Jesus Needs a Vacation

June 28, 2015

Mark 5:21-43

Last week I went to a meeting of people interested in talking about how we can support the public schools and the diverse interests of the students in this area.  I’ve seen some of the struggles in our schools while serving on the PTA board at Fort Hunt and volunteering in my kids’ classrooms, and through the work we’ve been doing here at St. Aidan’s to help out with the weekend food needs of the at-risk kids.  So when Tuck Bowerfind, the rector of St. Luke’s, sent out an email seeking people to be in conversation about the needs of the schools and how the community can support the kids, I was on board.  

Monday night I sat at a long table with a bunch of other folks - teachers, community leaders, clergy, and even a School Board candidate.  We introduced ourselves and talked about why we were there.  I began to see that there was a wide range of interests, from one person who wanted smaller classroom sizes, to another who wanted to return all the local schools to neighborhood schools, to another who wanted to ensure arts education in the schools.  There were people I agreed with and people I very definitely did not agree with, and even felt offended by.  After an hour went by, Tuck asked who was willing to start building relationships with other people in the community to talk about schools.  He suggested setting up meetings with local principals, PTA presidents, and parent leaders from across Route 1.  The woman who had struck me as self-interested at best wanted to know exactly what issue we’d be talking to them about.  And Tuck started talking about how community organizing works — that you first build relationships and then figure out what issues emerge that we can work on together.  This woman had no interest in being part of such an amorphous group.  And I have to admit, neither did I.  The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a room listening to people wax poetic about problems in the schools and never move on to fix them.  I didn’t have time to “build relationships.”  I have plenty on my plate with work and family and other commitments.  If anything, I needed to find ways to say no to things, not new things to say yes to.  If this group didn’t have something definitive that it was working on that was important to me, I didn’t have time for it.  Building relationships, schmuilding relationships!  What was that going to solve?

And then along came Jesus, gently kicking me in the rear once again.

When we meet Jesus this morning, it looks like the poor guy needs a summer vacation.  I wish I could give him a fruity beach and find him a lounge chair on the beach.

Over the last week, it seems like Jesus has been doing his darndest to find still waters and having no luck.  After healing someone of a withered hand on the Sabbath, Jesus withdrew from the crowd that was plotting against him and headed down to the lakeside.  But another crowd was impressed by all that he had done and followed him down to the lake.  He told his disciples to get a fishing boat ready so he could escape the crowd if needed.  He appointed disciples and preached and taught.  And he was so bogged down by the throng of people around him that he couldn’t even eat a meal.  Finally such a huge group had gathered that he had to get into the boat and sit in it to talk to the people on the shore.  After exhausting himself by sharing parables with the masses, he asked his disciples to take him across to the other shore of the lake.  But of course then, as we heard in here last Sunday, along came a raging storm that almost swamped the boat.  So the disciples woke him up from the only sleep he’d had in days, it seems like, and he calmed the storm and got them safely to the other side.  As soon as they’d landed their boat, immediately a demon-possessed person started shrieking at him.  He exorcized the demons which caused the crowd that had gathered there to implore him to leave.  So he got back in his boat and crossed back to where he’d started, where we find him today.  He is hanging out by the lake when again a large crowd gathers around him.  Along comes one of the synagogue officials, Jairus, begging him to come with him to heal his daughter.  And even as he is detouring to go do that, here comes the hemorrhaging women grasping on to him for healing.  

For Jesus, there is always some new need and pressing coming his way.  Is it possible that for Jesus there are no still waters?

Maybe Jesus needs to read a book I skimmed through recently - Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte.  

Schulte is a staff writer for the Washington Post who is overwhelmed by all of the parts of her life that she is trying to hold together.  As she puts it: “This is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting.  I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door.”

(Is there perhaps anyone who thinks that feels a little bit familiar?)

Schulte finds that everyone she knows feels the same way and so she begins speaking to neuroscientists and sociologists and researching working conditions and child care and home expectations.

For me, the most interesting part of the book is about the daily time-use journal she begins keeping that attempts to track all of her activities.  She brings it to a sociologist known as Father Time, who breaks everything down into 7 categories: paid work, personal care, sleep, leisure, child care, housework, volunteering, and commuting.  This time expert tells her that she actually has 17 hours a week of leisure time.  She is understandably shocked by this, as probably most of us would be who feel like we are on our own precarious hamster wheels.

But when he starts explaining where these mythic 17 hours can be found, he points to things like her time exercising as quietly as possible in the dark so as not to wake sleeping children, time spent organizing logistical help for a sick friend, and, most laughable of all, 2 hours spent waiting for a tow when her car broke down.

So even our leisure time apparently doesn’t feel like leisure.  Schulte goes on to discuss all the ways in which our time has been contaminated.  We engage in one thing which still in the midst of something else.  And our devices add to the challenge, making it seem like they are saving us time when often they are a large perpetrator of the contamination.

Schulte’s book has an appendix with some of the experts' starting points to regain our time.  Things like setting clear expectations about what really needs to be accomplished, saying no, chunking our time so that we work in shorter but more concentrated blocks, and setting aside time to play.  Probably nothing you haven't heard before.

But I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn't measure up well from a time management perspective.  I can’t imagine what Father Time might have to say about his time-use journal.  His logistical planning is not well thought out; he just seems to be crossing back and forth across the lake willy nilly instead of organizing his appearances regionally.  He doesn’t seem to have a clear plan of the most important things that need to be accomplished; he just reacts, responding to whatever comes up rather than prioritizing.  And he clearly doesn’t know how to say no to anything.  He stops to help everyone that comes to him with a problem, stops for discussion and stories even with the people that condemn him most.

But I’m guessing Jesus wouldn’t be too worried about what the time management experts might think.  Today we see him slam dunk in the middle of the usual chaos of his life.  Surrounded by crowds, beseeched for healing powers.  He is heading down the road to Jairus’ house to help his daughter when this woman closes in on him.  A woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years.  This woman is an unnamed, ritually unclean nobody.  She touches Jesus and is immediately healed.  

So Jesus’ power has been demonstrated, the woman’s physical trauma is over.  There is no reason to stick around at this point; his work is done.  But Jesus doesn’t just cross that off his list and move on to his next task.  He stops.  Everything comes to a grinding halt as Jesus takes time to engage this woman.  As she becomes known to him and as she knows herself to worthy of Jesus’s time.  God incarnate comes to a grinding halt for her.

Maybe Jesus’ time with this woman models for us how to find still waters even in the midst of the whirling sea of responsibilities and expectations.  By building relationship, especially with people that the world doesn’t make time for.  By getting involved with activities and interests that don’t fit rationally into our to do list.  By sharing our peace with people for whom peace feels impossible, and being open to the peace that others can share with us.  

Sometimes we just have to be willing to come to a grinding halt. 

Simone Campbell, the best known of the Nuns on the Bus, 

was on NPR recently and presented a beautiful image of life as a snow globe.  It gets all shaken up and we feel like everything is swirling frantically all around us and we can’t see clearly.  

But then look what happens with just a little bit of stillness, of listening, of calm.  All that circling craziness sinks down and there is nothing but shining clarity.  The life of faith is learning how to wake up to that clarity.  To find the stillness long enough to find what lies beneath the chaos and uncertainty.  

May Jesus teach each one of us more each day to find our own still waters even when the waves of the world are crashing around us.  And may we become more open to the God who comes to a grinding halt for us. Amen.