Scripture: Matthew 14:13-23
The scripture reading for this morning begins by saying that Jesus went off to a lonely place. Some translations say that he went off to a deserted place, but I don’t like that translation so well. I don’t know which translation is closer in meaning to the Hebrew, but I do know that the idea of a lonely place resonates a lot more with me than the idea of a deserted place. I’m not concerned with the physical place Jesus went off to, whether it was inhabited or sort of desolate looking, whether it was deserted in that sense. I am concerned about the spiritual place Jesus went off to, a lonely place, a place that doesn’t have anything to do with whether there are other people around. Crowds, after all, can sometimes be the loneliest of places.
I don’t know why lonely places are on my mind this week, but they are. Sometimes things just sort of “pop up” inside you and then once there don’t let go, but you don’t know exactly why or where they came from. So I can’t give you a very satisfying reason why I’m preaching about this today. I don’t know if you need a reason from me, but it may seem like it’s just coming out of the blue, which is something of the way it feels to me. In any case, it was the idea of loneliness that drew me to the scripture not so much the story of the feeding of the multitudes, which by the way I think we should stop referring to as the feeding of the 5,000 since scripture itself says that the 5,000 number does not include women and children. But let me not get distracted…
I guess it’s not entirely true that I don’t know where my thoughts about lonely places came from. Labor Day weekend has always seemed like the beginning of a new year, almost more than New Year’s Day does. I’m sure that has lots to do with the fact that I spent more years as a student than I care to admit, fifteen years as a part-time teacher, had kids in school for many years, and served churches where a lot of activities picked up again in the fall after taking some time off in the summer. So even though school now starts in August for most people, early September has always been the time when I sort of take a deep breath in preparation for a new cycle of activity and ask myself specifically what some priorities are for the season ahead and in a broader sense step back and ask myself what I think we’re about here. I ask myself how am I thinking about things as we begin this “new year” in our church’s life. Let’s see now. Let me get focused here. What is it we’re about here? What’s important about what happens at Sojourners?
Of course there are lots of answers to those kinds of questions and lots of levels of answers. There are some specific things on the horizon. Responding to Katrina, offering ourselves as a shelter for the homeless in December, making some major changes to the building, some sort of ordinary things like Sunday school and youth programs and opportunities for adults and getting back to work on matters of racial justice and justice for sexual minorities. None of this being exactly incidental to our life as a congregation, all of it being a way of saying what we are all about, but then still there is also a way of thinking about what we are about that is broader and more basic than any of these specific things on our plate, no matter how important they are.
And what has been in my mind as an answer to the question of what we are about—and again this is just one possible way of thinking about things, certainly not any kind of definitive statement—what’s been in my mind is the thought that what we are doing here is saying somehow to each other that we don’t have to travel alone, that what we are trying to do here as a church is to try to speak to those lonely places that are part of all of us and to refuse to let them have the last or the only word in our lives.
But the first part of that is to recognize the lonely places and not be afraid of them. I’m talking about lonely places or loneliness, if you will, not as a kind of temporary feeling that depends a lot on our moods and circumstances but the kind of loneliness that is part of being human, that is there because we are physical beings and we don’t just merge into each other, don’t just walk into each other and mutually inhabit each other’s interior spaces. These are the kind of lonely places that are there because there are parts of us that are not sharable, not even with the people we love most deeply in all the world, parts of us that are just between us and our God.
When the scriptures tell me, as they do in a number of places, that Jesus went off to a lonely or solitary place, that is what I hear them telling me. That Jesus paid attention to those lonely places that were part of his inner reality, that he knew how important it is for him and for us not to hide ourselves from ourselves or from God, not to pretend those places do not exist, not to bury them under a mountain of entertainment and busyness. That’s the first step: to recognize and not be afraid of the loneliness that is built into our lives as a condition of our being human, and even to embrace it because it is not just a painful separateness but is the source of the unique and precious reality each of us is. Jesus went off to a lonely place to pray. As I say that resonates with me in a lot of ways.
What we do here in church, it seems to me, is greet each other as people who know one another to be people who are in the middle of essentially lonely journeys, but who also greet each other believing that we do not need and are not meant to live entirely within that loneliness. We are not meant to travel alone.
If all there was to the religious life were to pay attention to our lonely places, to go off ourselves to some lonely places as Jesus did, if that was all that religion was about then it would be true what people often tell me, that they can worship God by going for a walk in the woods or sitting still in front of a sunset. And of course that is true as far as it goes. Going to those places where there is no one to meet but ourselves and God is a way to worship. Churches are not required for that. Churches more likely get in the way of that. Maybe by the grace of God we make room in congregational life for those private encounters with holiness that lie at the heart of faith. Maybe we have a role in encouraging such encounters. But if that’s all we thought we were about, we would be setting ourselves up for failure.
Maybe this is all just too obvious to need saying. It’s sort of like saying we come together here because it’s important to come together and not to live entirely within our own solitary places. We come together here to make ourselves vulnerable enough to one another to share in some small, perhaps, but significant way the journeys we are each involved in. We come together because it is important not to just read or watch on television about hurricane flooding and other devastations and shake our heads in private dismay. We come together because the grief over a world that is flooded in bloodshed cannot be just a private grief. We come together in hope of finding some as yet undiscovered part of ourselves in an encounter with another child of God.
A few years ago there was a book called “Bowling Alone”, which tried to document the increasing isolation of people in our society and the breakdown of the public arena. The author picked the phrase “bowling alone” for the title, as I recall, because one of the young men who did the shootings in Columbine had gone bowling alone the morning of the shootings. But of course it was also meant to be symbolic of the fact that we tend to do more and more things alone, things that used to be social activities have become increasingly private. We can go to the movies, go shopping, attend a city council meeting, go to church (or pretend that we have) without ever leaving the privacy of our home or the seat in front of our computer or television, and without engaging another human being. The point being, of course, not that we should do away with DVD’s, computer shopping, or televised city council meetings or church services, but simply that in such a world it is still important and especially important to have ways of engaging one another and keeping open that possibility of making our journeys of faith in some important way together.
I also find myself needing to mention briefly something I read somewhere recently reporting one of the several racial incidents and incidents involving harassment of gay students too. The one I’m remembering though was a racial incident, where a group of students was standing on the street corner and someone in a vehicle driving by shouted some racial slurs. There was one African American student in the group, the report said, so it was clear who the ugliness was aimed at, and not one of the other people in the group expressed any disgust at the remarks or any support for the black student. Now my point is not to say how awful people were not to say anything. I don’t even know that the report is completely accurate or fair. I do know the image of people standing there saying nothing is a true image of what happens too often among us. We have said in adopting the leading concern of racial justice that we will not put up with the silence. And I believe it is implied in our being as Sojourners that the image of people standing, elevator like, with their eyes forward, pretending as though nothing happened or they did not hear, the image of people pretending that we all have our separate lives to live, our own stuff to deal with, and we’ll just go about our business minding our own business, that that image is not who we are. Justice does not come about by living in isolation from one another. Neither in the end are spiritual journeys meant to be made alone.
And so as I listen to the story this morning of the feeding of the multitudes, I do hear the reminder that Jesus often sought out lonely places because God led him there, and I also hear the story as a story about his desire to keep people together in community. I do not hear the miraculous part of the story this morning as a very important part of it. I do hear that Jesus reacted against the suggestion of the disciples that people be dismissed so they could go fend for themselves and find something to eat—by themselves. The message, as I hear it, was not: “Wait, don’t send people away. I have a miracle to show you.” The message was, “Wait, don’t send people away. We need to be together.”
And so it is important and appropriate, I think, to begin this fall season, this new year, today with communion because it does not have to be that we make our journeys alone. May the communion table we share in today be a sign for us of what we are, at least in part, about here: being open to being fed by the spirit of God and, by the grace of God, open to being fed by the spirit of God we encounter in one another. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 4, 2005