Home
Commentary
Object:
One day in l748, the hymn writer Charles Wesley was in a dark and somber frame of mind. He was discouraged at the struggles Christians experience and troubled by his own weak faith.
As he walked in a small garden near his home, he watched an unusual sight in the sky above. A little sparrow was darting madly on the winds in a desperate attempt to escape the clutches of a pursuing hawk. The outcome was certain: in a moment the sparrow would perish.
But in that brief instant something happened. With a last frantic effort, the sparrow angled suddenly toward Wesley. He was wearing a large overcoat, quite bulky and open at the neck, and in a flash the tiny bird dived into the comforting folds. The hawk gave an angry shriek, circled for a moment in hopes of a second chance, and then flew off to find other prey. Wesley could feel the feverish restlessness of his little friend slowly ebb away.
The imagery of the song that came out of this encounter is clear and precise:
Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll, while the tempest still is high;
Hide me, O my Savior, hide, till the storm of life is past;
Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last!
Everyone needs a refuge, a place of retreat when the going gets rough. Behind the school where I taught in Nigeria was a high mountain. Circling its upper slopes were the remains of a centuries-old stone wall. This landmark was a symbol of hope to the Tiv people from ancient times. When marauding Hausa and Ibo and Udam raiding parties swarmed the Benue River basin, local farmers fled up Mkar Mountain till safety returned below.
The wilderness fortress of Masada served as similar protection for the first-century Jews in their desperate struggle against Rome. The stores and provisions laid up there, combined with the virtually unscalable walls of rock, created a standoff that lasted for years. In Ireland today, the Irish Round Towers still dot the landscape. They are small stone castles with a single door positioned high off the ground. When the ladder was pulled in and the heavy door bolted shut, everyone inside felt safe from the hostile Scottish scavengers.
We know that our religion is more than just a refuge. It should be a shaping influence on all that we do, say, or think. After all, that's what our Lord himself said when telling us that we should love God with all our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength.
Over the centuries we've tried to tell Freudians that their limited perception of religious faith is inaccurate. Religion is more than just some complex childhood fixation. We know that Marx was wrong when he called religion the "opiate of the masses." And a modern "God of the gaps" who takes over only when we can't find the answers through science or technology isn't anything like the personal Creator and Redeemer of the scriptures either.
Still, as Jesus knows and testifies to his disciples in his farewell discourse, if our religion doesn't bring comfort in times of struggle, if it doesn't keep us sane through periods of sore distress, if his God isn't at least a "God of the gaps" whose unfailing presence can be counted on when life falls apart, then our religion is worthless. This is why Jesus promised, and we need, the Paraclete, the comforter, the living spiritual presence of Jesus in a sometimes very threatening world. As Charles Wesley put it:
Other refuge have I none; hangs my helpless soul on thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone, still support and comfort me.
All my trust on thee is stayed, all my help from thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head with the shadow of thy wing.
Each of today's passages breathes that prayer. Ancient Israel looks for someone to bring it "home" after the tragic death of its first king and the loss of so much in battle with the Philistines, so David shepherds his flock into a new haven of rest. Paul wrestles with earthly tragedies and concerns but finds comfort in a divine vision of home with God in heaven. Jesus tries to go home, only to be rejected, while his disciples fan out in homeless exile, only to be welcomed by the lost, the last, and the least in the shared pilgrimage of home-going.
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Some years ago Saturday Night magazine carried an interesting story about the layout of major cities in our world. Some spread and sprawl, some creep and crawl, and some rise ever higher to the skies.
"What makes a city great?" the author asks. The answer, it seems, has much to do with planning. Paris is great, he says, because it has a heart. The cathedral of Notre Dame stands gracefully proud on the Ile Saint-Louis, beckoning the rest of the city to gather round her like a brood hen.
Washington DC, is great too. Here the French engineer Pierre-Charles L'Enfant designed a city that would capture the vibrancy of the young United States of America. Not the church, but the halls of government would take center spot, with all of the rest of the city radiating outward from "the Mall." L'Enfant's vision was enormous for the time; it helped to create the myth that would become the nation.
So, too, was David's vision for Jerusalem. The little city conquered by David early in his kingly career was barely more than a hillside village that happened to have great defenses. David saw its potential, somehow, and claimed it for his royal seat.
Then he did a surprising thing. Other kings would have immediately planted their palaces at the topmost heights of the city ("king on the mountain," you know), but David reserved that spot for another building. In fact, he spent most of his four decades in power planning for this other structure and collecting materials for its eventual erection. That building, of course, was the temple of God in Jerusalem.
It was left to Solomon to make the dream come to reality. And when he finally dedicated the temple after seven years of meticulous construction, it became the purpose for Jerusalem's existence. This was the palace of the true king of Israel -- the God of heaven and earth.
When the pilgrims of ancient Israel wended their way toward Jerusalem, they couldn't wait to see this great city, this city of importance, this true home of all the faithful. Every age since has been looking for such a home, and Jerusalem beckons as an eternal symbol.
In 1891, Scottish professor George Adam Smith traveled to Palestine to find out why. Frankly, he was disappointed. Somehow Jerusalem didn't match up to all the promotional hype or tourist tripe. Until he read again his Bible, and then he wrote the following:
[Judea] has no harbours, no river, no trunk-road, no convenient market for the nations on either side. In their commerce with each other these pass by Judea, finding their emporiums in the cities of Philistia, or, as of old, at Petra and Bozrah on the east side of the Jordan. Gaza has outdone Hebron as the port of the desert. Jerusalem is no match for Shechem in fertility or convenience of site. The whole plateau stands aloof, waterless, on the road to nowhere. There are none of the natural conditions of a great city.
And yet it was here that she arose who, more than Athens and more than Rome, taught the nations civic justice, and gave her name to the ideal city men are ever striving to build on earth, to the city of God that shall one day descend from heaven -- the New Jerusalem. For her builder was not nature nor the wisdom of men, but on that secluded and barren site the word of God, by her prophets, laid her eternal foundations in righteousness and reared her walls in her people's faith in God.
-- George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939)
With heart like that, how could Jerusalem's city planning fail?
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
British mountain-climber George Mallory tried a number of times to conquer the peak of Mount Everest. In fact, he lost his life in 1924 on those slopes, and debate still rumbles in mountaineering circles about whether or not he reached the pinnacle before he died. He's the one who coined the phrase "because it is there" in response to the question of why anyone would want to climb a mountain.
"Because it is there" is a pretty fair psychological assessment of human interaction with high places. The ancients set their cities on hilltops to command the advantage in war. Rich folk have always wanted "a room with a view" and are able to buy the higher ground for their palatial homes. Historically "high places" were scenes of religious devotion, probably because of their isolation from the busyness of human society and their proximity to the heavens.
Even little children get in on the act. Who, in northern climates, at least, hasn't played "King of the Mountain" in a winter schoolyard, pushing all comers down icy slopes? And who among us doesn't relish "mountaintop experiences": times when we feel "elated" and "elevated" and "ecstatic," times when we are "flying high," "sitting on top of the world," and "on cloud nine" somewhere there in the heavenlies.
True worship of God demands mountains, heights, and climbs of significance. Worship has an "elevating" dimension -- read the apostle Paul's description here of being "caught up" in the third heaven. "Flat" worship is boring and insignificant. Even those among us who don't wish the exuberance of hand-clapping, foot-stomping music still need to be drawn out of the "depths" of our difficult times. We need to pray for "higher ground."
Of course, like Paul, we still need to live in this world, with our thorns and our difficulties and our problems. And those rare but singular mountaintop experiences don't so much define theology as declares its glory. Strong glory, like the shoulders of the mountains. Majestic glory, like the sweeping pinnacles. Firm glory, like the justice that rolls down from heaven. Beckoning glory that calls us to bathe in the cascading waterfalls of God's forgiving and cleansing love.
When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur...
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee:
how great thou art, how great thou art!
Mark 6:1-13
Homes come in all shapes and sizes. There's a house in Asheville, North Carolina, that boasts 250 rooms and lays claim to being the largest private home in the world. Or, if you live on the 110th story of the Sears Tower in Chicago, you can truly boast about living in the clouds.
Of course, if you're into the weird and wacky, there's the home of Mrs. Winchester in southern California. After her husband and her only child died early last century, Mrs. Winchester believed spirits were telling her that she should buy a particular seventeen-room house, then under construction, and that she would continue to live so long as she kept building it. She did manage to survive another 38 years, dwelling in solitude as the construction continued on around her. But even the builders couldn't keep death from going in to visit her one night. Her house is now one of the strangest curiosities in the world.
Perhaps the most unusual story of house-building happened in Detroit. Henry Ford erected a marvelous home called "Fairlane" on the upper slopes of the River Rouge. It's a masterpiece of craftsmanship and artistic design. Ford had learned early in life that he could never really count on anyone else, so he spent an extra $200,000, already back in 1917, to put in his own electric power plant for the whole estate.
In all his years at Fairlane, the power plant served faithfully, lighting and heating his impressive home. Except for one time: in early April of 1947, torrential rains lashed the Detroit area. The River Rouge rose from its banks and on the night of April 7, the floods entered the Fairlane boiler room, smothering the fires and causing the steam pressure to drop. That night the lights went out at Fairlane, and that's the night that Henry Ford died in his bed at the age of 87.
That story is something like a parable. Here was a man who put North America on wheels, and who invented one gadget after another to make life less tedious and more enjoyable, who helped to usher in our modern technological society. Here was a staunchly independent man, one who took care of himself and didn't owe anybody anything. Here was a man who even managed to separate his wiring grid from that of the public utilities, and the very night he dies, forces beyond his control snatch away his source of power!
Jesus must have felt a bit like that when he came home to Nazareth, and everyone turned out to see him, cheer him, hear him, and beg from him. But his neighbors couldn't believe he was any more than the snotty-faced kid who used to play in their dirty streets. Because they didn't truly welcome him for who he was, he found himself homeless at home!
So Jesus sent out his disciples as homeless wanderers to bring the home of heaven into their hovelled lives. As G.K. Chesterton once put it:
This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
Application
There is a familiar gospel song that breathes with the pain and the urgency of today's passages. Thomas Dorsey was born in 1899 with music in his soul. He was known as "Georgia Tom," entertainer and blues singer. When he became a Christian, his music took on more depth as Dorsey explored the profound spiritual blues of scripture.
In 1938, Dorsey was scheduled to be the lead singer at a series of revival meetings in St. Louis, Missouri. His wife was pregnant, and Dorsey grew more hesitant to leave her as the due date approached. But she knew the impact of his ministry and urged her husband to keep his musical commitments for the sake of those who were seeking God. So he traveled the long road from Chicago to St. Louis.
On the first night of the revival, while Dorsey was already on the platform and the service was in progress, a telegram came. Dorsey's wife had died in a sudden and serious childbirth. Dorsey left for Chicago immediately and found his infant son barely hanging onto life. The child died a few hours later. In a moving funeral service, Thomas Dorsey buried his beloved wife and tiny son in the same casket.
Despondency set in. The great blues singer wandered in a depression that seemed to know no limits. A friend took him in for a while, just to care for his physical needs. One evening Dorsey wandered over to a piano and began to improvise on the keyboard. A melody gradually emerged, and the words soon followed. It sings in the heart of every person who has started the steps of faith that begin at the point where the resources of self prove insufficient:
Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, help me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.
When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near --
When my life is almost gone.
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall --
Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.
When the darkness appears,
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand,
Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.
Alternative Application
Mark 6:1-13. At age seventeen John Hull began to go blind in his left eye. One day he realized that the only way he would ever see his left shoulder again would be by turning to his side and catching his reflection in the mirror with his right eye. Later the blindness spread and eventually John's sight was gone entirely.
Hull writes that for a while he energetically tried to remember what he looked like. He thought about old photographs of himself and struggled to recall the face that peered back at him from the bathroom mirror when he shaved. After a while, though, his memory banks gave out and he couldn't remember his own face anymore.
"Who am I?" he thought, with a wash of panic. "If I don't even know my own face, who am I?"
Worse still, however, was his daughter Lizzie's question. She was only four years old when she asked him, "Daddy, how can a smile be between us when you can't see my face?"
It was Lizzie's curious questions that prompted Hull to write his autobiography, Touching the Rock. He wanted to remember himself and re-picture the times and circumstances that made it important and unique. More than that, he wished for Lizzie to know him in his sighted and unsighted years. His biography was a journal to restore the smiles between them.
Then, as he surveyed his life in its spiritual dimensions Hull took his daughter's query to a level higher. "How can a smile be between us and God if we cannot see his face?" he asked.
As he reflected, Hull came to realize that the only way we can see God is when we take what little God gives us to work with and use it as a kind of tarnished mirror to seek out God's distant face. In other words, said Hull, we are all somewhat blinded, and we need to use things like the scriptures and the person of Jesus to help us take the first steps toward making a smile happen between ourselves and God. In this he echoed Mark's design in writing the gospel. Those of us who did not originally stand with Jesus in that ancient world are no less lost and hurting than they were. We are all looking for meaning in our lives. To a person we are searchers on a quest for purpose or identity. The hunger is in every belly and each of us finds ourselves in strange wilderness places as we look and seek.
What will we find? How will it become visible to us? Where will we see the smile between God and us? However it will happen, according to Mark, it will be when we first believe that Jesus has what it takes to satisfy our cravings.
A friend called me one Saturday. He was a perennial student, far away from the town that shaped him and mostly at odds with his family. There was good reason for his mother to chide, nag, and scold, for my friend had lost his faith and his parents were worried. The more they pushed the certainty of their beliefs on him, the more he chafed and backed away. He could no longer live in the simplicity of their dogma, even if it gave them shelter and safety.
So now he wandered in the wilderness of academia, hoping in each class to find a glorious utopia or a grand dream or at least a tiny map that might point toward some secularized Holy Grail. Every term he called me to describe his latest faculty mentor, a true savior, finally, who was worthy of his devotion. But this Saturday something was different. There was wistfulness in my friend's voice and a trembling uncertainty in his words. What if there was no big picture or all-encompassing thesis or unifying meaning? What if we were tripping with stumbling paces through the wilderness and there was no limit or signpost or way out? What if he was on a quest but there was nothing to find?
"I'm lonely," he told me, and I was left to imagine his cosmic, spiritual aloneness, a void where both heaven and hell were silent and he was left in awful communion with only his inadequate self. There was no dream here; only an incessant heart hunger kept awake by an unrelenting nightmare.
Generations ago George Herbert penned a brilliant picture of the aching in each of our souls. In his poem "The Pulley" he portrayed God at the moment of creation, sprinkling his new human creature with treasures kept in a jar beside him. These were God's finest resources, given now as gifts to the crown of his universe: beauty, wisdom, honor, pleasure… All were scattered liberally in the genetic recipe of our kind.
When the jar of God's treasures was nearly empty, God put the lid on it. The angels wondered why God did not finish the human concoction, leaving one great resource still in its container. This last quality, God told the angels, is "rest." But God would not grant that divine treasure to the human race.
The angels, of course, asked why. Herbert was ready with the divine answer regarding the best mix for the human spirit:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.
Herbert saw well that the strong talents and marvelous abilities of humankind would make us like impatient children, eager to strike out on our own and find our self-made destinies. Only if God would hold back a sense of full satisfaction from our souls would we search our way back home.
This remains a perennial theological paradox: it is the creative act of God that gives us freedom. Yet when we use our abilities for our own ends we tend to lose what is best in ourselves and often demean it in others and push like adolescents away from our spiritual parent. Only if we become restless to find the face of God in some longing for home will we regain a glimpse of our own best faces reflected back toward us in the kindness and smile of God.
Here is where the strange complexity found in Mark's story connects with us. We are the people who pretend to welcome Jesus home, seeking something from his words and actions to give us meaning. And like the crowds in Jesus' day, we lack the resources to take along anything of lasting value. We reject the very one who offers what we need.
So life beckons us to follow the latest fad, to search for the newest fulfillment, to seek the richest treasure. We consume and devour until we are fed up with life, so to speak, and still we want more.
Augustine reflected on the spiritual character of our race. "Man is one of your creatures, Lord," he said, "and his instinct is to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you."
As he walked in a small garden near his home, he watched an unusual sight in the sky above. A little sparrow was darting madly on the winds in a desperate attempt to escape the clutches of a pursuing hawk. The outcome was certain: in a moment the sparrow would perish.
But in that brief instant something happened. With a last frantic effort, the sparrow angled suddenly toward Wesley. He was wearing a large overcoat, quite bulky and open at the neck, and in a flash the tiny bird dived into the comforting folds. The hawk gave an angry shriek, circled for a moment in hopes of a second chance, and then flew off to find other prey. Wesley could feel the feverish restlessness of his little friend slowly ebb away.
The imagery of the song that came out of this encounter is clear and precise:
Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll, while the tempest still is high;
Hide me, O my Savior, hide, till the storm of life is past;
Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last!
Everyone needs a refuge, a place of retreat when the going gets rough. Behind the school where I taught in Nigeria was a high mountain. Circling its upper slopes were the remains of a centuries-old stone wall. This landmark was a symbol of hope to the Tiv people from ancient times. When marauding Hausa and Ibo and Udam raiding parties swarmed the Benue River basin, local farmers fled up Mkar Mountain till safety returned below.
The wilderness fortress of Masada served as similar protection for the first-century Jews in their desperate struggle against Rome. The stores and provisions laid up there, combined with the virtually unscalable walls of rock, created a standoff that lasted for years. In Ireland today, the Irish Round Towers still dot the landscape. They are small stone castles with a single door positioned high off the ground. When the ladder was pulled in and the heavy door bolted shut, everyone inside felt safe from the hostile Scottish scavengers.
We know that our religion is more than just a refuge. It should be a shaping influence on all that we do, say, or think. After all, that's what our Lord himself said when telling us that we should love God with all our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength.
Over the centuries we've tried to tell Freudians that their limited perception of religious faith is inaccurate. Religion is more than just some complex childhood fixation. We know that Marx was wrong when he called religion the "opiate of the masses." And a modern "God of the gaps" who takes over only when we can't find the answers through science or technology isn't anything like the personal Creator and Redeemer of the scriptures either.
Still, as Jesus knows and testifies to his disciples in his farewell discourse, if our religion doesn't bring comfort in times of struggle, if it doesn't keep us sane through periods of sore distress, if his God isn't at least a "God of the gaps" whose unfailing presence can be counted on when life falls apart, then our religion is worthless. This is why Jesus promised, and we need, the Paraclete, the comforter, the living spiritual presence of Jesus in a sometimes very threatening world. As Charles Wesley put it:
Other refuge have I none; hangs my helpless soul on thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone, still support and comfort me.
All my trust on thee is stayed, all my help from thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head with the shadow of thy wing.
Each of today's passages breathes that prayer. Ancient Israel looks for someone to bring it "home" after the tragic death of its first king and the loss of so much in battle with the Philistines, so David shepherds his flock into a new haven of rest. Paul wrestles with earthly tragedies and concerns but finds comfort in a divine vision of home with God in heaven. Jesus tries to go home, only to be rejected, while his disciples fan out in homeless exile, only to be welcomed by the lost, the last, and the least in the shared pilgrimage of home-going.
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Some years ago Saturday Night magazine carried an interesting story about the layout of major cities in our world. Some spread and sprawl, some creep and crawl, and some rise ever higher to the skies.
"What makes a city great?" the author asks. The answer, it seems, has much to do with planning. Paris is great, he says, because it has a heart. The cathedral of Notre Dame stands gracefully proud on the Ile Saint-Louis, beckoning the rest of the city to gather round her like a brood hen.
Washington DC, is great too. Here the French engineer Pierre-Charles L'Enfant designed a city that would capture the vibrancy of the young United States of America. Not the church, but the halls of government would take center spot, with all of the rest of the city radiating outward from "the Mall." L'Enfant's vision was enormous for the time; it helped to create the myth that would become the nation.
So, too, was David's vision for Jerusalem. The little city conquered by David early in his kingly career was barely more than a hillside village that happened to have great defenses. David saw its potential, somehow, and claimed it for his royal seat.
Then he did a surprising thing. Other kings would have immediately planted their palaces at the topmost heights of the city ("king on the mountain," you know), but David reserved that spot for another building. In fact, he spent most of his four decades in power planning for this other structure and collecting materials for its eventual erection. That building, of course, was the temple of God in Jerusalem.
It was left to Solomon to make the dream come to reality. And when he finally dedicated the temple after seven years of meticulous construction, it became the purpose for Jerusalem's existence. This was the palace of the true king of Israel -- the God of heaven and earth.
When the pilgrims of ancient Israel wended their way toward Jerusalem, they couldn't wait to see this great city, this city of importance, this true home of all the faithful. Every age since has been looking for such a home, and Jerusalem beckons as an eternal symbol.
In 1891, Scottish professor George Adam Smith traveled to Palestine to find out why. Frankly, he was disappointed. Somehow Jerusalem didn't match up to all the promotional hype or tourist tripe. Until he read again his Bible, and then he wrote the following:
[Judea] has no harbours, no river, no trunk-road, no convenient market for the nations on either side. In their commerce with each other these pass by Judea, finding their emporiums in the cities of Philistia, or, as of old, at Petra and Bozrah on the east side of the Jordan. Gaza has outdone Hebron as the port of the desert. Jerusalem is no match for Shechem in fertility or convenience of site. The whole plateau stands aloof, waterless, on the road to nowhere. There are none of the natural conditions of a great city.
And yet it was here that she arose who, more than Athens and more than Rome, taught the nations civic justice, and gave her name to the ideal city men are ever striving to build on earth, to the city of God that shall one day descend from heaven -- the New Jerusalem. For her builder was not nature nor the wisdom of men, but on that secluded and barren site the word of God, by her prophets, laid her eternal foundations in righteousness and reared her walls in her people's faith in God.
-- George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939)
With heart like that, how could Jerusalem's city planning fail?
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
British mountain-climber George Mallory tried a number of times to conquer the peak of Mount Everest. In fact, he lost his life in 1924 on those slopes, and debate still rumbles in mountaineering circles about whether or not he reached the pinnacle before he died. He's the one who coined the phrase "because it is there" in response to the question of why anyone would want to climb a mountain.
"Because it is there" is a pretty fair psychological assessment of human interaction with high places. The ancients set their cities on hilltops to command the advantage in war. Rich folk have always wanted "a room with a view" and are able to buy the higher ground for their palatial homes. Historically "high places" were scenes of religious devotion, probably because of their isolation from the busyness of human society and their proximity to the heavens.
Even little children get in on the act. Who, in northern climates, at least, hasn't played "King of the Mountain" in a winter schoolyard, pushing all comers down icy slopes? And who among us doesn't relish "mountaintop experiences": times when we feel "elated" and "elevated" and "ecstatic," times when we are "flying high," "sitting on top of the world," and "on cloud nine" somewhere there in the heavenlies.
True worship of God demands mountains, heights, and climbs of significance. Worship has an "elevating" dimension -- read the apostle Paul's description here of being "caught up" in the third heaven. "Flat" worship is boring and insignificant. Even those among us who don't wish the exuberance of hand-clapping, foot-stomping music still need to be drawn out of the "depths" of our difficult times. We need to pray for "higher ground."
Of course, like Paul, we still need to live in this world, with our thorns and our difficulties and our problems. And those rare but singular mountaintop experiences don't so much define theology as declares its glory. Strong glory, like the shoulders of the mountains. Majestic glory, like the sweeping pinnacles. Firm glory, like the justice that rolls down from heaven. Beckoning glory that calls us to bathe in the cascading waterfalls of God's forgiving and cleansing love.
When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur...
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee:
how great thou art, how great thou art!
Mark 6:1-13
Homes come in all shapes and sizes. There's a house in Asheville, North Carolina, that boasts 250 rooms and lays claim to being the largest private home in the world. Or, if you live on the 110th story of the Sears Tower in Chicago, you can truly boast about living in the clouds.
Of course, if you're into the weird and wacky, there's the home of Mrs. Winchester in southern California. After her husband and her only child died early last century, Mrs. Winchester believed spirits were telling her that she should buy a particular seventeen-room house, then under construction, and that she would continue to live so long as she kept building it. She did manage to survive another 38 years, dwelling in solitude as the construction continued on around her. But even the builders couldn't keep death from going in to visit her one night. Her house is now one of the strangest curiosities in the world.
Perhaps the most unusual story of house-building happened in Detroit. Henry Ford erected a marvelous home called "Fairlane" on the upper slopes of the River Rouge. It's a masterpiece of craftsmanship and artistic design. Ford had learned early in life that he could never really count on anyone else, so he spent an extra $200,000, already back in 1917, to put in his own electric power plant for the whole estate.
In all his years at Fairlane, the power plant served faithfully, lighting and heating his impressive home. Except for one time: in early April of 1947, torrential rains lashed the Detroit area. The River Rouge rose from its banks and on the night of April 7, the floods entered the Fairlane boiler room, smothering the fires and causing the steam pressure to drop. That night the lights went out at Fairlane, and that's the night that Henry Ford died in his bed at the age of 87.
That story is something like a parable. Here was a man who put North America on wheels, and who invented one gadget after another to make life less tedious and more enjoyable, who helped to usher in our modern technological society. Here was a staunchly independent man, one who took care of himself and didn't owe anybody anything. Here was a man who even managed to separate his wiring grid from that of the public utilities, and the very night he dies, forces beyond his control snatch away his source of power!
Jesus must have felt a bit like that when he came home to Nazareth, and everyone turned out to see him, cheer him, hear him, and beg from him. But his neighbors couldn't believe he was any more than the snotty-faced kid who used to play in their dirty streets. Because they didn't truly welcome him for who he was, he found himself homeless at home!
So Jesus sent out his disciples as homeless wanderers to bring the home of heaven into their hovelled lives. As G.K. Chesterton once put it:
This world is wild as an old wife's tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
Application
There is a familiar gospel song that breathes with the pain and the urgency of today's passages. Thomas Dorsey was born in 1899 with music in his soul. He was known as "Georgia Tom," entertainer and blues singer. When he became a Christian, his music took on more depth as Dorsey explored the profound spiritual blues of scripture.
In 1938, Dorsey was scheduled to be the lead singer at a series of revival meetings in St. Louis, Missouri. His wife was pregnant, and Dorsey grew more hesitant to leave her as the due date approached. But she knew the impact of his ministry and urged her husband to keep his musical commitments for the sake of those who were seeking God. So he traveled the long road from Chicago to St. Louis.
On the first night of the revival, while Dorsey was already on the platform and the service was in progress, a telegram came. Dorsey's wife had died in a sudden and serious childbirth. Dorsey left for Chicago immediately and found his infant son barely hanging onto life. The child died a few hours later. In a moving funeral service, Thomas Dorsey buried his beloved wife and tiny son in the same casket.
Despondency set in. The great blues singer wandered in a depression that seemed to know no limits. A friend took him in for a while, just to care for his physical needs. One evening Dorsey wandered over to a piano and began to improvise on the keyboard. A melody gradually emerged, and the words soon followed. It sings in the heart of every person who has started the steps of faith that begin at the point where the resources of self prove insufficient:
Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, help me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.
When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near --
When my life is almost gone.
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall --
Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.
When the darkness appears,
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand,
Take my hand, precious Lord; lead me home.
Alternative Application
Mark 6:1-13. At age seventeen John Hull began to go blind in his left eye. One day he realized that the only way he would ever see his left shoulder again would be by turning to his side and catching his reflection in the mirror with his right eye. Later the blindness spread and eventually John's sight was gone entirely.
Hull writes that for a while he energetically tried to remember what he looked like. He thought about old photographs of himself and struggled to recall the face that peered back at him from the bathroom mirror when he shaved. After a while, though, his memory banks gave out and he couldn't remember his own face anymore.
"Who am I?" he thought, with a wash of panic. "If I don't even know my own face, who am I?"
Worse still, however, was his daughter Lizzie's question. She was only four years old when she asked him, "Daddy, how can a smile be between us when you can't see my face?"
It was Lizzie's curious questions that prompted Hull to write his autobiography, Touching the Rock. He wanted to remember himself and re-picture the times and circumstances that made it important and unique. More than that, he wished for Lizzie to know him in his sighted and unsighted years. His biography was a journal to restore the smiles between them.
Then, as he surveyed his life in its spiritual dimensions Hull took his daughter's query to a level higher. "How can a smile be between us and God if we cannot see his face?" he asked.
As he reflected, Hull came to realize that the only way we can see God is when we take what little God gives us to work with and use it as a kind of tarnished mirror to seek out God's distant face. In other words, said Hull, we are all somewhat blinded, and we need to use things like the scriptures and the person of Jesus to help us take the first steps toward making a smile happen between ourselves and God. In this he echoed Mark's design in writing the gospel. Those of us who did not originally stand with Jesus in that ancient world are no less lost and hurting than they were. We are all looking for meaning in our lives. To a person we are searchers on a quest for purpose or identity. The hunger is in every belly and each of us finds ourselves in strange wilderness places as we look and seek.
What will we find? How will it become visible to us? Where will we see the smile between God and us? However it will happen, according to Mark, it will be when we first believe that Jesus has what it takes to satisfy our cravings.
A friend called me one Saturday. He was a perennial student, far away from the town that shaped him and mostly at odds with his family. There was good reason for his mother to chide, nag, and scold, for my friend had lost his faith and his parents were worried. The more they pushed the certainty of their beliefs on him, the more he chafed and backed away. He could no longer live in the simplicity of their dogma, even if it gave them shelter and safety.
So now he wandered in the wilderness of academia, hoping in each class to find a glorious utopia or a grand dream or at least a tiny map that might point toward some secularized Holy Grail. Every term he called me to describe his latest faculty mentor, a true savior, finally, who was worthy of his devotion. But this Saturday something was different. There was wistfulness in my friend's voice and a trembling uncertainty in his words. What if there was no big picture or all-encompassing thesis or unifying meaning? What if we were tripping with stumbling paces through the wilderness and there was no limit or signpost or way out? What if he was on a quest but there was nothing to find?
"I'm lonely," he told me, and I was left to imagine his cosmic, spiritual aloneness, a void where both heaven and hell were silent and he was left in awful communion with only his inadequate self. There was no dream here; only an incessant heart hunger kept awake by an unrelenting nightmare.
Generations ago George Herbert penned a brilliant picture of the aching in each of our souls. In his poem "The Pulley" he portrayed God at the moment of creation, sprinkling his new human creature with treasures kept in a jar beside him. These were God's finest resources, given now as gifts to the crown of his universe: beauty, wisdom, honor, pleasure… All were scattered liberally in the genetic recipe of our kind.
When the jar of God's treasures was nearly empty, God put the lid on it. The angels wondered why God did not finish the human concoction, leaving one great resource still in its container. This last quality, God told the angels, is "rest." But God would not grant that divine treasure to the human race.
The angels, of course, asked why. Herbert was ready with the divine answer regarding the best mix for the human spirit:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.
Herbert saw well that the strong talents and marvelous abilities of humankind would make us like impatient children, eager to strike out on our own and find our self-made destinies. Only if God would hold back a sense of full satisfaction from our souls would we search our way back home.
This remains a perennial theological paradox: it is the creative act of God that gives us freedom. Yet when we use our abilities for our own ends we tend to lose what is best in ourselves and often demean it in others and push like adolescents away from our spiritual parent. Only if we become restless to find the face of God in some longing for home will we regain a glimpse of our own best faces reflected back toward us in the kindness and smile of God.
Here is where the strange complexity found in Mark's story connects with us. We are the people who pretend to welcome Jesus home, seeking something from his words and actions to give us meaning. And like the crowds in Jesus' day, we lack the resources to take along anything of lasting value. We reject the very one who offers what we need.
So life beckons us to follow the latest fad, to search for the newest fulfillment, to seek the richest treasure. We consume and devour until we are fed up with life, so to speak, and still we want more.
Augustine reflected on the spiritual character of our race. "Man is one of your creatures, Lord," he said, "and his instinct is to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you."
