Aware

Proper 24 B 2009
(Job 38: 1-7; Ps 104: 1-9, 25, 37b; Heb 5: 1-10; Mark 10: 35-45)


“Be aware of your surroundings.”

Last Thursday night I taught our martial arts class. I wanted to do something fun, so in the last ten minutes I had the group divide into four teams and play a game called Tae Kwan Do dodge-ball. At the signal each team attacks the other and spars in a free-for-all. If a point is scored for a clean hit, that person needs to go and stand against the wall. They can only re-join if an active teammate touches them. The last team with one or more active members left wins.

There’s a lot to be learned in martial arts. One intense young man charged his opponents and began to fight furiously with the most challenging person. He was so intent that he ignored a seven-year old kid who slipped around him and delivered a perfect front kick to his spine. “Out!”

The lesson: Be aware of your surroundings. Lift up your eyes. As in martial arts, so in life. We are surrounded by beauty and glory. The seasons change, the year ages in the graceful journey that is autumn. We savor the days, and welcome the promise of new life as an old life passes away and we smile or weep in memory. Be aware.

But are we? Are our days a joy and a revelation, or a burden? Is our life more curse than blessing? Is joy and delight hard to come by?

If we are not watchful, if we do not take care, it is easy to live in the place of scarcity and lack and even resentment that is the temptation of all of us. It is my temptation. At my stage in life my demons have names like “discouragement”, “cynicism”, and “resentment” when life does not turn out the way I thought it should. “My life should be secure and stable now.” “The other people in my life should have gotten a clue by now.” Even “the parish should be all straightened out by now.”

“”Who is this who darkens counsel without understanding?” God’s dialogue with Job is ours as well. “Dark counsel” comes to all of us, when we are sure that the weary resentful voices inside us speak truth.

But if our days are more burden than joy, it may do no good to be harangued by some preacher to “snap out of it.” That just adds to the burden, gives us more things to do.

We need someone to carry burdens that are too heavy for us. Jesus, says Hebrews, is “able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness.”

There is no burden we carry that has not already been carried by Jesus. There is no cry in the night, there is no agony of soul, there is no silent pain, there is no heaviness of heart that is not also being carried alongside us and within us. The Christ of hope and glory is the Christ who still suffers with his beloved people. As we struggle, as we journey, there is one who is with us and is healing us and is setting us free. Each step we take is not the same as the last. Each step takes us closer to knowing the heart of God.

A professor wrote recently that the letter to the Hebrews was written to a good community who were tired of doing the right thing—tired of being faithful in worship, tired of caring for the poor and needy, tired of keeping the community going one more year, one more month, one more day. Sound familiar? There’s no all-healing special program to address that. But there is Jesus Christ, his overwhelming love, his endless mystery and fascination, his amazing ability to heal and understand and renew and bring what was dead back to life.

Jesus has been to that moment of despair. From it he returns with grace and power to give abundantly to us.