July 21, 2024, Orchard Ridge UCC, Madison WI
A video of the sermon is here.
The week before last, I was up at Moon Beach camp with my daughter, Julia, and three-year old granddaughter, Ellie. It was the week after many folks from Orchard Ridge were up there for your annual time at camp.
Sleep, that is, until 2:30 one morning, when Ellie woke up in tears and wanted all the lights turned on. Julia was exhausted but her daughter needed compassion. So the lights went on, Julia cuddled Ellie and soon she was back to sleep – but mom wasn’t.
That same week, I got to know a man from Edgerton, a retired guy whose wife is four-years into a journey with Alzheimer’s. He increasingly must be with her - and it is exhausting. He does get away occasionally to be with an Alzheimer’s support group. And he got to go to camp because his daughter and family came up from Texas. She stayed with her mom while dad and the two granddaughters went to Moon Beach.
“How’s it going back home?” I asked as the week went on. I knew that his compassion for his wife never left his thoughts for long. He told me that one of the things he had to deal with was her inclination to turn the thermostat down to 58 degrees. Then he would turn it back up when he noticed. He told his daughter that was an issue to watch out for.
When he had talked with his daughter the previous evening, he asked how things were going. “I am losing the thermostat war,” she told him.
Exhaustion. Responding to needs. That was story we heard about Jesus today in the Gospel.
Just before the section from Mark that Dee read today, Jesus had been rejected by the folks in his hometown of Nazareth.
Then he sent his followers out to help those dealing with what they called “unclean spirits,” what we today might call people dealing with mental illness. They also reached out to those who were ill and brought a sense of healing.
Then his cousin John the Baptist was executed on the orders of King Herod.
You can see why Jesus and his closest followers might have felt a bit worn out, in need of quiet, a time for prayer. As the reading said, Jesus told his friends, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
Nice try, Jesus.
Pretty soon there was a crowd. And, as the reading said, Jesus had compassion for them.
Jesus goes away to pray again. But the apostles were out fishing and got caught in a storm. Jesus got up again, this time to rescue them. When they finally reached land, the people surged again, bringing people who were ill for Jesus to heal.
It never ends, the needs of all the people. Over and over, Jesus tries to find a place of refuge for himself in the midst of it all and winds up reaching out to those in need. He was not a good example of that life/balance thing we hear so much about. But he was a good example of giving hope to those who were at the edges of despair.
I think some of you here are familiar with Mitri Raheb. He is a Lutheran minister who grew up in Bethlehem. He says he is pretty sure his great, great, great, great, great grandmother babysat for Jesus. He served as pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church there for 30 years.
He has lived through the Israeli occupation of Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank. And now he is in the heart of the current horrors in that part of our world.
There are people here who know a lot about the crisis in Israel and Palestine. You have found ways to react with compassion to the horrors in Israel on Oct. 7 and to the horrors in Gaza and the West Bank since then. You can only imagine the sense of exhaustion that must envelope Mitri in the midst of all this. Where does he find the resources to bring compassion to all of those who are suffering?
In part, he anchors himself in hope for the future – hope informed by his faith, hope made real by his vision for what can be even in the midst of today’s horrors. He is a theologian among his many talents and has been leading an exploration called “Theology after Gaza.” As hard as this time is, it is not the end and Mitri is always looking ahead, no matter how discouraging, how exhausting the present moment may be.
At the center of that relationship has been Ruthann Landsness. I am pretty sure there have been times at Casa Alitas when she is feeling both overwhelmed by the needs, exasperated by our governments’ policies and tired from all her efforts. And yet when someone needs her, she is there.
She said she knows she has skills speaking Spanish so she can talk with people even more exhausted than her. “All I have to do is think of the hundreds of people to whom I have brought smiles to their faces.”
What gets her up the next day? Not a naïve optimism, she said, but hope. And meditation helps sustain her. One of her mantras is “Just for today,” adding “If I can do it once, I can do it again.”
And, of course, she does not do that alone. Neither does Mitri. Neither does my new friend caring for his wife nor my daughter up in the middle of the night to comfort Ellie. Neither did Jesus, for that matter. He asked his followers to go out to care for others, he asked them to get food for the hungry crowd.
The day after Julia’s sleepless night when Ellie got her up, she was pretty tired. So during nap time – “feet on bed” as it is called at Moon Beach – she texted me to ask if I could take Ellie after nap time so Julia could get some uninterrupted sleep. Of course I could.
My friend’s daughter came from Houston to be with her mother while her father got a week away. She was not only caring for her mother – she was caring for him as well.
While Mitri is a visible leader of the shrinking Christian community in Palestine, he works hard to keep expanding the circles of people supporting not only his work but the urgent needs of so many in that land. His U.S. organization, Bright Stars of Bethlehem, has as its motto, “Hope is What We Do.” Hope even in the face of so much that can lead to despair.
When he wrote an essay for the Religion News Service this past Holy Week, he said that without a cease fire and the release of the Israeli hostages, “the region will be pulled into a dark spiral of misery, reprisal and instability. We will continue to cry out: Stop.” Then he added, “We will continue to practice hope.”
And as he looked at the story of Easter, he wrote, “We are waiting not for angels to roll away the stone, but rather people who hear the call for justice, for liberation, for peace.”
Hope. Working together. A vision of what can be.
That sustains Mitri. It sustains those working at Casa Alitas. I think those are examples that can sustain us in whatever is wearing us down.
Whether it is the political turmoil swirling around us right now, the worries about climate change, the lack of housing for so many, the anger that too often bubbles to the surface, or whether it is caring for an ill relative, grieving the death of a loved one, helping a child struggling with addiction – whatever it is, I think we can learn from the stories of Jesus and so many others that seek to walk in his way.
Here's a starting point.
Acknowledge what is exhausting you. Don’t pretend that everything is OK.
Sometimes, you will have to get up and deal with it yourself – at least at first. Then find ways you can involve others. You do not to do any of this alone. And as a church community, we have the networks to do this.
And draw on the rich resources in our traditions – the Psalms, the hymns we sing, the prayers we say together and alone. They can offer sustenance along the way.
Since there seems to be a tradition here of the preacher sending you out with a homework assignment, here are a few questions to ponder this week:
When do we take care of ourselves?
When do we sacrifice ourselves for others?
How can we help each other get rest and be resilient?
Let me tell you one more story that will take us to our closing hymn. It is a story of one more person facing the grimmest of odds – imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II, facing execution.
And yet in that time when all must have seemed dark, he found hope in his trust in God and help in getting his words out of prison – words that have offered inspiration to others across almost 80 years.
He was sacrificing himself for others. Surely he knew exhaustion yet he kept reaching out, moving forward, sustained by the Psalms, the Gospels, prayer and ultimately, his trust in God’s love, come what may.
On Dec. 31, 1944, from the Gestapo bunker in Berlin where he was being held, he wrote to his friends the words that became this hymn. It was smuggled out of the prison, given to his mother a few days later and then published in several places over the years. He was executed four months later, on April 9, 1945.
Bonhoeffer’s heart is tormented, his cup of sorrow is brimming over, yet he believes that his life is still part of God’s love and care.
The hymn Bonhoeffer wrote is in our hymnals – it is #413. And the words will be on the screen. It may not be familiar to many of you, so I’d invite Vicki to play the melody through once.
No comments:
Post a Comment