Proper 11, Year B
Jeremiah 23: 1-6; Psalm 23; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34; 53-56
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know
our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion
on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our
unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the
worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Barely does Jesus get both feet on the shore
of the lake before desperate people start to swarm around him. I can picture
them now: men limping on abscessed legs; women holding limp children in their
arms; young men covered in battle scars; childless brides; babies with blind
eyes covered in flies; teens with raving demons in their heads; widows bent low
with grief. Human beings dark and light, Roman and Jew, citizen and slave; all
coming to be healed by Jesus; all filled with great need and deep hurt; all irresistibly
drawn to the compassionate power that burns within him; all focused on the hope
for healing that drives them hungrily across the countryside.
Our Gospel tells us that all of these
suffering people touch Jesus’ cloak and are healed. Thanks be to God! But then
what happens? Do they continue to hang around? And I wonder what the disciples
think? They are supposed to be spending some peaceful time with Jesus,
themselves. They have been working hard, helping Jesus to heal the crowds,
walking from dusty town to dusty town, watching and trying to understand what
their Master expects from them. They have been hosting funeral receptions,
teaching kids from Zachary Taylor, hauling food to the food pantry, setting up
apartments for refugees, and going to way too many committee meetings. They were
probably excited and relieved to get Jesus all to themselves for once, to stop
helping and to get some private explanations, to have their souls fed with the
wisdom of Jesus’ words and the love in Jesus’ eyes. The disciples have needs,
too, after all. They are hungry for God, too. But they don’t seem to get their promised
time alone with Jesus. Here come those crowds--the hurting, hungry crowds in
all of their maddening diversity. And there goes Jesus, responding to them with
compassion, reaching out to all of these needy strangers.
In these days of ever-smaller
congregations, we church-disciples feel the pull between getting our own spiritual
needs met and reaching out to others, between caring for our community and doing
God’s work in the world. On the one hand, our hearts are fed when we get to
talk only with each other at Coffee Hour and at the Peace. Our souls are fed
when we worship in a familiar way: when we sing the songs that we know and love
and repeat the liturgies that we all remember. We strengthen our community when
we meet those that we know and love to do a common project, when we laugh over
familiar stories during a bible study, when we combine our energy to reach out
to our beloved elders in need, or to those fellow disciples who are hurting. Jesus
loves his Church and surely wants to feed and strengthen us.
And yet, we church disciples see the
crowds out there beyond our community, those crowds with needs that just keep
coming. We know that Jesus loves them, too. We know that Jesus has compassion
on them, too. We know that Jesus wants us to turn outward to welcome them with
compassion in his name. But, Lord, sometimes we’re tired of showing all that
hospitality. We’re tired of explaining things to those who might not
understand. We’re tired of welcoming those who might want to do things
differently than we do. We’re tired of the unending succession of needs that
pushes in on us as soon as we get out of the boat.
In the early days of Christianity, the big
split in the church was between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. The Jewish
Christians were like the disciples, comfortable among themselves, keeping their
familiar ways, enjoying their homogeneous group. But the throngs of non-Jews
kept coming to Jesus—coming from all over the Roman Empire, with new languages,
customs, and understandings. Surrounded by these Gentile throngs, the Jewish
Christians must have longed to get away with Jesus to a quiet place. And the
non-Jewish Christians in places like Ephesus, far from Jerusalem and its Jewish
ways, must have longed to have Jesus to themselves, as well. When Paul writes
to the quarreling church in Ephesus, he tells them that their peace can only be
found in their common citizenship as followers of a crucified Lord. There are
no true outsiders in the Christian community because Jesus’ self-giving love
reaches out to each and every one: to those who are far off, as to those who
are near. Jesus died for the needs of the whole world, and in him, we are all
lifted up into God’s presence and put on equal footing.
John Shea points out that compassion
becomes tiring when it is based on difference. If we see ourselves as superior
people, lifting up the poor downtrodden outsider, then such lifting is heavy
indeed, and can become difficult over time. If our compassion is rooted in our
sameness with others, however, and we see ourselves as opening ourselves up to our
equals, connecting with another child of God who is just like me, a sinner
dependent upon Jesus Christ, then our compassion can flow freely, without the
need for lifting anyone up to our level.[1]
This all came together for me this week, when I went with my
Swiss relatives to the old Shaker colony at Pleasant Hill, outside of Danville.
The Shakers were a utopian Christian community that flourished in a number of
locations in the United States during the 19th century. Their name
comes from the ecstatic dancing, or “shaking,” that filled their common worship
on Sundays. While I’ve been to Pleasant Hill several times, there is one piece
of information that I had somehow always missed. This week, I was surprised to
learn that these 19th-century Southerners believed in the total equality
of blacks and whites, at a time when most church-going Christians were still
arguing for the superiority of the white race. Moreover, the Shakers put their
beliefs into practice! When a slave-owning family would join the Shaker
community, they would be required to welcome their slaves as free members of the
Shaker family, on equal standing with their former masters. Master and slave
would from then on share work, food, and life together. Can you imagine the
transformation of long-standing attitudes that such a change would have
occasioned on both sides? Many neighbors were so threatened by the radical
nature of the Shakers’ position that they threatened them with violence,
burning their fields and ostracizing them. Still, at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky,
black and white Shakers continued to live and work side by side as equals. They
called each other “brother” and “sister,” and they shared their money and their
goods. Whatever their faults and peculiarities as a community, the Shakers do
seem to have modeled the peace, strength, and welcome that come from seeing
each person as equal in Christ Jesus. While our own denomination was mired in
the muck of slavery, the Shaker community was building the house of God, with
Christ as the cornerstone. It’s no wonder that they could sing with such joy about
the “gift to be free, the gift to come down where we ought to be…”
And there’s more! The Shakers had four
ministers, or religious leaders, in each community: two women and two men.
Their ministers did not preach or lead the liturgy on Sundays, though. They
weren’t even in the room with the rest of the congregants! Instead, they were
upstairs, in the room over the church gathering, peeking through small windows
down into the assembly below. While the believers and their guests were
singing, and praying, and dancing their ecstatic dances, the ministers were
watching: watching the newcomers for signs of interest or enlightenment;
watching the long-standing community members for signs of hurt, absence, or
sorrow. After the service was over, it was their job to go look after their
flock, acting on what they saw, reaching out both to the inner circle and to the
crowds who came to find Jesus there. It made me wonder: how would it energize
our tired communities, if we truly believed that Jesus is watching us like
those Shaker ministers, assessing the needs of the old and new believers alike,
his heart melting with compassion at what he sees. How strong would we be if we
truly believed that he is here with us in this place, the cornerstone of all
that we are and all that we do, offering to each of us everything that we need,
a shepherd who can both seek out the lost sheep and feed the 99 back home in
the pen? Perhaps then we would feel free enough in our relationships to one
another to join in the Good News of the Shakers’ song: “When true simplicity is
gain’d, to bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d. To turn, turn will be our
delight, till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.”
[1]
John Shea, Eating with the Bridegroom: The
Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers, Year B (Collegeville,
MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 185.
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