Eph. 3:14-21; Mark 6:30-34; 53-56  “Running on Empty”

INTRODUCTION

            By Friday night, we had some exhausted teachers and students.  Vacation Bible School ran Monday through Friday evenings this past week.  We had wonderful time learning about Heifer Project, International.  I spent quite a bit of time cutting out copies of small animals to glue on card stock for a matching game and a bingo game for my class of first through third graders.  We learned about the wonderful world of people, animals, and plants that God has created and for which we must care.  It was a great week, but exhausting.

            The disciples of Jesus must have felt much the same way as they returned from their mission, going two by two into the villages, curing the sick and sharing the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness.  They were exhilarated, but exhausted.  They were running on empty.  So Jesus invited them to come away from the pressing crowd, from the neediness of the people.  He invited them to come away for some rest and renewal, to come away for Sabbath. “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while,” he said. Hoping to escape the crowd, they got into a boat and went out into the lake.  Did they see the crowd following along on land the path of the boat?  Perhaps they lingered a while on the lake, fishing a little, resting, enjoying the sunlight play upon the water, feeling the freshening breeze.

            Their Sabbath was short-lived.  When they came ashore, there were the people, clamoring for healing, hungry for the message of salvation.  Jesus’ first response was not anger or frustration at having his Sabbath interrupted.  His first response was compassion.

HOW IS IT WITH YOU?

            All of us grow weary in our work from time to time, and some are perpetually worn out.  That’s why we have days off and vacations.  God commands us to keep the Sabbath, and Jesus reminded his followers that the Sabbath was made for people, not the other way around.  Like the other commandments we fail to observe, we don’t always “remember to keep the Sabbath holy.”  Let’s just see.  How many of us have ever worked more than the number of hours your job is supposed to require?  How many of us have ever worked on what was supposed to be a day off?  How many of us have even worked on what was set aside to be our vacation or done work while on “vacation”? We are sinners, aren’t we?

            Often it isn’t the work that is exhausting, but the people and situations with which we must deal.  Dealing with resistance, conflict, miscommunications, hurt feelings, and sensitive egos can wear us out.  At times we may even have to deal with out and out hostility.  I’m certain our political guests are familiar with this particular stress.

WE LIVE IN A HOSTILE WORLD

            The world is full of hostility.  The disciples of Jesus undoubtedly encountered hostility as well as hospitality as they knocked on doors in the villages they visited.  Paul writes to the Ephesian Christians: “Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”   Paul was writing about the wall of hostility between Jews and people who weren’t Jews (a hostility we clearly see still in existence today).   Certainly Christ came to break down all the dividing walls of hostility.  Yet, 2000 years after Christ’s coming, walls abound!  And we keep building them—in Israel/Palestine and along our border with Mexico.  Our contemporary walls are rather puny compared to the one human created feature that can be seen from outer space—the Great Wall of China.  The Chinese really knew how to build a wall.

            Perceived hostility causes us to build walls.  We think they will keep us secure.  Perhaps in some ways they do.  But I’m inclined to agree with Robert Frost in his well-known poem, Mending Wall.  The poem is about two New England farmers whose land is separated by a stone wall.  Each spring they meet to rebuild the wall that fall and winter has weakened.  The one farmer is the narrator and wonders what purpose the wall serves since he grows apple trees and his neighbor grows pine. 

I’m just going to share a few excerpts from the poem.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall……

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each…

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side.  It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it

Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down. [1]

“Good fences make good neighbors.” Is it true? We must think so, or we would not spend fortunes on building and repairing them.   But no matter how much money and effort we put into building them, “something there is that still doesn’t love a wall.”

THE WALLS WE BUILD

            There are the literal walls we build, and then there are the other walls—the walls of which the Apostle Paul wrote.  My first call to ministry was in Wilmington, Delaware.  I began my work in June.  In September the community faced the end of their fight against court-ordered desegregation of the Wilmington schools.  Parents in the lily white suburbs where my church was located were distraught.  They didn’t want their children bussed to inner city schools.   Wilmington had a wall around it, separating the inner city from the suburbs.  It wasn’t a wall made of bricks or stone.  It was a wall of green.  Park lands and golf courses ringed the city.  But that wall of green was nothing compared to the wall of bigotry that existed in the hearts of the people in the suburbs. 

            Walls are erected between “us and them.”  This us/them orientation is particularly apparent in our country right now.  One pastor recalls a conversation:  

                        Recently I heard a woman talking about her fears for our nation. One of the things she said was that the loudest and most painful noise she hears in our beloved country is the sound of minds snapping shut all over America. Her point was that too many of us are becoming people whose minds are closed and whose opinions are set in a sort of fatal concrete which threatens to sink the fragile nature of our democracy. She pointed out that this beloved ship floats on the willingness of diverse people to work with one another despite their differences of opinion, to find ways to get along with one another. [2]

We remember that Jesus sought strangers and the marginalized of his society.  He showed compassion and unconditional love.  He commanded his disciples to show this same compassionate love, what the Hebrew writers called “hesed” and the early Christian leaders, “agape.”  The way of God’s people is the path that leads to the common good.

            Sadly we erect walls even within ourselves.  We wall off the aspects of our personalities we don’t want to face.  We build walls around a fragile sense of self-esteem.  Those actions committed or thoughts conceived too ugly for us to bear are walled away in the unconscious only to creep our dreams and nightmares and sabotage our relationships.

GOD DOESN’T LOVE A WALL

            But something there is that doesn’t love a wall. God. God doesn’t love a wall, because the wall is sin.  God wants the walls down and sin destroyed.  That is essentially why Jesus came.  Christians believe that Jesus was fully God and fully human, breaking through the wall that separates us from our Creator.  However, we are always forgetting this marvelous act of goodness.  We forget because we are too busy building walls—shoring up our defenses, making certain we are protected.  Jesus tried that one day to get a little R & R for himself and his disciples.  He tried to put a lake between himself and the hungry, anxiety- ridden crowd.  But when he came ashore, he saw the people, the people he’d come to heal and to save from their sins, and he was filled with compassion.

            Christ’s compassion is what we need to overcome the walls of hostility within us and within the world God has entrusted to our care.  We hear news reporters talking about the wall being erected on our border with Mexico.  Commentators banter back and forth about its effectiveness.  We want to keep out people who come to this country illegally wanting to make a living.  But few people are talking about the reason behind their coming. If we are concerned about illegal immigration, maybe we need to be more concerned about helping the citizens of Mexico improve their standard of living, so they don’t feel the need to cross our border.  Could it be that we really want them to cross the border, because they perform services for us that we are hard-pressed to do for ourselves?  Are we dependent on an impoverished Mexico for cheap labor in the United States?                                                                                                  TIME FOR REFLECTION    

            Frost writes, “Before I’d built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.”  Building a wall is seldom an act of compassion.  Yet compassion is the response of Jesus and the expected response of his disciples.  We’re running on empty, however, because so much of our energy goes into building walls, protecting ourselves, rather than into offering compassion.  Fortunately, there are people working to bring down the walls of hostility.  The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, made a commitment to invest in organizations working for peace in the Middle East.  There are many, though you don’t read much about them in the news.  One impressive organization is Seeds of Peace, founded in 1993 by John Wallach after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in NYC.  He created the Seeds of Peace International camp in Maine, bringing together several dozen Israeli, Palestinian, and Egyptian teens. The goal of his organization was to create a new generation of leadership in the Middle East. The camp addresses the outdated and harmful stereotypes Israelis and Arabs have about each other. The program has spread to include youth from many Arab and African nations, and camps now operate programs in the Middle East as well.[3]                                                                                                                       Groups are working to bring down the walls of hostility along the US-Mexico border as well.  One such group is The Mexico Solidarity Network which maintains that in the context of growing globalization, international grassroots alliances are critical in the struggle for democracy, sovereignty, and economic and political justice.  The Mexico Solidarity Network is committed to developing these grassroots alliances on both sides of the US-Mexico border, and organizing to promote dialogue and collective action for social change.[4]  Wouldn’t it be great if we could use some of these techniques to bring down the walls of hostility in our own backyard?  We need more initiatives like the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise which works to establish Violence –Free Zones[5] to curb gang hostility in Baltimore.  What about the walls within our churches, our families, ourselves?  Where can we make a difference by showing compassion?

 CONCLUSION                                                                                                         

Jesus invited the disciples to “come away…,” observe a Sabbath, a time of relaxation and renewal. We also need to take time away, time for reflection, play, prayer.  Because the walls are all around us and within us, we are exhausted in the maintenance of them.  We have to step away from the walls. Come away… all by ourselves.  We must take time to let the spiritual batteries regenerate, to put some fuel in our tanks, so we’re not running on empty.  And then, perhaps we can loosen the grip on the boulders we’re using to build the walls.  After taking some time to relax in God’s presence, our first response might even be to offer compassion.

May it be so.