I’ve been looking for a way to describe what Jesus is suggesting that his disciples take with them in when they are sent out two by two. The passage is more than just about traveling light. I wondered if something like “spaciousness” is what he’s suggesting, and what he needed to step into the synagogue in his hometown.

Viktor Frankl says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”[1] Spaciousness is a wideness of presence that can pause, at least for consideration, our habitual, default, or even culturally trained responses. Spiritual writer Jordan Bates says, “Spaciousness is the willingness to allow [for] unknowing, uncertainty, confusion, ambiguity, meaninglessness. Spaciousness values astonishment, perplexity, and groundlessness. Spaciousness gives experience a quality of freshness: every situation appears unique, not merely as another instance of a familiar category.”[2]

The link between the two little stories that we read today is the context that Jesus entered and that the disciples get sent into: confusion, anxiety, ambiguity, judgment. It was obviously complicated for Jesus in a community that knew him more than most others. Their lack of a rousing endorsement even seems to diminish him. Mark tells us that he can’t do big miracles. The synergy is off. Imagine being a disciple, witnessing all that, already feeling insecure, and then immediately being sent to other places that are likely just as complicated, if not more.

Jesus tells them they have all the authority they need to go into really challenging places. Later, Paul would say, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

This is the world that all of us have to get up and enter every day. It’s the world just outside the doors of this church; maybe inside, too. It’s the life that we live into, even as we drip with baptismal promise. And wow, does the world seem complicated and painful right now. Think of the politics right now that surround this celebration of the 4^th of July. Any one feel great about the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch, or the Congress? Anyone know what to do to fix it all? Anyone have this election figured out? Maybe I’m alone in not knowing how to celebrate the holiday right now, other than stand at the grill, dressed in red, white, and blue, flipping burgers, pretending, at least for a day, that it’s not all happening. Add to all of that a changed landscape after the pandemic, the myriad problems we face at work or school, or our own complicated struggles to love and be loved.

Wouldn’t it be nice to pretend that life will one day be less complicated? We’ve stuffed a lot of things in our baggage that we’re just sure can protect us from the pain of living a real, human life. How in the world is all to be repaired?

If authority means having clarity, knowing just what to do, and channeling divine power to make it all change, we may be in trouble. What if authority, however, is something different. What if authority is more like grounding, standing on a firmer foundation, being drawn into the spaciousness of a grace and love that are bigger than any challenge, even, as it turns out at the end of the gospel story, death itself.

What we take into the world is love. It hardly seems enough to say that out loud. Love is the authority that we receive in baptism. Love is the fuel that comes in bread and wine. Love provides a space to rest, to consider, to pause, to wait, to be creative, and then from which to step off into life.

I hear Jesus saying, “Trust that you have what you need to live into it all.” And, if it doesn’t work out, or what you decided to try fails, get up, shake the dust of your feet, and go on. There is always another day, which was true for Jesus even after a couple of days in the tomb. In the end, there is a spaciousness that gathers us and provide for us, even beyond the spacious skies.

If you’re just not sure that’s going to be enough for this world, I suspect we’re all in it together, and we have each other along the way. Wendall Berry ends in his poem, “Wild Geese” this way?

what we need is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.[3]

[1] Jordan Bates • January 31, 2020, Spaciousness: How to Free Your Mind and Stop Living Reactively. https://www.highexistence.com/spaciousness-free-mind-stop-living-reactively/

[2] Ibid.

[3] From Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry. Copyright 1998 by Wendell Berry. With permission of author and Counterpoint Press, a member of Perseus Book Group.