July 23, 2006
Year B
Title: Waiting In The Boat
Theme: Sometimes we need to wait in the boat, and watch God can do
on the shores of the world.
During our vacation to visit family during the early part of this month,
Douglas and I spent a lot of time reading, in between seeing parents in
Mississippi and west Texas. Douglas was reading a book called Tulia,
which told the story of that notorious west Texas town and the corrupt
police force that prosecuted a large portion of its African-American on
trumped drug charges. I, on the other hand, decided to take the low
road in choosing the epic entitled Devils On The Deep Blue Sea: The
Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America’s Cruise-Ship
Empires. While on vacation, I decided to read about the vacation
industry. But Douglas and I also went on a cruise last year for the first
time, and I just became fascinated with the whole cruise ship industry
itself during that time, though I think both of us, admittedly, had mixed
feelings about the cruise ship experience itself.
What fascinated me the most is the whole idea of the cruise ship itself
being the destination—in the last 30 years or so, that idea has been the
central revolution within the industry. For the first part of the 20th
century, ships were transportation vehicles to get from one place to
another—you got on a ship to get from New York to London, they were
passenger ships—getting to your port of call was the point of getting on
the ship itself, but by our modern era, the ship actually becomes the
centerpiece of the vacation. From their, this whole self-contained
vacation world within cruise ships themselves is introduced, with no real
pretense that you are going anywhere in particular, aside from a few
stops in the Caribbean, or some other region of the world. Ships ceased
really being transportation to a particular place and really just became
hotels, sometimes pretty garish hotels—and all the shows and eating
and entertainment stopped being the distractions to entertain us until we
got to our destinations, but became the destination itself. And to be
honest, that is the way I felt about it…I had no real desire to visit the few
ports we stopped at—for me the point was being on the boat itself, doing
absolutely nothing in particular. Sometimes you just need to do nothing,
you know, and that was what I was seeking on that particular vacation.
The whole idea of a boat being a place where you do nothing but rest is
not all that new, really, and even our text today has a boat being the
place where the disciples go to rest—it becomes a deserted place for
them, as the text says—so the great thing for me is that I can argue that I
simply followed the biblical pattern—I went to a boat to rest, just as the
earliest disciples were commanded to do by Jesus. Clearly, I am very
spiritual, committed Christian, in going on this cruise: I hope that you all
recognize that. In my attempt to cull down the spoken word, I edited a lot
of the story but I want to quickly give you a sense of what is happening
here. Earlier in chapter 6 of Mark, we have Jesus telling his 12 disciples
being told to go out and preach and teach and cast out demons in Jesus’
name, and they do these things themselves, they perform the miracles,
and where once it was Jesus who had been the sole healer and miracle
performer, they now become healers and miracle workers themselves,
they now become the focus of people’s hopes and dreams, the people’s
deep desires for healing in their own lives. They come back to Jesus
from their mission, amazed at what has been done through them—and
yet almost immediately—and this word “immediately” is used a lot in the
Gospel of Mark: Jesus is always dashing about, moving quickly through
this particular Gospel narrative—almost immediately Jesus invites them
to rest, to go with him to deserted place. He wants to take care of them,
and so they head out onto the Galilean sea, to find that place where they
can be alone, as Jesus has done by himself many times already.
I suspect he thought his disciples were experiencing something that
sociologists have labeled “compassion fatigue,” the moment that many in
the caring professions experience as the emotional wall that many hit,
where people simply do not have the emotional energy to care anymore,
or to feel compassion very deeply anymore, and this phenomenon is
especially prevalent if one continually deals with the deepest and most
heartbreaking needs of human beings. Social workers experience
compassion fatigue all the time, and most of us have experienced it at
some point in our lives—we can only experience so many heartbreaking
appeals for starving children on television before our minds and spirits
just shut down. Certainly I think Houston as a city has experienced this
very human reaction with last year’s influx of Katrina evacuees—some of
the coverage you see in the newspapers and televisions about the
possible misdeeds of these fairly new arrivals to our city seems tinged
with an anger and deep suspicion that I think that has been brought
about, at least partly, by the city hitting that emotional wall known as
“compassion fatigue.” We seem tired and maybe the way some of
express that fatigue is by sometimes vilifying or lumping all together the
people we once sought to help.
But as much as I hope that we’re not doing that, I get the whole idea of
compassion fatigue, and I have certainly felt it a few times myself as a
minister. I know ministers who have left the ranks of the clergy because
they felt overwhelmed by emotional demands of pastoring a
congregation—the amount of people leaving the ranks of the clergy
profession within the first 5-10 years of beginning their ministry is
sometimes staggering. I don’t know how many of you know the name
Barbara Brown Taylor, but she is an Episcopal priest who was once
named one of the best preachers in the world by Baylor University
(believe it or not). Recently, she left the priesthood and has chronicled
that journey in a book called Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, where
she tells her story of entering and then eventually leaving ordained
ministry because of what she felt was a creeping compassion fatigue that
was about to overwhelm her. Taylor says that she left the ordained
ministry in order to keep her faith, and now in your new role as a teacher
of religion, she has found a balance she could not find in the parish. I
share that story mostly because its a reminder that most everyone hits
that kind of wall, even the most well-meaning people, and whatever we
do in life, especially if we work with human beings who find themselves in
personal crisis, we may find ourselves where Barbara Brown Taylor was,
or even where the disciples are in our text, tired from the new job of
caring for others, this new job they had been given by Jesus, and so
they are waiting in the boat, as Jesus greets the 5000 who have followed
him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
Now, I have to admit, the whole idea of seeing the disciples waiting for
Jesus in that boat is something I have imagined into the text. The text
only says that Jesus got out of the boat, to greet this new crowd who was
hungering to be feed by his words. The disciples were all trying to get
away to that deserted place, including Jesus, but the crowds see where
they plan to land and greet them at the very place where the 12 and
Jesus had wanted to be alone. These people hadn’t had enough and
the people were still hungering to be fed by the presence and words of
this Jesus of Nazareth who has made such a stir in the area. The
disciples were exhausted, they were tired, and so I imagine that Jesus
just leaves them in the boat, as he climbs out to greet the crowds. The
text itself doesn’t say that the disciples stayed in the boat, but it also just
seems to imply that it was only Jesus who went back onto shore and
plunged back into the waiting crowds. Later the disciples will go and tell
Jesus that the crowd is obviously hungry and in need of food, but after
that particular moment, the disciples simply fade away in the Mark’s
Gospel for the next chapter of this narrative—its almost as if Jesus goes
out to meet and preach by himself by the end of chapter 6, because the
disciples are not even mentioned again until chapter 8. Maybe they
have gone to rest, maybe they’ve taken a sabbatical, maybe they’ve
gone home to see family and friends, and to have the chance to wake up
at 10 AM rather than 6 AM.
I am probably reading too much into it, but I think I want to believe that
the disciples stayed in the boat, because I know I would have wanted to
stay in the boat, I would have wanted to get some “down time,” away from
the people clamoring for more than I could give them, even with this new
power and authority given to me by Jesus, if I had been one of those
earliest of disciples. We’ve all been there, we’ve all been stretched to
the limit, and ready to give up on ourselves, and others, and just walk
away from wounds we cannot heal or from concerns we do not have the
energy to address. There have been moments like that for me, as a
minister, as a friend, as a partner—and I suspect there have been
moments like that for you. There are just times you want to stay in the
boat, where the boat itself seems like a good destination, where you can
see what is happening on the shore, but you are up on the upper deck,
lounging in the sun with a pina colada, with your frivolous mystery thriller
book on your lap. I wonder if Jesus wanted the disciples to do the same,
minus the pool and book, of course, since this was probably a small
fishing boat, and not a cruise ship. I wonder if the boat was the
destination for them at that moment, as they look wearily at the crowd of
people they did not have the energy to meet and serve and share with.
Jesus leaves them there in that boat, resting, watching what he was
doing in this world.
Maybe that is part of it…sometimes we have to sit in the boat, sometimes
we have to go wait in the car, and we have to wait for someone stronger
than us to finish the job. Ever been told to go wait in the car, while your
mom or dad had to finish up doing something that only he or she could
do? I have, and it was usually was because I either was too tired to help
out my dad finish some more adult job I was totally useless in helping
with in the first place. There are times when we need to wait in the boat,
and see what God is doing on the shore of the world. There are some
things we cannot fix, or if we can, we simply cannot do it because we are
too tired to do anything at that moment. The disciples watch from the
boat, from a distance, and they see what God is doing through this
friend, this rabbi they have come to follow and love. And even with this
newfound power they had been given earlier in this chapter, they realize
very quickly that they somehow cannot be the one, this Jesus, who gave
them the power in the first place. In the coming verses, even Jesus will
take time for himself to be alone with God, to go to the deserted place
that is devoid of other humans, but so full of the Divine, full of the God
that can only be found in the silence.
There is something here, something about resting and simply watching
what God can do, when we let go trying to do everything, and to heal
everyone and to make all things right. Like Jesus, they too have
experienced what God could do through them—they had healed the sick,
they had cast out demons, they had preached the Gospel—they knew
what God could do WITH them, but now, in the boat, they had the
chance to learn what God could do WITHOUT them, as they see Jesus
plunge into the crowd to feed the people with his words, and later, to
feed them with loaves and fishes. Sometimes you have to trust that the
work will get done WITHOUT you, that God can do something in this
world, that God can show compassion to God’s own world without you
and me necessarily being the instrument of that divine compassion every
time. John Westerhoff has said that the way atheism is characterized in
our modern world is by the belief that “if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.”
And don’t get me wrong, please know that I do believe that: yes, we are
the hands and feet of God in this world, but we are not the ONLY hands
and feet that God has, and sometimes we have to trust that others will do
the work we cannot do at this moment, for whatever reason. Like Jesus,
we may have to sit in the boat and watch what God can do through the
presence of others, to seem that God can do what we cannot do at the
moment, even with those we love and care for. Hard stuff, and a hard
truth for someone like me, and a truth that I don’t practice very often, I
admit—I know Douglas is probably rolling his eyes at this point—but it is
true, that God can sometimes do it without us.
Now, of course, we’ll all have to get out of the boat at some point, but
maybe not right now, because this may be the moment when Christ has
asked us to stay, and to watch what God can do WITHOUT us. There
will be moments when we need to get out of the car, and get out of the
boat, to help our mother or father or God do what needs to be done, but
just not right now. Our work is to believe, at least for a few moments that
the destination is the boat itself, and that this boat has been transformed
into a viewing stand in order to watch and see how God can heal the
world without us. Our hands, our presence will be always be needed
later, but there are times when we are told watch and see the other ways
that God does what God does in this world. For a few moments in our
lives, we are simply asked to rest and gaze onto the shore, and be in
wonder at the deep tenderness with which God can heal the world
without, and maybe even heal us as well. Amen
This sermon relies heavily on “Waiting In The Boat” by The Rev. Martin
B. Copenhaver published in June 29, 1994 issue of the Christian
Century.
