July 28, 2021, Orchard Ridge UCC - Mark 1: 32-38
(You can see a video starting with the Gospel reading and the sermon here.)
My friend Charlie is a doctor in the Intensive Care Unit at one of our local hospitals, His specialty is respiratory illnesses. So as COVID-19 cases began filling up the beds in the ICU, he was in the center of the storm.
As Mark said of life in Jesus’ times, “That evening, after the sun was down, they brought sick and evil-afflicted people to him, the whole city lined up at his door!”
That’s the way it was in our hospitals as the pandemic was hitting its peak. That’s the way it still is in hospitals in southwestern Missouri or in Mexico or in Malaysia. They are bringing in the sick and medical workers around the world are trying to cure them.
Over the past year, people here have had to care for aging parents or for friends, for young children bored with staying home and attending school on a computer. Teachers have had to figure out new ways to teach when their students were not in the classroom. We have all had to figure out how to cope with disease, with life-changes – and then with the stark realities of racial disparities and political polarization that have deeply affected all of our lives.
I think we can probably identify with Jesus wanting to get away before dawn that morning in the Gospel story. Or with the desire of the character in the Cat Stevens song that Jim sang: “I left my folk and friends / With the aim to clear my mind out.”
Oh – excuse me a moment. I think my phone is running low on power and I need to plug it in…
There. Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah – lots of people have gotten slammed physically, emotionally, spiritually over the last year plus. I think like Jesus that evening in Capernaum, like Charlie in the ICU, like so many of us at so many points along the way, we have been feeling like our batteries have run down.
It turns out, it is a lot easier to recharge my phone than to recharge our lives.
Yet that’s the Re-word for today – recharge.
In some ways, recharging our bodies is not the hard part if we take the time and the care to do that. You know the litany – get enough sleep, take a nap, eat good food, take a walk or a bike ride, or – if you are really ambitious – a run. We can help our bodies heal and regain the energy we need to go on.
But tending our spirits, recharging our souls – that’s trickier.
Even when Jesus tried to do that, the crowds were after him again.
“While it was still night, way before dawn, he got up and went out to a secluded spot and prayed. Simon and those with him went looking for him. They found him and said, ‘Everybody's looking for you.’ "
Just when we think we have gotten past the pandemic, COVID cases bump up around this nation and even more so around the world. We are waiting for the dawn, but it is still dark.
Just when we think we are making progress on creating a more just and inclusive society, there is another reminder that we have a long ways to go. We are waiting for the dawn but it is still dark.
Just when we think we are breaking down the barriers that keep people apart – barriers of religion or politics or heritage – we notice that new walls have gone up and they seem higher than ever. We are waiting for the dawn but it is still dark.
Let me take you out under a starlit sky. Maybe it is not as dark as it appears.
Many years ago – it was in the summer of 1977 – and I was on a retreat, wondering about how I knew God, whether God knew me, whether God even existed, what exactly God was anyway.
One very clear night, I was sitting under a tree not unlike the one in this photo – although it was summer and the tree had its leaves. But beyond the leaves were the stars – a whole universe of stars. There were not intellectual answers to my questions in that moment, and yet there was a sense of the breadth of the divine above me, around me, within me.
In the darkness of that night, my spirit felt transported – you might even say recharged.
But it was still night. While I love the stars in this picture, I also love that dawn is emerging on the horizon. Something new is emerging. And with that – at least for me who is definitely a morning person – is a new sense of energy.
As Cynthia Reynolds wrote in her poem that we heard at the beginning of worship today, “This morning is new and so am I.”
And then there is the tree.
Kerry McLeish is a spiritual director who works with those who are weary or exhausted. She writes about how in her times of exhaustion, she finds that being in nature helps sustain her emotionally – especially when she can spend time with trees. Here’s what she wrote:
“There was something about their solidity, their rootedness, their age. They had been here before I was and would still be standing long after I was not. I was comforted thinking about how they went through seasons and weathered the effects of those seasons.”
For me, the tree was a place I could lean against, a place where I could be reminded of how our lives are both deeply rooted and stretching ever outward. And the branches remind me that after I stand in awe of the stars, am energized by the dawn, steadied by the tree, I can now reach out to what needs attention around me.
There is an ebb and flow to this, after all. There was for Jesus and there is for us as well.
Listen again to the end of the Gospel story. Jesus was praying in that time as dawn was approaching. The word prayer in there is an important one, I think. Jesus was putting himself in that space where he could connect with God, where’s God’s love and energy could recharge his spirit.
And then his followers showed up. "Everybody's looking for you," they said. And Jesus replied, "Let's go to the rest of the villages so I can preach there also. This is why I've come."
He was not about to get stuck in one place. He was not about to ignore the needs of those around him or his mission that he articulated in the Gospel according to Luke just before Luke tells this same story. That mission? “To bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”
Let me leave you then with some questions. I’ll pause for moment after each one to give you time to ponder. You will know the answers that make the most sense to you.
Where in your life is your energy running low?
What batteries do you need to recharge in your own being?
Sometimes, unplugging is a way to get some rest and renewal. But then we need to plug in if we are going to be recharged.
Where to you get your energy renewed?
What can help you move forward with your life and with the way you see your mission in our world?
She helped take our spirits to, in her words, “find light in this never-ending shade.”
“We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,” she said,
“and the norms and notions of what “just” is
isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.”
And much like Jesus told his closest followers that now that he was recharged, it was time to move on, not to get stuck with what just was, Gorman called the nation – and us – to let that energy of the dawn carry us forward.
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
It is important to find those places where we can rest our spirits.
It is important that we find ways to recharge our spirits.
And it is important then for us to let that fresh energy carry us on to help those closest to us and those in our wider world reach their full potential as well.
Hmm… I think my phone is recharged now.
It’s time for us to let God’s Spirit recharge us. We can end with a song that carries on our theme of new energy in the morning, a song filled with energy and hope. It’s “I Woke Up This Morning” is a song with deep roots in the African-American tradition and it was adapted during the civil rights movement to say “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.” But for today, let’s use the traditional “stayed on Jesus.”
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