JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO
Exodus 18:13-27; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Jeff VamosJesus said to the apostles, "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.
--Mark 6:31
- Harvard president Neil Rudenstine overslept one morning in November 1994. For this zealous perfectionist, in the midst of a million-dollar-a-day fund-raising campaign, it was cause for alarm. After years of intensive, nonstop toil and struggle, in an atmosphere that rewarded frantic busyness and overwork, and having been assaulted by a hail of never-finished tasks, President Rudenstine collapsed.... Only after a three-month sabbatical, during which he read Lewis Thomas, listened to Ravel, and walked with his wife on a Caribbean beach, was Rudenstine able to return to his post. That week, his picture was on the cover of Newsweek magazine beside a one-word banner headline: "'Exhausted!"1
I wanted to read you this snippet from a book called Sabbath, by Wayne Muller, as I begin this morning because I think it is a parable of modern life.
As the quote in your bulletin from Thomas Merton suggests, our busyness, the rapid pace of our lifestyle, is a kind of violence. The most pervasive form of middle class poverty in our country consists not of a lack of material things, but a lack of time. We always are complaining about our lack of time--do we ever think about what we would do if we did indeed have the time we complain about not having? What is the real purpose we'd be living out if we had that time? It's a cultural trend that doesn't seem it's going to change any time soon.
Here's a telling story. Several years ago, Catherine told me about a friend, the mother of a six year old, and about a scene at the family breakfast table one morning. The mom was rushing around, talking on the phone, getting ready for work, getting the kid ready. And at one point, her six-year old daughter looked up from her breakfast cereal and asked, "Mommy--when can I be busy like you?"
In our culture--it's ironic isn't it that being busy is a disease we all complain about, and yet at the same time, it's a matter of pride. If you're not busy--you're a nobody. If you're not busy, there's something wrong with you. Does anyone boast about being having too much time? "You know--I just have so little to do." Even though we're at different places with this too--even if we do have a lot of time on our hands, we are loath to admit it.
This past couple of weeks, our family has been hosting family and friends from out of town. And last week, I rearranged my schedule to spend afternoons with friends, and often we found ourselves at the pool. (One of the best moves we've made since coming to New Jersey was joining one of the community pools--especially in the kind of weather we were having this past week). And so I showed up in the late afternoon several days this past week at the pool. And of course, there were church members there. And I started to feel sort of apologetic, like I shouldn't be there. I shouldn't be lounging around the pool at 4:30. I should be out visiting the sick, or doing emails, reading theology. I should be working. Then I thought--what kind of example do I want to set for people? That of a workaholic?
We should be careful, though, not to divorce our own cultural world from that of the Bible's with respect to this whole business of busyness; we should realize that Jesus himself was subject to the very same temptations around being busy as we are...temptations to become enmeshed, captured by the tyranny of the urgent.
At the beginning of this passage, we see a picture of the Disciples overwhelmed by Jesus' popularity. People were suddenly coming from far and wide to see Jesus, and to hear his teaching. They were teaching, healing, hosting people. They wanted to capture the moment, capitalize on Jesus' popularity. They were busy--so busy, we read in the text today, that they didn't even have leisure to eat.
And Jesus tells the disciples to go away from the crowd, to go away from all that--the busyness and chaos--and find "a deserted place all by yourselves."
That phenomenon--of withdrawing from the world, from the busyness, from the work of teaching and healing, and then returning to the people and to the hard work that must have been exhausting--is a theme throughout Mark and the rest of the Gospels. Jesus, so much in demand, with so many important things to attend to, with so many people wanting his attention, seems constantly to be wandering off by himself to pray. He is constantly taking time to be unproductive, so that he can meet the many spiritual demands he faces in his ministry.
In the very beginning of Mark's gospel, after Jesus' public debut--his first healing miracles at the beginning of the book--right after that, Jesus wanders off into the wilderness. When he comes back, Peter says to him, basically, Where have you been? "Everyone's been looking for you."2
Christianity is a religion of withdrawal and return. An important part of the tradition has involved taking people away from the world, from the busyness and concern of the world--not so they can forget the world, but so they can engage with the world, so they can pray for the world. Withdrawal and return. It's a religion that is like breath--you must inhale in order to exhale. Both are essential to the maintenance of life.
The problem is--if we spend our lives exhaling, always giving, always busy, exhausting ourselves and never resting, we die.
There's an image that often comes to my mind for the way I see us living out our modern life. It's like looking at life, at the universe, through a tube. And you see in there, in that little circle are my life, my family, my work. And the problem is, so much of my anxiety goes into what's happening there; there's so much worry about it. Are there enough people in the pews? Is my family OK? Am I a good enough parent? And so on. We worry about our co-workers, our family, our in-laws, and our anxiety is like our tongue compulsively playing with a loose tooth.
But outside this view through the tube of modern life is a vast expanse of...life. Real life. We experience the mystery and miracle of a life lived in the presence of God, who's known in this great vastness, if we can simply step away from that little view, and look around. And then when we see that bigger view of the universe, we can then see those problems in that context, then suddenly we find they're not as big as we thought. And we see ourselves becoming better parents. Better co-workers. Grandmothers. Spouses. Friends.
Wayne Muller's book--again it's called Sabbath, and I'd recommend it to your reading--is full of stories of people who reoriented their life because of a cataclysmic event. A man who had a massive heart attack, and reoriented his whole life. A massage therapist who found lumps on her breast, endured cancer treatment, and found an entirely larger universe than the one she'd been living in. An overworked social worker who was nearly killed by a hit-and-run collision, and during her long rehabilitation, she began to listen carefully for those things that brought her life.
One of my favorite movies is called Joe vs. The Volcano (whence the title for the sermon). It came out in the early 90s, one of Stephen Spielberg's earlier films...it's actually a very bad movie, and I wouldn't really recommend your seeing it, but it has some scenes that somehow keep coming back to me. It's about a guy who hates his job and his life; it's a story about a man versus himself. One day, he finds out via a shady doctor that he has a "brain cloud" and has 3 months to live. After learning this news, he embarks on a journey--he meets a woman, and gets shipwrecked. And so there he is in the middle of the ocean--the woman (played by Meg Ryan, the man is played by Tom Hanks)--it's the middle of the night and the woman is passed out from dehydration, and we see the main character, Tom Hanks, rise to stand on the raft, shaky and delirious from thirst, and he sees the moon rise--it fills the whole screen--and he stares into it and says, "My God, I had no idea it was so big." That life is so...big.
It's important to say, though, that we don't need a cataclysm to get this bigger view of the universe. We can practice taking that larger view every week. Even every day. It's called practicing Sabbath, and it's a fundamental and essential part of our Christian tradition--a tradition we can often forget about.
If you're doing the Year of the Bible, you'll note just how many times you hear the commandment, "remember the Sabbath...remember the Sabbath." It's not the first commandment, but it's the most oft-repeated one. It seems that the Sabbath is so important, because that is the time--the time out of our normal time of busyness--that we reconnect with the God who led the Hebrew people out of slavery to freedom. It's the time when we get a glimpse again of that bigger picture, that larger universe, that central affirmation that forms the core and content of our faith.
So, I want to leave you...me...us (this applies to me too) with a challenge: to find ways to practice Sabbath, every week, every day. And that means not just going to church--which you've fulfilled this morning and is perhaps the most important, the "baseline," but there is more to practicing Sabbath than that. So here are some ideas.
Several years ago, I used to watch a TV show called "Twin Peaks." Again--it was a sort of bad entertainment, but it was addictive; maybe you remember it. Somehow, I got hooked in to all the characters, and the murder-plot that the show centered around. And one of my favorite characters was a guy named Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle McLaughlin), an FBI agent working with the local police to crack the case. And there's one scene that somehow has stuck with me all these years. Special Agent Cooper is eating some pie at the local diner (he loves the local pie), and he and the Sheriff receive a hot tip. The Sheriff is in a hurry to pursue it, to get up and go right away, when Special Agent Cooper holds up a finger and says, "Now, wait. We can take our time. Here's a lesson I've learned in life," he continues holding up a finger. "Each day, every day...give yourself a gift."
Again, for some reason, that aphorism has stuck with me. It comes back to me, because I think it's a wise practice--that we ought to remember once a day, every day to practice one thing that is Sabbath. To take off your shoes and feel the cool earth beneath your feet. To do yoga, to take a walk outside, to look out at the trees. But, do one small thing that is your conscious way of practicing Sabbath, whatever that thing might be.
Invest in your own renewal. I think it's Steven Covey, in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, who tells the story of the man who says, "I'm too busy to get gas." Do we not, though, live our lives this way? We're too busy to take care of ourselves, so that our work is fruitful--we're too busy working to do that, and it makes our work more unproductive. Investing in your own renewal means perhaps taking time for a retreat--get away for a weekend. Spend some time alone for an afternoon. Enroll in a learning or personal development experience that changes your focus away from the forest, to get a view of the wonderful forest we're living in. In Stephen Covey's book, he calls this "sharpening your saw." It's awfully hard to cut wood with a dull saw--but that often describes our approach to life.
Learn to say no. I find that this is a trap that clergy especially tend to get into, but we all struggle with it, don't we? It's the idea that I am the only one who can do it--who can do this or that important job. No one else has the know-how, the ability to do this thing. Many of us also feel obligated when someone asks us to do something, we feel guilty saying 'No.'
The story from Exodus we read this morning is a great reminder that no one is indispensable. I love the interaction between Moses and his father-in-law Jethro; Moses is Moses, but he's still just a son-in-law to Jethro. Moses is doing the job of "judging" the people of Israel all by himself. People were coming with cases to be adjudicated day and night. If you keep going like this, "you'll wear yourself out," says his father-in-law. "Son, you've got to learn to delegate." Saying no means that someone else has to--or gets to--say yes. We may think the task is a burden, but someone else may delight in it--and sharing the load, sharing the authority can be a way for someone else to explore their gifts. Or--if there is no one else to do it, maybe it wasn't meant to be done.
Develop a spiritual discipline. Perhaps this is the highest goal any of us can seek. To find a way to actively commune with God on a regular basis. Some of you are doing well at that--many of you are doing Year of the Bible, many have a devotional discipline. It's something we need to equip each other to do here--to develop a personal spiritual discipline, beyond reading the Bible. We need to study it together, to talk together about how to apply it to our lives. That practice has become important in my life; I say this not to be boastful, but to be thankful: that my early-morning practice of prayer and meditation has become one of the most important things in my life. I trust that if you were to set aside a time with God--to pray, journal, meditate on scripture--it would change your life.
The challenge for us in our modern life is--in the words of the great mystic Thomas Merton--to find "the root of inner wisdom which makes our work more fruitful."
May God bless your own quest to find in your life, every week, every day, a Sabbath rest in God. Amen.
1 Wayne Muller, Sabbath, P. 4.
2 Mark 1:35-37
July 23, 2006
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