[Given that I was scheduled to preach this Sunday, I had written an outline for the sermon before I got sick Tuesday night; now I am sitting in a largely empty house, isolating with COVID, but with good internet, and the sermon outline was rattling around in my head, so . . . here you go. It is so specific to my own situation it’s probably of no use to anyone as their sermon for Sunday, so if you need one, my apologies. But if you are in a position to say “this was a rough week for my schedule, and Jeff just happened to offer this up, so I’m going to read you his sermon,” please go right ahead! It’s fairly UCC oriented but not so you’d have to notice; I was feverish when I typed it out, so please take that into consideration as well. This post is a modest digression from my ongoing “Subscribing to Faith” essay parts 1 & 2, for which part 3 is very near us . . . until then, stay hydrated, my friends.]
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Sermon - Feb. 4, 2024
“Everybody is looking for you!”
Mark 1: 29-39
29 Upon leaving the synagogue, Jesus entered Simon’s and Andrew’s house with James and John. 30 Simon’s mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told Jesus about her. 31 Jesus went over to her, took her by the hand and helped her up, and the fever left her. Then she went about her work. 32 After sunset, as evening drew on, they brought to Jesus all who were ill and possessed by demons. 33 Everyone in the town crowded around the door. 34 Jesus healed many who were sick with different diseases, and cast out many demons. But Jesus would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew who he was. 35 Rising early the next morning, Jesus went off to a lonely place in the desert and prayed there. 36 Simon and some companions managed to find Jesus 37 and said to him, “Everybody is looking for you!” 38 Jesus said to them, “Let us move on to the neighboring villages so that I may proclaim the Good News there also. That is what I have come to do.” 39 So Jesus went into their synagogues proclaiming the Good News and expelling demons throughout the whole of Galilee.
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Jesus knew exactly where he was. He went there, on purpose. Jesus knew why he was where he was, too. He went there with the express intention of praying.
Simon Peter, who as we know often had a gift for saying the wrong thing with the best of intentions, “managed to find him” with a few others, and says helpfully to Jesus “Everybody is looking for you!”
Jesus is not rattled by this, nor does he snark. Because, of course, he’s Jesus. Sometimes people make contact with me saying “I’ve been trying to reach you for a long time!” I try not to say “Well, I’m in the book, and my email is in two papers most weeks, and online my life is set to public, but okay, you’ve struggled to reach me.” Except sometimes I do.
Jesus intentionally went to a place apart, a solitary or wilderness place (‘eremon’ in the Greek original), but Simon Peter and likely some disciples remember where Jesus has gone before to get away, find him, and say “Everybody is looking for you!” Like he should feel bad about that, maybe?
Instead, Jesus says “Let us move on to . . . [do] what I have come to do.” The fact that people are looking for him? That alone isn’t reason for him to repent, to turn back, and go where he’s expected.
This past month, I’ve had the opportunity to go to two very different places, but each with a very specific reason for being, both with a general function for getting away from where most people are, from where “Everybody is looking for you!”
First, I went to the Abbey of Gethsemani. It’s in central Kentucky; you may have heard of it in association with Thomas Merton, or Father Louis as he was known within the monastic enclosure. It’s what’s sometimes called a Trappist monastery, for the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Strict, in that they welcome visitors most graciously, but into their condition, which is largely that of silence. Not that there’s no words, but in the eight services a day between 3:15 am Vigils and 7:30 pm Compline, the words are mostly from Scripture, and those pre-eminently from the Psalms. The meals are mostly meatless, and taken in silence, including in the guesthouse.
I’ve been there before; in fact, this was my fifth visit for a silent retreat, sometimes one or two nights, sometimes four nights like this was, arriving Monday afternoon and leaving Friday morning, with three solid days of silence between. But I hadn’t been back since March of 2019, and it was good to return, to slip into the rhythm of the monastic hours, to go to sleep at 8:15 or so each night and wake at 3 am to begin a new day in the dim sanctuary.
Obviously, a monastery is a place apart; there were about fifteen other retreatants there my week, some arriving late, a few leaving early, about half female, mostly but not all Catholic. We didn’t talk to each other, you could just tell at Mass by those of us who did not receive who was not a communicant, but you were welcome to cross your arms and come forward to receive a blessing by the priest sharing communion. There were always a couple of us like that.
There was one brief span of conversation I had in the music room with a monk there I’d gotten to know online, as well as with the guesthouse porter on checking in, and as I left on a snowy morning: Brother Gerlac said “Take care you don’t return home by way of the hospital!” Good advice.
For the rest of my time there, I had the silent meals, the chant and hymns around the monastic hours in the abbey church, and on one day it got just warm enough, above 20 degrees by midday, to where I could hike one of the many trails they have on the property. While I was silent, there were birds singing, trees creaking, wind blowing; even in my room, the bells rang from the tower to announce the hours during the day, the heating system had sounds which became familiar, and the stray creaks of an old structure punctuating the occasional roar of a truck passing by on Monks Road just beyond the enclosure.
Silent? Perhaps the word is quiet, even the word peaceful would do, peace-filled. In the silence I could hear some sounds usually drowned out by modern life, and between those sounds, I had a chance to listen to God. (More on that conversation in a moment.)
Everyone who was there had made a number of specific, intentional decisions to get to Gethsemani Abbey. It’s not on the way to anywhere; south of Bardstown, but well south of it and the Bluegrass Parkway and the Bourbon Trail, as well as off on a narrow winding two lane road, Monks Road. It’s been there since 1848, so if you want to go there, people can tell you how; Thomas Merton first visited in 1941, came to stay in 1942, took his first vows in 1944 and his solemn vows, a commitment to the monastic life in 1947. The proceeds from his writing allow the abbey to receive guests as freely as they do.
We guests had to take time away, make our journey to get to their gracious welcome, and choose to accept the guidelines of the monastic enclosure. Once there, we were free, within certain limits; no one had to come, and in truth, no one has to stay. There was one person who came, moved in late, was visibly uncomfortable through a service and a meal, and who left in the middle of the next service, at its end carrying luggage back out through the public area. It appeared he did not find what he had hoped; I trust Brother Gerlac had good words for him on his departure.
For me, I hated to leave, but it was time. And time, in part, because a few days later I would be leaving with my spouse for a trip in association with her work; I’ve helped on these before, called retreats but of a more official and formal sort, with meetings and discussions and highly social meal events.
And yes, it was in Florida, which is not a bad place to be in January. The facility has history of its own, built in 1926, with a tower at the center of the complex, and built for people to come to for the purpose of getting away from things for a while, a place to resort to, or perhaps you’d just say a resort. This is where my two weeks of retreat have some distinct differences.
For one thing, the monastery doesn’t have a pool; for another, the resort is a place where people are talking, the rooms have TVs (did I mention there’s no TVs in the monastery guest rooms?) and telephones (ditto), and the food is bit more . . . more. Still, the similarities are what intrigue me.
There’s group eating: true, we ate simply and in silence in Kentucky, but there are certain rituals and maneuvers around personal space and private practice which are common to any place where people line up and go through a line of serving tables, pause to consider condiments or side dishes, and how to settle yourself at the table in a strange place.
There’s the schedule: in Florida, we didn’t go to bed at 8:15 or get up at 3, but there was a group schedule which drove our decisions to which you conformed and got used to for a brief period. It wasn’t a service book but an agenda we consulted to see where we were in the program; we didn’t use Psalms but the institutional mission statement got quoted a fair bit.
We were in a place set apart, in Florida, with a golf course instead of woods and nature trails as buffer, but a location designed to allow people who come to feel they are in a setting where they can refocus themselves, individually and together. Everything about the resort is designed to support that intention, and that’s why we were there, and not in Ohio: to get some critical distance and be able to reflect on how things are, and what they might be, without the distraction of everyday demands.
Frankly, I think people could enjoy the amenities of a resort a bit more if there had been less choice, fewer decisions, and even some space where screens were not in evidence (other than at the poolside). A simpler meal gave me a chance to reflect on the ingredients, to appreciate the bell peppers and whole grain bread, to savor the coffee. When you confront a buffet of myriad choices, there’s almost a weariness of “Lord God, guide me now” as you try to decide what to take, and what to leave behind.
All of which is where it was a blessing for me to have been to the monastery before I visited the resort. To be given some very strong guardrails between which I needed to be mindful: this is the food, take it or do not, now is the time we sing, here is when we are silent. There I got a chance to work on my mindfulness around eating, drinking, waking, sleeping, and praying both in community and on my own.
Because the intended genius of a resort is to push mindfulness away, and mostly with the best of intentions: people to open doors, people to refill your water glass, people to keep the buffet fully stocked, all not for mere indulgence, but to open up the space where for the time you are there, you can focus on “the agenda.” Everything else is made ready before you even want it.
Where God spoke to me on retreat, at the monastery, was in that call to be mindful. To be conscious of my choices, my options, and my effect on others beyond the verbal or official ways we normally gauge reactions between one another. There’s a mindfulness to that sort of silent structured discipline that carried over helpfully into the very differently structured atmosphere of a resort. And not just towards helping me take smaller portions or avoiding unnecessary seconds when offered!
There was a parallel, a very non-ironic parallel, between the two locations. It turns out the resort hotel encountered hard times in the Depression, closed briefly, then reopened as a Veterans Administration hospital through World War II and on into the 1960s. The rooms and public spaces took on a different feeling knowing of that history.
And though we’d been there before, this trip was our first where we got the chance to cross the street in front of the resort, and attend a Sunday service at the UCC church which it turns out was built BEFORE the hotel, in part because the developer’s father was a Congregational minister and abolitionist. The minister there today came there, in fact, from Ohio, and we had other friends & experiences in common.
All of which might have happened in any case, but not inevitably, not necessarily. I think a little more mindfulness, some extra intentionality, opened the door for more possibility, additional connections, between my week in Kentucky and the one in Florida, between life in Ohio, and other paths not taken, new possibilities yet ahead.
Yes, it was easier to talk to God at the monastery. In truth, most of what God had to say to me there were questions. Questions I’m still sitting with. Considerations other than what everyone who is looking for me is wanting to know.
“Everybody is looking for you!” Simon Peter says to Jesus when he accosts him in the wilderness, to which Jesus says “Let us move on…” not “Oh dear, I’m sorry, well, let’s go back.” Jesus says let’s “proclaim the Good News” because “That is what I have come to do.”
In other words? When somebody says everybody is looking for you? It might just be God’s will that you go the opposite direction. Take a little time and space where you can, at home or away, but somewhere with minimal distractions, and work it out between you and God. You’ll hear something.
Because I’m told, God is still speaking.