When Elijah fled from the threats of his monarchs, an angel brought him simple things to revive him: a meal and a rest.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking that I’m very grateful to Lori Yamashiro, the Office Coordinator of the Hawai’i Conference of the United Church of Christ, because she will be delivering the message this coming Sunday while I’m traveling. I’m deeply grateful and I’m looking forward to hearing her wisdom when I return and can watch the recorded service.
I am, however, also thinking about the nineteenth chapter of First Kings (1 Kings 19:1-15). The prophet Elijah had had a great success calling down fire from heaven to ignite a sacrifice soaked in water, when the prophets of Baal could not. The queen of Israel, Jezebel, however, was not impressed. She sent word that Elijah was to be sought, arrested, and executed.
Despite his recent success, Elijah fled, and he headed out into the wilderness — in fact, towards the wilderness through which the people of Israel had wandered many years before. Along the way, he settled down next to a book and he went to sleep, asking that he might awake and die. When he woke, he found an angel standing there, and there was food and water for him. The Angel told him to eat and drink and sleep. Elijah did, and then found the angel with food again. He ate, he drank, and he slept again.
And then he continued his journey.
I’ve been known to say that (it’s not original with me) this is a Scripture text that demonstrates the power of a nap and a snack for carrying on with the work of God. And however trite it may seem, it is also true. Elijah, after all of his exertions: he was tired. And Elijah, despite his success, also knew that the power of the nation was not to be disregarded lightly, and so he feared.
Tired and afraid, he fled.
Each of us finds ourselves in places where we get worn out even by the successes, even by the triumphs. And you and I also find ourselves in places where we fear: where we fear perhaps to fail, or perhaps we fear some outside agency, or we just fear that we’ve worn ourselves out and we’ve got nothing left.
Elijah took a break. He thought it was going to be a longer break than it was, but he took a break, and that is a guidepost for us: because there will be times that we need to rest and recover. There will be times when we need to renew and reform. There will be times when we need someone to take care of us, give us something to eat, and encourage us to sleep.
There’s one other thing that occurs to me. This did not end to the story of Elijah in First Kings. He had more to do (and God gave him his instructions later on), but it occurs to me that giving somebody a snack, giving somebody the opportunity to rest: this might be the single easiest way for us to act as angels to someone else.
So where are you? Are you weary and afraid? Rest and eat.
Or is there somebody weary and afraid around you? For them, be an angel.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Thank you, everyone, for the time to take a sabbatical this year. I needed it more than I thought I did – and I thought I needed it pretty badly! I return to the office and the pulpit with a lot more energy than I had in January, and with a good deal more joy in the ministry and in the work. Mahalo nui loa!
I will schedule a time for a presentation fairly soon. One of my sabbatical activities, one I had not planned but which became deeply refreshing, was photography. I credit Pelehonuamea with providing ample opportunity for dramatic pictures and for offering the blessings of one of earth’s thin places. During these three months I marked over 1,000 pictures as worth sharing. I promise that I’ll make the slide show shorter. Much shorter.
I found it more difficult than I’d anticipated to prepare a publishable manuscript of stories (Jonathan Roach warned me about this). It took me some time to read them and to make decisions. In the coming months I’ll work on editing the texts for a printed format.
I also didn’t get to all the Hawaiian Islands. As I tried to plan the last trip to Maui and Moloka’i, I ran into a medical appointment which had been scheduled months ahead and would be difficult to delay. Instead, I plan to visit those islands during my vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Sabbath rest is one of the commandments, one of the “Big Ten,” if you will. It applied not only to people, but to also to domestic animals in their care. The ancient law of Israel even gave rest to the land every seven years. Rest is a sacred thing.
Thank you again for help me connect with sacred rest.
In peace,
Pastor Eric
PS: I hope you enjoy the video below which covers my sabbatical time (and a little beyond).
I don’t know why I think summers will slow down, except that it’s a lingering memory from my childhood. The hustle and bustle of school seemed overwhelming in those days, and the stretch of days without those obligations seemed absolutely blissful.
In truth, of course, my brother and I ended up spending time in our parents’ workplaces, which sometimes interested us and sometimes bored us and usually required us to create our own entertainment – something at which every parent holds their breath.
This summer certainly hasn’t slowed down. I set down one set of responsibilities as Chair of the Conference Council in June, and was given another set as Chair of the Hawai’i Island Association Committee on Ministry in July. I’m took a week off in May and I’m taking two weeks off in August, but with my family now more spread out across New England, I’ll spend quite a bit of time on the road.
Where to find rest and peace?
As always, the answer to that question is to create those spaces for myself and hold them for myself. Whether it’s a prayer time at dawn or dusk, or Bible reading at noon, or a place to visit which soothes – these are things within my power to reserve and to protect. I can make the quiet time, and regrettably I can also set it aside for some reason which, in the end, rarely is as important as renewing my heart and soul.
No, you can’t count on summer to slow things down for you. You and I, we have to carve out those times ourselves, and keep them safe, so that God may reassure our hearts.
We’re not far into the Gospel of Mark, and Jesus has run into trouble. Things went so well in chapter one. Jesus’ success in healing people actually began to overwhelm him, so that he stayed out in the country where there was more room.
In chapter two, Mark began to describe the theological debates. It’s one thing to heal the body, said some critics, but how can you forgive sin? Others asked about Jesus’ habit of eating with tax collectors and sinners – he even summoned a tax collector to join him in his travels. They wanted him and his disciples to be ascetics, to leave aside even such comfort as regular meals. And they wanted him to adhere to a rigid standard of sabbath observance.
Plucking grain on the sabbath? No good. If you hadn’t taken care of it the day before, you need to wait until you get somewhere that somebody who had properly prepared can give you food. Although it’s funny: the fourth century Talmudactually includes guidance that plucking and eating grain was fine as long as you did it without a utensil.
Healing on the sabbath? Well, that’s a fuzzier question. Midwives could assist with births on the Sabbath, according to the third century collection of rabbinic wisdom called the Mishnah. You could wash an injury “in the usual way” and “if he is healed, he is healed.” In this case from Mark, Jesus didn’t do any of the things that would normally be inappropriate to the Sabbath. He didn’t put oil on the man’s hand. He didn’t touch him. He didn’t even gesture to him. Jesus didn’t do any of the things that would constitute work on the Sabbath.
But he also didn’t fit the image of some of his contemporaries in religious leadership who knew what a teacher and healer should be like.
Jesus frequently didn’t fit the image of what a teacher and healer should be like.
But he did know his Bible.
The Sabbath commandment is distinct among the Ten Commandments. Unlike most of the others, it was explained. God didn’t bother justifying the commandments against murder or theft or false witness. The Sabbath, though, got a long explanation. You just heard it read from the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy.
Just to keep you on your toes, there’s a different explanation in Exodus twenty, which also lists the Ten Commandments. There, the reason for the Sabbath is to imitate God, who rested after six days creating. Here in Deuteronomy five, the reason is to celebrate the freedom God had won for the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt.
Slaves don’t get days off. Slaves don’t rest. Free people do.
Jesus probably drew on both these texts to inform his theology of Sabbath. He believed that the power of God was present and accessible to human beings. He believed that his followers could preach and teach and comfort and heal. He promised them the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit when he was no longer at arm’s reach. Like God, you can do great things. Like God, you can rest.
Jesus also declared a new freedom to his followers. Though some were definitely hoping he would free them from Roman domination, he made it clear that they could also find freedom from the burdens of ritual impurity, shame, and sin. “Which is easier,” he asked people earlier in chapter two: “to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?”
Forgiveness, he said, should be easy, both to offer and to receive.
That’s what it means for the Sabbath to be made for human beings: that in it we find the freedom to live well with God, and to bring God’s grace to those around us. D. Mark Davis writes at his blog, LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “The idea that ‘humanity was made for the Sabbath’ continues to be a wildly popular theology that God created the law and humanity needs to live up to it or else we are lost. In that theology, God is chiefly known as holy, and humans have to achieve a certain level of holiness – through following laws or practicing purity rituals – to be acceptable to God.
“The alternative theology, which Jesus poses here, is that ‘the Sabbath was made for humanity.’ In that sense, God is chiefly known as love and the laws and purity rituals are for humanity’s own good. Or, even better, they offer ways that humanity can respond to God’s grace with gratitude.”
It is tempting to take Jesus’ opponents here and have them represent all first century Pharisees, or even worse, all first century Jews, or worst of all, all Jews. They didn’t. They don’t. Jesus had good relationships with some Pharisees clear to the end of his earthly ministry. They kept inviting him to dinner.
And that keeps us from something far more important. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “The question this story asks is not, ‘What was wrong with 1st century Judaism?’ but rather, ‘What have we — here and now — ossified at our peril? What mortal, broken thing have we deified instead of love? Who or what have we stopped seeing because our eyes have been blinded by our own best intentions?
“‘What are we clinging to that is not God?’”
We live in a society obsessed with productivity. Later this year our ballot choices will be substantially guided by our notion of which candidate will get more accomplished while in office. Who will lower inflation? Who will increase Gross Domestic Product? Who will perform the economic gymnastic trick of getting employment, compensation levels, and interest rates just right?
The answer to that one, by the way, is nobody, because no one person in any one office can do all that.
Who will tell us, though, that outproducing other nations increases the rate at which we run through our resources? Who will tell us that more is not always better? Who will tell us that in Christ there is freedom from that productivity race as well as from sin, and death, and political oppression?
Who will tell us that if you build your nest all night with materials you can’t identify pushed into places you can’t be certain of, your nest won’t hold up?
We weren’t made to run an eternal treadmill. No were we made to follow arbitrary guidelines of what rest is, when it should be, or what it shouldn’t be. We weren’t made for the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was made for us, for our rest, for our well-being, for our freedom.
The Sabbath was made for us.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric frequently improvises while preaching. Sometimes he does it intentionally.
Jesus regarded the law as a gift of God for the benefit of human beings – which meant he interpreted it from that point of view.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the second chapter and the beginning of the third chapter of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 2:23-3:6). The stories that Mark told here described the beginning of Jesus’ conflict with some of the religious authorities of his day.
In the first story, Mark told about Jesus’ disciples gathering grain while passing near fields on the Sabbath. Plucking grain was considered doing work; work was, of course, forbidden on the Sabbath. In the second story, while in a synagogue Jesus healed a man with a withered hand. That time, those who disapproved looked on silently and condemningly. Jesus asked them if it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath, and they said nothing.
In response to that first criticism about plucking grain, Jesus said something quite fascinating. He said that the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath. That is, the Sabbath is a gift for people.
The gift of a day off in the ancient world was not a universally held value. Not every culture said that people deserved some “down time,” but the ancient Hebrews, under the commandment of God, they did believe it. It was one of the things that distinguished them in the first century from the Greeks and Romans who surrounded them.
To violate the Sabbath was not just to commit some arcane religious kind of offense, it was also to deny one’s kinship with an occupied people. It was also to set at risk the people’s commitment to God. “Why do you do what is not lawful on the sabbath?”
But if the Sabbath was made for the benefit of humankind, said Jesus, then we need to look at what benefits humankind as we evaluate whether an action is appropriate to the Sabbath or not. And it was fairly well established in rabbinic schools of thought at the time that there were things that were work that you could do on the Sabbath. You could bring an animal to water. You could pull an animal out of a ditch. Midwives were allowed to do their work on the Sabbath because that delivery of a new child into the world — labor — that contributed to the life and well-being of the individual and of the community.
So yes, said Jesus, they need this food to sustain them, and because the Sabbath was made for them, there is no question that they can eat. There is no question that a man in pain can be healed. There is no question but that one can do good, one can preserve life, one can heal, one can love on the Sabbath.
As we evaluate our own legal structures, our own customs that are not enshrined in law, let us ask that question at every venture: Are we making these laws, are we keeping these customs, for the benefit of human beings? Or have we set them up in ways that cause people pain, hardship, even oppression, even death.
The Sabbath was made for humankind so that people could have rest and renewal. All our laws should be addressed towards human needs, so that we can have rest and renewal and a community of love.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below; I’d love to hear from you.
Jesus had already had a busy day. He went to Simon’s house from the synagogue service we heard about last week. He’d taught there, then he’d healed a man beset by a demon or a mental illness there. His friend Simon, whom Jesus would later nickname Peter, seems to have thought it was time to give Jesus a break, get him out of the public eye, and have a nice sabbath dinner.
Or… maybe not. When Simon left his house that morning, did he know his mother-in-law was sick? I grant you that illness can come on pretty quickly – when I get a stomach virus I get about five minutes warning – but it would not surprise me in the least if he left her in the care of his wife and maybe a neighbor when he headed off to the synagogue.
On the way back, do you suppose he thought, “He cast out a demon? What could he do with a fever?”
I think he thought it.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he mentioned it. “Say, Jesus, could you perhaps come to my house? We can have dinner there. And, perhaps, you can take a look at my mother-in-law. She’s got a fever.”
For those of you not accustomed to thinking of Jesus’ first disciples as men with families, at least not more than James’ and John’s disappointed father Zebedee left in the boat, or their mother advocating for their promotion, where there’s a mother-in-law, there’s generally a spouse. Some suggest that by the time Simon Peter began following Jesus his wife had died, but curiously in First Corinthians the Apostle Paul mentioned that some of the other apostles, including Jesus’ brothers and Simon Peter, were accompanied on their travels by “a believing wife.” The group of women that accompanied Jesus on his journeys probably included the spouses of his male disciples.
Having endured a lengthy bout of illness and recovery, I feel rather ambivalent about this healing. He took her hand, he lifted her up, and did she get any recovery time? No. Off she went to serve the meal. I’m afraid that some of this is the pure sexism of the first century Mediterranean cultures. Women served in the house, and that was that. But having sat out a couple Sunday services last month, I can tell you this, too: Where I wanted to be during the illness and during the convalescence was right here in this pulpit, even when I wasn’t sure I had the energy to stand. This is my role. This is my calling. This is my place.
Simon’s mother-in-law may have felt much the same. As the senior woman in the house, she was in charge, and failure to serve a distinguished guest – the speaker at the synagogue that day! – may have galled her terribly. As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “But, what if the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law was bringing her back to be the mother she always was and that she always wanted to be? And in being brought back to who she was, she became a disciple, called to minister, to serve, like the angels did for Jesus in the wilderness and like the Son of Man, who did not come to be served but to serve?”
Mark used the same word “lifted up” to describe Jesus’ resurrection later in the book. Mark used the same word “to serve” that he used of angels, of the women (not the men!) who traveled with Jesus, and of the Son of Man himself. Debie Thomas asks at JourneyWithJesus.net, “What if Simon’s mother-in-law is not an undervalued woman in a patriarchal system, but the church’s first deacon? The first person Jesus liberates and commissions into service for God?”
Well. If she is, I think she still might have needed some rest. Jesus did.
“In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”
We haven’t reached the end of chapter one in Mark, and this is the second time Jesus found a deserted place to pray. The first took place after his baptism. It’s a model for us to remember and to emulate. As Osvaldo Vena writes at Working Preacher, “We need to find our ‘deserted place’ in order to re-energize and charge our spiritual batteries. It is a vital part of our ministry and a good antidote for the cult of personality.” Jesus didn’t stop taking those times away. He went up a mountain to appoint his twelve closest disciples. He was trying to get away from the crowds who followed him such that he fed five thousand people. A trip to a mountain top led to the Transfiguration, which is next week’s Gospel story. And on the night he was betrayed, he left the city to find a garden in which to weep and pray.
Jesus kept making time to restore himself in the presence of God. Jesus kept stepping away from the pressures and the requests to renew himself once again.
Simon and Andrew, James and John, set out on Jesus’ trail to summon him back into Capernaum and resume the work he’d been doing through the evening. I’m pretty sure that when they said, “Everyone is looking for you,” that they expected Jesus to say, “I’ll be right there.”
Unlike John the Baptist, though, Jesus chose to set his ministry in motion. He could have set himself up in Capernaum and waited there for people to show up. They’d have come from miles around, I’d guess. Instead, Jesus said, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns.” He wouldn’t ask people to seek him. He chose to seek them.
As we consider our own calls from God, how do we set our ministries in motion? Once we’ve been revived to our calling like Simon’s mother-in-law, once we’ve been restored by deep time with God, what do we do so that we offer the news of God’s grace and love, rather than simply holding up a sign that says, “God’s love here.” How do reach out rather than demanding that others reach to us? How do we become the one whose hand lifts up, so that someone else regains their strength and, in their own time and with their own call, begins to serve?
We don’t have to look far. There’s a lot of people around us who need that helping hand, and who need that reassurance of spirit.
Let us go on, and lift them up.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes to his sermon text while he’s preaching. It might even be a good thing.
