What I like about this little passage from Mark is that it’s really two separate passages from Mark – it’s the two pieces of bread in a sandwich, and we left out the middle. You’ve got two pieces of bread with no peanut butter and jelly.
In fact, the peanut butter and jelly that comes between these two slices are two really well-known stories: the feeding of five thousand people, when the fish and bread suddenly become enough to feed an army, and then when Jesus walks on water. So well-known that the phrases “fishes and loaves” and “walking on water” are a part of most people’s vocabularies, whether they’ve ever darkened the door of a church or not.
And then there are these two bits that are the bread around that juicy middle. Which might seem kind of boring, but to me, that’s always a clue that there’s probably something pretty cool hidden inside.
In these two passages today, the first few lines are about Jesus and the disciples being public and hurried and harried and needing to be alone but still being pursued by the overwhelming needs of humanity. And then our last few lines are about a similar thing, the disciples and Jesus moving from one place to another, and people all but chasing them down and wanting to be healed.
In short, what we’ve got here isn’t an interesting story or a parable or a major event. What we basically get are transitions. Transitions from one physical place to another, but also the fact that there were no clear boundaries in the daily plans – meaning, the transitions in a regular day. Jesus and the disciples try to go from one place to another, or to set aside some quiet time, or to plan when to see people, but all these boundaries that they try to work into their day keep getting messed up.
All the places where they weren’t supposed to be setting up shop and getting everybody quiet and focused on God – are ending up being the places God goes right ahead and happens.
Which is always one of the problems with God, you know – God just won’t follow human rules, no matter how much we insist that it’s in God’s best interests. Dang if God doesn’t seem to have a mind of God’s own.
So in this case, the God moments happen on the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee, at Gennesaret, and on the northwest shore, at Bethsaida, and out in the country, and on and on. And these God moments today aren’t happening when everybody’s lined up at the right place and time and in their own appointed neighborhood. These God moments are happening at the wrong places and the most unhelpful times, and in somebody else’s space entirely.
Which makes me have to ask, Why would that happen? – why would people be driven to such unseemly, unchurchy behavior? – until we see again that these are transitions and that people are ignoring all the social and religious stop signs and following the deepest needs of their hearts. Not the more surface needs that can so entice us in life, stuff we think we need but is probably more a compulsion. What’s driving these people into these transitional non-places is a deeper hunger that sends them into the country or across a sea or out into the night to bug a teacher who’s got really bad bags under his eyes because people keep bugging him.
In short, these people’s hunger drives them to stop saying they’re gonna look for God in all the socially or religiously appropriate places. Instead, they’re going go start looking high and low, in the back entrances and side entrances, the servant entrances. They’re going to look for God in the transitions. In the unplanned places, improper places.
And so, if that’s what this boring Gospel reading is showing us – then does that mean that we are to do the same?
Well, probably so. That’s not to say we should all suddenly go out and ignore the regular rhythms of daily life, or the boundaries that may be really important to somebody else. Remember that these stories came out of a very brief, intense ministry of a guy we’re supposed to follow but who we can never be.
But I think there’s something really valuable in this weird non-story we have today, because it’s as important as anything to realize the Gospel is found in the transitional and goof-up places in life – the places that show us that the way God sees our lives is always going to be different than the way we see them, and we should be chasing down God, parrying with God, bugging God, to ask what that divine viewpoint is.
Because in the end, like the crowds bugging Jesus, it’s going to end up helping us. Just like Jesus taught and healed in these in-between places, I’ll bet dollars to donuts we find teaching and healing in those strange, in-between places in our lives, too.
The picky daily stuff, the unexpected things, the interruptions, when one plan becomes another, and we can’t get things back on track. The Gospel says it’s in the re-drawn map, the replanned plan, that we can find God coming in the side door and doing God’s work as if it’s been The Plan all along.
And that sounds good enough in a sermon. But how open to that can we really be, once we walk out those doors? What is it in us humans that might resist taking this out into the world and into our real lives?
Well, a good guess, whenever we’re asking human-ish questions, is that it has to do with control – controlling the unknown, controlling the risks, controlling the unexpected. And to a degree, that’s healthy – it’s sane. If someone has no ability with that, that’s a problem.
But too much of that control can be too much of a good thing. And it can keep us zipping past all the little places in our lives where God – or spirituality, or love, however you think of it – is knocking at a little rabbit door to say, “Come look over here. Come through this door, and you’ll find a whole new lovely place that I’m just dying to show you.”
When we’re clipping along to the next Big Thing, we can be deaf to those gentle knocks, we can be numb to that tap on the shoulder. And you might think, So what if I am? What am I losing? To which I might respond that the more we wake up to the taps and nudges, the more we make space for little timeless moments wedged into the flow of time – and the more we realize there’s stuff on offer that might really help us.
Basically, it’s called paying attention. In fact, it’s one of the spiritual practices that we’ll do together in our fall program, based on Barbara Brown Taylor’s book An Altar in the World. Her writing on the practice of paying attention fits right in, I think, with this Gospel reading that’s all about having your plans thrown off, having the day changed.
She says that paying attention creates a sense of reverence that has little or nothing to do with going to church. Instead it makes a kind of reverence for life because it makes us aware of how things really work in our lives, the subtle mechanics of it all that we might not usually notice until we stumble over them. Reverence changes the pace of your day; it makes you give yourself over to what’s in front of you. And that’s a really good thing.
Not that I’m dissing having a day’s plan. As a single parent with an overly fulltime job, there’s no way I could keep parenting and keep working without a plan for my day, most of which I try to get done. This isn’t about giving up the gifts of organization and intentionality and the art of juggling, which I know many households around here do really well.
What I am talking about is adding a gift to those that are already there – adding a gift to the pile under the tree. The gift of allowing ourselves to wake up to the quiet knocks and taps and nudges in the places that we thought were real low points, unredeemable – or annoyances, or just what we’ve gotta get past till something better came along.
The point being that it’s not just another thing to do – you know, like writing “Paying Attention” on the day’s long list.
To figure out the point of paying attention, just ask yourself this – Why would it help? Why could it help to notice the cracks and crevices of your day, to see transitions as points of arrival and then leave the old map behind?
Well, maybe the bottom line here is that we realize more and more that we’re not alone. That there’s really something, or someone, there, some loving One at work right alongside us in our day. Not just checking in for the big moments, not setting the wheels in motion then copping a cappuccino over at Old City Coffee. It means someone is right there in those ornery moments, in the very un-lofty feelings, in the right turns where you meant to turn left.
And if that someone is using those moments to bring you a little more peace, or a little more insight, or somehow to help you feel a little more like yourself – if someone is there doing that in the real moments of a real day, then that’s pretty damn good news.
Because it means it’s not all on us. The successes, the effectiveness of our planning, making the day work for us and the people we love and feel responsible for, doing good works in this ridiculous world – to realize that God is hard at work in our regular days means it’s not all on us.
And maybe then we start to grip a little less, and to breathe a little easier. And we can feel like, even if there are still very big things left to take care of in the day, “right now” just feels a little lighter. And we see things that otherwise we might have missed – and that’s the really exciting part.
Gifts or answers that we thought we had to work a lot harder for might really right there on offer. Right there for the taking.
There for the taking.
I think that’s the basic idea behind our fall program and so much of our time here together, as we journey together in looking at a way that God, love, spirituality, is right there for the taking. Maybe in places it never occurred to us to look.
And what’s important about looking at that together – beyond just what I can do in a sermon or what you can do sitting at home with a book – is that it’s not easy to go deeper in these in-between places in life. It might sound like a no-brainer, but our old habits of management come to the fore really quickly, and it sometimes take holding someone’s hand – so to speak – to stop and look at things a little differently. Other people can reflect back to us things we miss, or they can just sit with us as we try to say things we’re not used to saying.
Looking for God, for spirituality, in all the bits of our lives takes trust, and that’s a big part of what builds community. I think we all know it’s a big part of what builds any relationship.
And maybe it’s what Paul is talking about in the letter to the Ephesians today. When we come together as people with our eye on Jesus, we automatically stop being “strangers and aliens” to each other. Instead, we all share a household, all of us. And what a great image – we’re all in a household together, not crammed in to a duplex like mine, but in some gracious roomy household that doesn’t make us feel closed in as much as it makes us feel encircled.
We belong – not because we’re all agreeing on everything, or because we all like each other all the time. Right….?! We all belong because we believe or at least hope that Love is working right along each of us, in the decisions and mistakes and successes of a day.
It really becomes like a web, a network, which the letter to the Ephesians makes clear – it’s very Facebook-y, really, if you want to get away from all this cornerstone imagery. Our connection with God's Facebook page affects all our connections with each other.
Listen to the words Paul uses: people had felt like they were outsiders, left out, out of the network, without God, and while no one is ever without God from God’s point of view, it’s true that from a human point of view we can easily feel like we’re without God. And Paul is saying that now everybody, no matter how you felt before, is on the inside. Each one of us is a place in which God dwells.
Which is what this whole paying attention thing is about. We’re just paying attention to how God is hanging out, dwelling, in each of us, in the expected events and the unexpected ones, the big moments, and the totally invisible ones.
You are a dwelling place of the holy.
So what do you do with that?
Good question. Keep me posted.