Asleep on the Job

There is a detail in today’s Gospel reading that always catches my attention — can you imagine Jesus asleep with his head on a cushion?  In a boat?  Well …

 Asleep on the Job

Psalm 133: Mark 4:35-41

Today we are marking “Pastoral Care Sunday.” It is not a day on the traditional calendar of the church, though it is becoming a tradition for us. It is a time to stop and reflect

on the ministries of mutual care that are so important in our congregation, to recall the theological basis for what we do, and to give thanks for all of the time and love that are shared here, especially in times of need.

A word first about the term, “pastoral care.” I would not want anyone to think that pastoral care is an activity done only by the pastor. Nothing could be farther from the truth – which is why the group in our church that is responsible for our mutual care is called the “Congregational Care Council.” I understand pastoral care to be all of our activities that support, comfort, and encourage one another, especially in times of particular need. The most common of these activities is friendship: listening, visiting, and being involved with each other. We also offer food, rides, child care, errand running, and other small services that are appreciated in times of illness, crisis, and loss.

What sets pastoral care apart from other kind deeds is that it is grounded in our faith. There are many motivations for helpful people: reciprocity, good citizenship, and simple generosity. All of those are noble reasons, and we are grateful to live in a community where those virtues are common. But the mutual care in a Christian congregation has motives that extent beyond these civic traits. We understand ourselves to be both servants and ambassadors on behalf of divine love. We are servants because Jesus taught us: “love one another as I have loved you.” And we are ambassadors because (as Teresa of Avila put it) “Christ has no body now but yours; no hands, no feet on earth but yours.”

Sometimes our care for one another explicitly uses the name of God. We offer to pray with and for our neighbors who are struggling and suffering. Much more often – in this congregation, at least – our religious convictions are concealed from the casual observer. We do not usually say, “I bring you this hot dish in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” and yet the presence of the holy is often very close at hand in these simple acts of helpfulness and nurture. As we listen each week to the church member who welcomes us to worship, we hear story after story about the profound spiritual impact that this caring community has on individual lives. Our commitment to congregational care is at the heart of our life as a faith community.

In recent months, we have been especially aware of the storms that are raging around us. The most obvious of these storms is the financial one, but in the midst of that global tempest the smaller human storms continue – and are sometimes made far more severe by the economic context. And so we hear the story of Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee with both yearning and skepticism. We would very much like to poke at Jesus, asleep in the stern, and ask him to calm the storms that are disrupting our families, our businesses, and our community. And we would like it even better if he awoke, raised his hands, and quieted the winds and waves. But our yearning to be rescued from the storms is tempered by our skepticism about divine intervention; we really do not expect Jesus to raise his hands over the stock exchanges and investment banks of the world and restore them to calm and predictable cycles.

What we sometimes forget is that if Jesus were to calm the storm around us, as he did for the disciples in their little boat on the Sea of Galilee, he would also probably ask us the haunting questions that he asked them: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” [Mark 4:40]

Jesus was no fool, and storms on the Sea of Galilee can come up quickly and be terrifyingly violent. He knew what they were afraid of, in the immediate and literal sense. So I don’t think his question is about their reaction to the weather. I think his question was deeper and more searching than that – I think he was asking about the way in which their fear had taken them over, the way in which it had moved to the center of their experience. Remember, their frantic question to them had been, “…do you not care that we are perishing?” [Mark 4:38]

That question sounds to me like a version of a question we often raise when we are stressed and fearful: “If you really loved me, you would ___” – and here, you can fill in the blanks: “you would spend more time with me,” or more insidiously, “you would know what I was thinking.” When we are afraid, we raise the ante, we personalize what is going on, and we feel cheated or (at least) short-changed. “If you really loved us,” said the disciples, “you would wake up and be afraid with us.”

“Why are you overcome by fear?” is how I hear Jesus’ question. “Why do you forget everything you have known and experienced of comfort and challenge and community, and let this storm be your only reality?” And that is the question he asks us, I think, when we want to wake him up and get him to intervene with the scary events in our modern lives. “Why do you let fear be your central reality?”

With a backdrop of the violent and tragic events of 9/11 and the equally violent and tragic economic events of the last year, many observers (including me) have noted that fear has become a primary theme in our nation’s public life. Leaving aside the ways in which that became a political reality, I am struck by how often we are asked to be afraid. News programs on television lead off with sensation stories about new health hazards, airport security regulations define shampoo as a potentially dangerous substance, newspapers warn us about scams and identity theft, friends send us emails about new computer viruses, and urban legends circulate about unspeakable crimes. Fear is all around us.

And yes, some of our fears are legitimate and healthy – but we are not always realistic about identifying which ones those are. In the community where I lived in eastern Washington, there was a great deal of fear about the arrival of gang members from California. What there wasn’t much fear about was the epidemic of teen-age drinking, and the highway deaths it caused, or the epidemic of teen-age pregnancies, and the family chaos that they caused. People in the community were so focused on what they feared that they sometimes couldn’t see the real challenges that were in front of them. They were, in a sense, blinded by their fear.

“Why are you afraid?” Jesus asked his companions in the boat, and now he asks us. And then he asks, “Have you still no faith?” In our modern conversation, we use the word faith as a noun; faith is a possession. We often think of faith as agreement with particular doctrines or beliefs, and (sadly) especially doctrines or beliefs that seem counter-factual or in conflict with our daily experiences and sensory experience.

But I think we can hear in Jesus’ question another way to think about faith: faith is that spiritual quality which trumps fear. Of course I don’t mean that faith blots out reasonable reactions to dangerous events and environments. What I mean is that faith keeps fear in its place, as a warning signal for appropriate precautions and reactions. Faith is the spiritual center that relativizes our fear, keeps it the proper size, and does not let it direct our actions. Faith is what reminds us that life is much more than the alarming events that confront us, much more than the hazards we must face or dodge. Faith is what keeps us from seeing only the dark side, from being under the thumb of what we fear.

Pastoral care, congregational care, is all about sharing our faith. Offering companionship and assistance are ways that we testify to the power of faith in the face of events and situations that bring fear into the forefront: illness, injury, loss, disappointment, betrayal, loneliness, death. Caring for each other awakens our faith, gives it life and breath and incarnational presence.

I chose the title for today, “sleeping on the job,” because my own mental image of Jesus in the boat is so clear. Mark’s gospel tells us, not just that he was asleep, but that he was asleep in the stern, on a cushion. That cushion is what sticks in my mind – one of those curious details that Biblical authors sometimes include that transform narratives from ancient recollections to living ones. We often remember important moments like this – psychologists call them “snapshot memories” – with odd little details. You may recall what you wore on an auspicious occasion, or what music was playing in the background, or what you had as an appetizer. That minor point makes the memory your own, keeps it bright, helps it to linger in your thoughts.

Because, of course, Jesus was not really “sleeping on the job.” He may have been napping; he may not have met the hopes of his companions right away. But he was there, with them, in the boat, on the stormy sea. And that is where he is for us: in the boat, with us, on whatever stormy seas we may sail.

Thanks be to God.

Prayer for June 21, 2009

Almighty and everlasting God, creator of all things seen and unseen, hear now our silent prayers, as we open our hearts to you in the sacred quietness.

God of faith and hope, we bring before you our prayers for those we have named this morning – we especially remember … Bring to each of them the gifts of mercy and grace that are most needed, according to your wisdom and love.

Holy One, we offer our prayers this morning for all of the people that we miss.

We miss the people who have preceded us in death. We pray for comfort in our losses of people whom we love: some were family members whom we knew intimately, some were friends whose lives were entwined with ours. Still others were less close, but somehow singularly important at some moment in our lives. Be with us in the sadness that comes over us at those moments we would have shared, those jokes that we would have laughed at together, and those milestones we would have passed in each other’s company. Help us, we pray, to let these memories become incorporated in our ways and our days.

We miss the people who are separated from us by distance and geography. We pray to find ways to keep these precious connections alive, even when our face-to-face contact is infrequent and our time for correspondence is limited.

We miss the people who are separated from us by conflict, misunderstanding, estrangement, and laziness. Help us, we pray, to mend the relationships that have been damaged or eroded, and to rebuild bridges of trust and affection where they have been lost. And in those situations where reconciliation is not yet possible, we ask for the help of your Holy Spirit is praying for those we have harmed and for those who have harmed us.

We miss the people who have brought wisdom and support to us in our dark days, often without knowing how valuable their presence was to us. We thank you for the gifts of grace that have come through their acts of compassion, justice, and kindness, and pray that we have likewise offered those gifts to people in need.

And we miss the people whom we have failed to welcome into our communities and into our churches: we miss their unique contributions, their stretching of our imaginations, and their widening of our perspectives. We pray for more open hearts, so that we can offer the holy gift of hospitality to all the souls who find their way into our lives.

All these things we pray in the name of the one who is never far from us, even Jesus the Christ, and we pray together now in the words that he taught us ….