Sitting In The Boat

"Sitting In The Boat"

Mark 6:30-34
August 10, 2008

The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.
He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went
away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and
recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead
of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them,
because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many
things.

During our vacation to visit family a couple of years ago, 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
population on trumped up 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—there’s some irony! But
Douglas and I also went on a cruise some months earlier 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 that point onward, 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
destination became the point of it all in the first place. 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 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. The disciples 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 to Bethsaida to get some rest. 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, and which he is about to do in
that very moment.

I suspect Jesus 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—I
mean, we can only experience so many heartbreaking appeals for starving children on
television before our minds and spirits just shut down.

Even 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 her 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—but 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. Still, the text says that only 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 the disciples 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 into the
waiting crowds.

I am probably reading too much into it, but I think I want to believe that the disciples
stayed in the boat, because if I had been one of those earliest disciples, I know I would
have wanted to stay in the boat, I would have wanted to get some “down time,” away
from the thousands of people clamoring for more than I could give them, even with this
new power and authority given to me earlier by Jesus. 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 Carnival Fun 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, and watching what he was doing in this
world.

I think there are times when we need to just wait in the boat, and see what God is doing
on the shore of this beautiful but shadowed 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, they cannot be Jesus himself, the one
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 sometimes be found in
the silence.

There is something else here, something about resting and simply watching what God
can do, when we let go of 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 by
himself 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 see that God can do what we cannot do at the moment, even with those
we love and care for.

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. 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 of this world,
and be in wonder at the deep tenderness with which God can heal this world without us,
and maybe even in that watching we can be become healed ourselves. 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