9th Sunday After Pentecost 2024
©The Rev’d Dr John Rolley
+In the Name of God, Loving Creator, Compassionate Christ, and the Healing Spirit. Amen.
I would like to commence with a poem from Malcolm Guite, an Anglican priest/poet titled, Christ among the refugees.
That fearful road of weariness and want,
Through unforgiving heat and hate, ends here;
We narrow sand-blown eyes to scan this scant
And tented city outside Syria.
He fled with us when everything was wrecked
As Nazarene was blazoned on our door,
Walked with the damaged and the derelict
To where these tents are ranked and massed, foursquare
Against the desert, with a different blazon;
We trace the letters: UNHCR,
As dark smoke looms behind a cruel horizon.
Christ stands with us and withstands, where we are,
His high commission, as a refugee;
To pitch his tent in our humanity.
This poem resonates with my experience of life. The times of escape from pain and trauma all too often led me into deserts: places where the surrounding landscape’s features drain of life, become parched shadows of a life long forsaken, where colour is muted, and the very air feels thin and ominous.
These have been times where anything even remotely vibrant would feel like sandpaper on already frayed nerves and I find myself shrinking away in search of even less colour, life and sound.
It has been tempting to surrender to the abject loneliness in those spaces. A bleak abandonment where I begin to take on the characteristics of my surroundings: Paleness like death-bleached trees. It is as strangely comforting, as it is treacherous. As my world shrinks, so too does my vision and hope until I have woven around myself, a whole series of delusions that seek to protect my wounded self, only to cut myself off from love itself, which constantly surrounds me.
Today’s Gospel reading is set following a period of feverish activity. Jesus finds out his hometown is incapable of accepting him. He commences a large preaching campaign including sending his own disciples out on mission. Herod gets wind of what Jesus is doing and panics because he has had Jesus’ own cousin, John the Baptiser, brutally murdered on a drunken promise to his daughter, and now Herod fears that Jesus is John resurrected.
Emerging from that crazy activity, Jesus urges the disciples to retreat to a ‘deserted place’ – an ‘eremos’ or lonesome space, a wasteland, a desert, a desolate place. Jesus calls a halt to all the busy-ness. A time to rest and reflect. A time-out from all the pressing crowds, rumours, hate speech, threats and murmurings: All the things that tear at the soul and drag us down.
Jesus doesn’t send them on retreat.
Jesus goes with them. Jesus climbs into their boat, as he often did, and went with them. Jesus went into the desert with them as a refugee, pitching his tent wherever they are.
You see, what I am learning about deserted places, is that they are full of life. The sense of death I feel – a sense that governs my focus while in these places – I bring with me. The desert place, the lonesome place, the desolate place is deep within me. And I hate it, loathe it and wish it didn’t exist. I resist it precisely because it does exist – it must exist.
Jesus is at home is the desert places of life. With each and everyone of us. Regardless of how trauma, pain, burnout, exhaustion and soul-weariness tries to twist and distort that environment into a deathly shadowland, Jesus is present in the midst of it.
Jesus called the disciples to an ‘eremos’ or desert place not for them to despair or loose their sense of his presence or abandon all hope. No. He called them to be present within the bleakness, yet in his presence.
The incarnation of Christ is all about God’s yearning desire to share our lives: to be the constant presence of love within each and every second of existence. Jesus’ presence isn’t a reflection of a god who tabulates our imperfections, reminding us of our flawed natures to put us in our ‘place’…rather, to be in our lives with us. When we suffer, Jesus is suffering with us. When we rejoice, Jesus rejoices with us. When we escape into the bleakness of our pain, Jesus is there with us and sharing that pain. In all of it. In the pit of our pain with us.
When we are aware of Jesus’ presence with us and enter his loving invitation to mutual surrender, the desert places begin to bloom and team with life – our shared life with him.
We don’t know how long the disciples had to rest before the maddening crowds descended upon them. However, amazing and life giving things happened after their time in that desolate retreat.
Psalm 84:5-7 speaks poetically of these experiences:
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you:
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
6 Who, going through the valley of dryness (Bacca or weeping),
find there are spring from which to drink:
till the autumn rain shall clothe it with blessings.
7 They go from strength to strength:
they appear, everyone of them,
before the God of gods in Zion.
It is the journey through those desert places – those places of weeping, of desolation and pain – that brings the fulfilment of the soul’s desire. God travels with the pilgrims…with us… along the desolate roads of our hearts – roads of pilgrimage, in other words, of roads filled with purpose. The tears of anguish form springs of refreshment for others who follow and, most importantly, none of us are lost.
Christ who called the disciples to rest within their deserted and seemingly desolate places, also calls us. Those places feel threatening, fearful and often despairing, yet, Christ, whose ‘high commission as a refugee’ has indeed chosen to pitch his tent right in the middle of our desolation. He will never leave us – he always chooses us. He continues to travel with us, rest with us, and lead us on the journey of sharing Good news, and being Good news.
In the name of Love,
Amen.