Pausing to Notice God Moving – Sermon for July 22, 2018

It’s been a busy week at St. Peter with VBS happening most of last week (pictures here) and getting ready to leave on a high school mission trip to Chicago right after Sunday worship this week. Squeezed into all that, of course, we also had worship!

Here’s my sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost, RCL year B, on Mark 6:30-34, 53-56. I’m grateful to Bishop Michael Rinehart’s reflection for this week and to Pastor Lori Allen Walke’s commentary at ModernMetanoia.

Hopefully you’ve heard something by now about our summer theme, “God is on the Move.” We’ve put it on some t-shirts, and I know a few of you have helped with projects on the Service Saturdays. As you might have noticed, it’s also the theme for our mission trip group as we head to Chicago for a week of serving.

We picked this tagline of “God is on the Move” for a couple reasons. First, there’s a great song to go with it that you’ll hear it in a couple of weeks during worship when we show a video of the service projects and trips.
Beyond the song, the idea is that remembering “God is on the Move” will help us notice where God is at work in our world. Sometimes, God’s activity doesn’t look like we expect it to, and often we have to look intentionally because it’s not obvious. But as Christians, we know and believe through faith that God is at work somewhere, and we can look for signs of God acting around us, in our world.

There’s a third point to the “God is on the Move” theme as well. If we believe God is on the move, and if we believe it when the Bible says we as the church are the Body of Christ, we are the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, then saying “God is on the Move” means we are involved in what God is doing. God’s moving moves us too.

That’s why we’ve been doing these service projects, and volunteering at VBS, and going on mission trips. It’s not “God is on the move and we’re sitting here watching;” it’s “God is on the move and we get to be involved.”

With this theme of God moving in mind, let’s take a look at this Gospel reading from Mark 6. This section starts out with the disciples gathering around Jesus and telling him what they’ve been up to. Earlier in the chapter, Jesus had sent them out in pairs to go preach the good news of God’s kingdom and to heal the sick and to drive out demons. And they did it.

Now, they’re all back from their travels, reunited with each other and with Jesus, and you can imagine how excited they are to share their stories, to share the amazing ways they’ve seen God at work around and through them.

In the verses we read, God is indeed on the move, but it’s not where you’d think. With this Jesus movement picking up momentum, the normal thing to do would be for Jesus to pick up the pace, to stoke the fire. But he does the opposite.

Instead of tossing more fuel on the fire, Jesus takes the disciples away on a retreat, by themselves. They need some time to process where God has been moving. Physically, they need time to just eat and rest. They need time to pray.

It’s strange to talk about God being on the move with this Gospel reading, because this section is more of a summary than a story. It almost feels like filler. Not much happens. You might have noticed our reading skips over 19 verses. The section it skips has two big blockbuster headline miracles: the feeding of the 5,000 and then Jesus walking on water. We’ll talk about those next week. This week, we just get the bookend paragraphs, the transitions.

Catholic sister Macrina Wiederkehr writes,

“Long ago when I was learning to type, I used to delight in typing letters to my friends without pressing the space bar. Now when you don’t press the space bar you’ve got a real mess and there is much decoding to be done. It is the spaces in between that enable us to understand the message.

Life is very much the same. It is the spaces in between that help us understand life. But some of us keep forgetting to press the space bar. And why do we forget? Well, many of us have the disease that some doctors are calling hurry sickness.”

I think she’s on to something there. Just as much as the disciples, we need time to process what’s going on around us. So often when God is on the move, we don’t see it until afterwards. If we don’t take time to pause and reflect, we might miss God’s work entirely. We need those spaces. And again, physically, we need rest as well. Our bodies are made to require rest and reflection.

In this story, Jesus demonstrates the need for rest and reflection, although it doesn’t actually work very well for him. Instead, the crowds beat him there, so when he and the disciples get to the deserted place, there is a huge crowd waiting for them. I have this picture of a family traveling to what the guidebook describes as an isolated campsite and finding a packed RV park or something. It’s not what they’re looking for.

Because he’s Jesus, when he sees the crowd, he has compassion on them and gets to work teaching and healing. There’s a great deal to do, and the people keep coming for him. The example of rest and priorities, though, is still there for us. Maybe if they’d have gotten to rest and process like Jesus wanted them to, the disciples wouldn’t have been so clueless in the rest of the story.

One of the dangers of talking about a theme like “God is on the Move” is that we’ll just sit by and watch rather than getting involved. That’s missing the point. If we have faith, we get involved. Not necessarily in particular projects, but in letting what we believe affect our lives. I’m not saying you don’t have faith if you didn’t show up to paint the church or play with cats. Not at all. But if we truly believe God is on the move, then we also believe God is working through us, and that changes the way we live.

Another danger, though, is doing too much and forgetting that it’s God who is at work through us, forgetting that our job is to follow God’s movement. It’s getting so caught up in the immediate needs of the world around us that we forget to take the time to step back and process, to pray and listen for God to speak.

And if we forget why we’re doing what we’re doing, if we lose sight of God at work and just see ourselves as working, we’ve also missed the point. We need the processing time, the sabbath time. It’s like when you’re flying on a plane and the flight attendants say, “In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. Put on your own mask before helping others.”

Taking time to pray and study the Bible and reflect is not selfish. It’s not taking away from serving. It’s exactly the opposite. Our relationship with God is central to whatever we do to live out our faith. We need to be fed so we can feed others. We gather in church each week so we can step back and be reminded of why we’re doing what we’re doing. We need that perspective.

This week, I’d like to invite all of you to join those of us going on the mission trip to Chicago in putting this idea into practice. Each morning before we do any service projects, we’re going to start by reading a Bible passage and reflecting on it.

Now, you’re not invited to come with us on the trip because you won’t fit in the van. I’m not even sure our luggage is going to fit in the van. But you are invited to join us in our devotions.

I’ve printed a daily Devotional Journal that I invite you to take home with you today. It starts tonight and ends on Friday. I know many of you have a regular devotional practice, and that’s great. If you’re looking for something else to try for this week, grab one of the devotional booklets on your way out today. See if pausing for a few minutes helps you see God on the move.

Let’s pray.
Gracious God, your son Jesus saw the needs of the people around him and had compassion for them. Give us that same compassion. Help us to make time to reflect on your love for us, so we too can look through the eyes of faith and see the people around us as your beloved children. In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen