This is the stuff of myths and fables. . .

It’s easy to hear a reading like that just read from the Gospel without hearing it at all, for it sounds like a thousand others. In fact, it seems to have exactly the same form as many of the most popular stories we tell in endless variation. Somewhere, somehow, someone is under threat, and suddenly, miraculously, by virtue of supernatural strength, a single individual manages to save the day. And by spontaneous expansion, it is then suggested that this relief of rescue extends to the whole world.

This is the stuff of myths and fables, of suspense novels and thrillers, and, increasingly, of comic book characters that explode with new life on movie screens, appearing simultaneously on children’s lunch boxes, in fast food value meals, and on highly marketed shirts, sheets, shoes, and so on. We love heroes, perhaps because we quietly know that none of us is immune from falling victim to something. Life has inherent risks. Yet a wonderful assurance is made available to us when we can drape ourselves in repeated accounts of the triumph of good over evil, even against all odds. Walking on water may have lost much of its original fascination, along with sandals, robes, and ancient rowboats. But vivid stories of men in tights and capes, scaling buildings, thwarting the scheming of technological geniuses are still being produced at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, and they earn hundreds of millions in return. Impending catastrophe and stunning deliverance: we feast on such tales.

Pick up almost any commentary on Mark’s text, and the explanation given for what was read this morning will announce the same theme. After the feeding of the five thousand, at nightfall, the disciples head out by boat across the Sea of Galilee. Jesus remains behind, alone, to pray. His prayer, however, is interrupted because, somehow, mysteriously, by the magic of extraordinary vision, very late into the night, he spies his disciples struggling against surging waters. It’s a terrific telephone booth moment, when, immediately, Jesus determines that this is now no longer the time for contemplation. No. What is required of him is action. So without pause, he heads out, stepping above the waves, neither sinking nor swimming. And, entering the boat, the storm is stilled. The disciple’s rescue is accomplished – impressively. And we, in turn, receiving this report, may thrill to the idea that this action, done on behalf of such a motley bunch of fisherman, would surely apply, then, to us no less. So it has often been said. Is this what you heard?

The problem with this interpretation is that it ignores the most intriguing line in the story. The disciples are in trouble. Jesus rushes to the scene. We expect, then, that he’d arrive and, in arriving, set everything right. But this is not what Mark tells us. For we are told that Jesus intended to “walk right on by.” To where, no one knows. Why, it isn’t explained. But Mark leaves us with this enigmatic, very odd, and humorous image. The hero misses the mark. Like a horse with blinders, Jesus seems to have wished only to amble aimlessly ahead, oblivious to the commotion in the boat – walking like Forrest Gump’s senseless running, anywhere and nowhere. It’s only the cries of the disciples that change his course. They scream, thinking he’s a ghost, adding fright to their fear. Their terror breaks through his seeming stupor, and this alone causes him to turn to calm them. Mark’s narration here is too strange to be ignored. Jesus meant to merely pass by the boat. This comment is too bizarre to dismiss.

I had a few minutes earlier in the week to talk with John Talbott about the reading, and I raised this question with him. I must credit him with a brilliant reply. For he suggested that the purpose of this line might be to inform us that the disciples didn’t actually need rescue – at least not in the sense that we tend to assume. They didn’t need the superhero. They didn’t need the miracle. They didn’t need Jesus to intervene, abnormally, on their behalf. Walking by would have been a way to signify that, in a much more fundamental way, Jesus knew they would be alright, and they, in turn, could have realized this from his passing without stopping. No magic was necessary, regardless of the severity of the storm -- for there is a trust that exceeds all the reaches of fear, a trust so deep that we may see that our very lives are the expression of God’s own faithfulness. Come high water or hell, we are not imperiled. This is what prayer reveals and establishes with us. But it’s a trust that, in the midst of our struggles, easily becomes occluded, and a promise from God that is often hidden under multiple layers of our own confusion, dismay, and anxiety.

It is important to remember that the whole Gospel of Mark is an act of subversion. It serves to undermine many of the firmest assumptions we make about God. In story after story, Mark tells us exactly what we expect to hear. He fashions an image of God that meets all our usual notions. And then, abruptly, again and again, he pulls the rug from under our feet. We think of glory as exaltation; Jesus declares that it’s servanthood. We look to God for the healing of illness; when asked, Jesus offers forgiveness of sins. We’d like God to be strong enough to save us from every crisis, -- from time to time we’d like some supernatural assistance; Mark tells us that Jesus was believed to be God only when a Roman centurion watched him die. Thus, if we are to hear what was read today, we should think of this story as Jesus’ wholesale rejection of the hero motif and the division upon which it depends. God’s function is not to rescue us from our ills. This perspective misconstrues everything. God’s presence and communion work in a altogether different manner.

Saint Paul probably came as a close as anyone to truly understanding God, and he closed his letter to the Philippians with a startling confession. He wrote that knowing God in Christ Jesus meant that he also knew an unusual comprehensiveness. He knew, he said, “how to be abased and how to abound. In any and all circumstances,” he declared, he had learned the secret of “facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” He could contend with all things, endure all things, hope all things. He could rejoice alway – at all times, in all directions.

How different this is from continuously see-sawing between opposite poles, dividing one’s life between trouble and solution, between curse and blessing. When God is taken to be a form of hero, even supremely so, he is, nonetheless, relegated to a far and insignificant distance, until, in the critical instant, suddenly, we are pressed by danger and cry for help. We beckon God, then, to do our will, to succeed on our behalf, to keep us safe, to defeat our enemies, to fight on our side, to contribute to our prosperity. Yet in the general course of time, we can feel removed from just such need. We are proud to be self-sufficient. We stand and succeed on our own. We have enough resources. We are well educated. In our context, we rely on ourselves quite easily, confident in our independence. As Americans, we are already triumphant, owning and consuming a hugely disproportionate portion of the world’s goods, wielding an equivalently imbalanced influence. As suburbanites, we live secure and safe, more worried about status than falling victim to random violence, naturally assured that even if difficulties arise, we will have recourse to a great array of services, by which we will be sustained and supported. We don’t much need heroics. And God often becomes, then, in our minds and hearts, no more than a pleasant accoutrement, sometimes acknowledged, but dwarfed by the general drift of our own pursuits – unless, perchance, disaster happens.

When Jesus intended to pass by his disciples he meant to do more than quiet their momentary fears and silence the storm. He meant to permanently displace the structure of their understanding and the form of their life. Mark wants us to see what the disciples in their confusion could not comprehend, which is a pervasiveness of divine love so great that even Paul’s words seem too small. If we understand God, we have no reason to be afraid, no matter what descends around us. If we understand God, we have no need of rescue, because nothing will be able to sever us from his devotion. If we understand God what pervades our lives is gratitude of such resilience that it can redeem everything. Truly.

God is not distant. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. This is what is visible in the saints – not their ability to rescue others but their capacity to transform everything, even death, by love. And this is not heroics. It’s adoration – something too little practiced in a world where all our intentions are turned toward self preservation and promotion. Yet this is what Mark hoped to open before us… if we hear what he wrote.

So let us borrow a few more words from Paul: we need not be tossed to and fro, for there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all. There is no greater story, no greater message, no finer trust than this.

What others pass over in dull understanding, he has learned to fail to understand

I keep in my office a reminder -- a single sentence framed for ready reference. It was used to describe a man who was a notable scholar. But, more than this, he is remembered for being a deeply influential mentor. In summarizing his life, one of his former students wrote simply this about him: “What others pass over in dull understanding, he has learned to fail to understand…[he refused] to pretend to be on the straight and open highway.”

After two thousand years of Christianity, our tradition is heavy with words we use freely, almost flippantly, with the assumption that we, of course, already know what they mean. They are words well-worn, like stones that have been made smooth from centuries of being tumbled across our tongues. Grace, love, faith, hope, mercy, forgiveness: it’s all church-talk. These are words that have been made dull, words by which we then, in turn, lull ourselves, perhaps looking for a moment of solace, a touch of inspiration, the temporary comfort of easy assurance. Isn’t this what worship has in many ways become, the automatic recitation of ancient texts by which we affirm a nice spirituality – or, perhaps more to the point, the spirituality of being nice. Our deepest words are often so emptied of content, so innocuously tossed out, so routinely applied – without even the merest scent of scandal or fear or awe – that, across the board, Christianity itself has been made supremely dull and wearying to many both near and far.

Isaiah speaks of eternity, of holiness, of anger and reconciliation. Together with Paul, both proclaim a peace that conclusively overcomes wickedness. What did they mean, using these words? Do you know? Do you understand this with crystalline clarity? Did Isaiah speak of wickedness so that we could look at others and shame them? (Isn’t this part of the church’s most enduring reputation?) Did both the prophet and the evangelist speak of peace so that, ultimately, we as Episcopalians could have a clumsier, liturgical way of mumbling “Good morning?” (And isn’t this what, in fact, we have done with these words? “Peace,” we say, and soon enough this term is exchanged for phrases that simply say “Hello.”)

It’s important, especially when confronted with Biblical texts, to stop in order to learn to fail to understand what so many others blithely pass over with hardly a thought. We must allow that sometimes, stepping backward is the best way forward.

Isaiah spoke of wickedness. It’s easy for us to look around and find a thousand examples of what we take wickedness to be. Every day, now in our world, innocent people are killed by suicide bombers, fanatics who have made murder a religious virtue. And with just the same regularity, every day we mark the appearance, near and far, of predators, abusers, thieves, liars, and cheats. It’s what makes the front page of our news. Behind these actions, we cite the profusion of hatred, of suspicion, of jealousy, bigotry, fear, resentment, and ice cold indifference. We see, too, the hurtful consequences of unbridled ambitions, of insatiable greed, of personal conquests made regardless of the cost in human lives. When ships are flooded with refugees, and all airline passengers must be screened and searched by an evermore sophisticated array of technologies, and churches feel they must resort to mandating public background checks on all their leaders and volunteers in order to make parish programs safe, wickedness is not hard to identify. And with its identification, much of our energy, then, is engaged in vast programs of prevention, penalization, and restitution.

Isaiah, however, mentions none of this. The root of wickedness, he declares, lies deeper than any of the instances we usually identify. Well below any of these actions or intentions or base perspectives, wickedness originates, he said, in just one characteristic. Isaiah names it as restlessness. The wicked, he said, are those who cannot rest, or pause, or stop. And this is not a moral qualification. The wicked are not simply those who disgust us, whose actions are aberrant. They aren’t merely those others who we find abhorrent, sick, or malicious. Wickedness is much broader than this. It exists wherever we suffer agitation in any form, whenever we are anxious about anything – either about what we fear or, just as significantly, about what we want and pursue with great passion. In Isaiah’s terms, wickedness occurs whenever we forget that every moment of our lives is enfolded within the eternity of God, whenever we are too mindful of the limits of our own time, whenever, charged with eagerness for what we feel we must or can accomplish, we forget that what is most important God has already secured for us – so, before all and in all, we may be always thankful.

This contention might seem hopelessly abstract and vague. On a day to day basis, eternity doesn’t have much traction. It’s not what we casually talk about over lunch, especially when there’s so much luscious gossip available to us. But the theologian Stanley Hauerwas stated Isaiah’s point with beautiful succinctness when he wrote that wickedness “is the form our character takes as a result of our fear that we will be ‘nobody’ if we lose control of our own lives.” This is as relevant a statement as any can be – and it is very intimate to all of us. When we forget our inclusion in God’s eternity, when this ceases to be the first hope of our prayers and the central conviction of our hearts, then, immediately, we are left to ourselves. And as soon as we are left to ourselves we become victim to ceaseless sways of self-preservation, working hard to be somebody, propped up by all the accomplishments we can parade before others, fearful all the while that our status, our earnings, our enjoyments, or the entirety of all our achievements might somehow fall short. We won’t make the grade. We won’t be accepted by the club. We won’t be able to acquire what we desire, across a wide spectrum of possibilities. And thus, we make life this struggle, a constant competition, racing to stand squarely on our own two feet, proud yet always vulnerable – as if the value of our lives were in our own hands, as if we could claim our independence when, in reality, we are always creatures, tied to God from our beginning, through all our time, and beyond this time in God’s eternal kingdom. Wickedness is the merest departure from this trust. We become restless, in work, in play, in acquisition, in consumption. And in doing so, we lose every real sense of peace as well.

The difficulty with peace in our world is that we tend to define it negatively. It is the absence of war, the cessation of conflict, the end of violence. Aggravated by all sorts of disagreements, frustrations, and irritations, we call for peace as the dissolution of our troubles. It’s the product of our best and hardest efforts, achieved through exhausting negotiations. It’s the constant work of discerning what is tolerable and what must be changed in order to effect coexistence without active hostility. As such, it is often compromising and unsatisfactory, and sometimes it’s just plain distasteful. And it is always fleeting. Our finest, crowning accomplishments are also our most fragile. Peace can be utterly destroyed in an instant. A single act of aggression can unleash a wave of rage that has no limit. And peace, then, seems to be never more than a frail, false dream, continually dashed by the first light of harsh reality. This sense of peace, says Isaiah, this, too, says Paul, we must learn to fail to understand. For true peace is different.

In truth, peace is not ours to establish by our own lights. Peace comes from God alone, unconditionally, as gift. It is God’s bestowal of his eternity to us, in which we may choose to abide. And thus, peace is God’s word. As Paul declared, Jesus is our peace. And this word addressed to us declares that we are not strangers or merely sojourners in our time. We are (and we must tune our ear to hear this acutely) – we have been named – “fellow citizens with all the saints and members of the household of God.” Borrowing Hauerwas’ phrase again, we might well say that peace, rather than being this accomplishment or that accord, is, more significantly, the form our character takes when we trust – even when confronted with all of life’s vicissitudes – that nothing of who we are can be lost because all of God’s eternity is bent toward our redemption, in resurrection and reconciliation. All of God’s eternity is bent toward you. Do you understand that? And there is nothing fragile about this at all.

We are here made free: delivered from restlessness, and invited instead to realize life as the ceaseless expression of love – no matter how many other masks wickedness presents. And exchanging the peace, then, is not just the pleasant exercise of wishing one another well, which soon enough can turn to nothing. It is actually our repeated confirmation that what we see, in fact, in the face of all others – friend or enemy, it makes no difference – is God’s Kingdom, a glimpse of God’s infinite joy and pleasure. If we could pause or stop to acknowledge this, if we dared, we might discover anew how there is nothing dull in any of our recitations – because these words, given to us, reveal the glory of God and of all creation.

If only we learn to fail to understand…

Clean out the clutter of your lives, make room in your conscience and your souls for the presence of God.

Mark has brought us to a very important turning point in the unfolding story of Jesus’ mission and ministry. Up to this point in the Gospel, Jesus’ followers have been learning from him what it means for them and for all creation for the kingdom of God to have crossed the boundary line between heaven and earth and broken into the world. Now, mundane and sacred mix and mingle.
Jesus’ followers have been witnesses to the miracles, the acts of power; they have heard his teaching, and received private instruction. Now Jesus has deemed them ready to go forth into the world on their own and spread the good news. They are empowered to heal and preach. Our reading is about their graduation—once disciples, now evangelists, once followers, now proclaimers.
Jesus unleashes his disciples on the world. They are to bring the good news to everyone within hearing: The kingdom of God is right here in the middle of us! Up to this point in the Gospel, Jesus has been the one doing the teaching and the preaching. Now those who follow him are sent into the world with a clear and simple message - shout it from the housetops, “The kingdom of God is here, now!”
The good news is so exciting and so precious, Jesus instructs his followers not to load themselves down with all sorts of spare clothing and unnecessary junk—just do it—just go, no extra cloaks or any of that stuff, just go and spread the good news.
Watching the news from Morango Valley, California, those horrendous fires, thinking about this passage made me start thinking about my own list of necessary items to take along in case of emergency. The passage from Mark’s Gospel was absolutely no help whatsoever at all. How can you make a list of what to take if the only instruction you have is a list of things not to take? No bread, bag, money, tunics—a literal reading of scripture here could be a problem—the passage demands interpretation—take only a staff and sandals, that’s all—I hesitate to impose this image on you so early in the day, but wearing nothing but sandals and carrying a staff would make short work of my journey. Maybe, I might make it as far as the ice cream store before the blue lights and the whoop—whoop came up, wrestled you to the ground. Indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, “I’m spreading the good news!”—“Tell it to the judge!” “The kingdom of God is near!”—“Tazer him, boys, this one’s dangerous.”
Suddenly sent out into the world with a life-changing message, you would naturally want to pack everything you might possibly need in every situation. Best to be prepared for everything: lap top computer, theology books, study Bible.
“Travel light,” is the instruction. Don’t let material things and material values overwhelm you. Clean out the clutter of your lives, make room in your conscience and your souls for the presence of God. Trust in God’s love and mercy—have faith.
Jesus didn’t send his disciples out with nothing, with no resources. They had received from him certain treasures to take with them on their journey. These were those wonderful kinds of treasures of which there is an infinite supply, treasures which increase as they are given away: love, reconciliation, compassion, joy, joyful generosity, hope, hopeful mercy, and the greatest gift of all, faith. This is stuff we all already have. These are the treasures God has already bestowed upon us. We are as rich as Jesus’ disciples. We are his disciples.
According to Mark’s account, the disciples went off into the world with Jesus’ blessing. Baptism is our blessing and instruction to go. We too have been instructed to spread the good news. We’ve been given a blessing for our journey. We are blessed in order to be a blessing. We are called in order to be sent.
Consider, for a moment, how very powerful this makes us. God has called us in order to send us, and we have been given the freedom and the power to say, “No! I don’t want to go! I’m not going to do it.” This brings us right to the edge, right to that boundary line that we spoke of at the opening of the sermon. Here we are at the dividing line between the sacred and the mundane, the frontier between the kingdom of God and the world.
The Psalmist this morning has taken that giant step across the boundary line of faith: I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him. Truly his salvation is very near to those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Would you, could you strap on a pair of sandals and grab a staff if the call to go and spread the good news came? Paul says the call has already come: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.
To be willing, to be open to God’s encouragement to go to those who haven’t heard the good news or can’t believe what they have heard about the good news—to be willing to do that is to be Christian. In this ministry to which we have been called we will always run into people who have chosen to reject the good news, people who simply cannot discern the good news.
The lessons and the psalm this morning are all about hearing and responding to the word of God to us. We must respond to the good news faithfully and in trust. Do we act because we are guided by the Holy Spirit or by our own devices and desires?
Was the Holy Spirit present when the people of New Hampshire elected Gene to be their bishop? Was the Holy Spirit present when the Seventy-fifth Convention of the Episcopal Church elected Katherine to be our Presiding Bishop?
I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.
O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and may have the grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.
Having done what is right and having done what has to be done because the Holy Spirit has led us to that place is righteousness. When righteousness and peace have kissed each other, when mercy and truth have met, we are in the right place. We are in the kingdom of God. Now we can pick up the staff and put on the sandals and set out to proclaim the good news of the love of God to a world that is dying to hear the word.
©John T. Talbott

We have been given a left and a right, and the choice is ours.

“The poor,” said Moses, will never cease out of the land, therefore I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land.’”

With the reading of this singular line, given in Moses’ farewell address to the people of Israel, we have been placed at the edge of a yawning divide, and we are asked to make a fundamental decision. Which is not primarily the obvious, moral one – whether we will choose to consciously and actively address some small portion of the world’s poverty. The more important question lies deeper. It involves how we understand the world itself. For Moses has balanced us between two ways of being. We have been given a left and a right, and the choice is ours. We may see the world as a place of great struggle, where, by the evidence of bare fact, the ruthless survive best, or we may perceive it, and our own time within, as a surpassing gift that calls forth our own generosity, not because of need but as a constant act of thanksgiving.

The pivotal point comes in one small word, “command.” God, Moses said, has commanded. He has pointed the direction we should go. But right away we tend to misunderstand, for God’s command is not our obligation. We hear it tediously, as an onerous task, as law that is matched with judgment. This, however, misconstrues everything, because, in truth, God’s command is our freedom. Command is invitation. It is God’s showing the way to beauty and joy. The most debilitating problem the Christian church faces is that we are so utterly blind to this possibility. We have learned a terrible chorus that we recite far too easily: faith, we admit, under our breath, is restrictive. It squelches life and spoils fun with puritanical earnestness. We make our message sound like the worst combination of threat and resentment, and then we wonder why others don’t hear it as good news and why it doesn’t seem all that wonderful to us either. But Moses gives us reason to believe otherwise.

How do we deal with the poor? It’s a timeless question, and Moses readily conceded this. They will always be among us. There will never be a time when poverty will be eradicated or even substantially eased. As long as the world exists, wrenching poverty will persist with it. We must not try to sidestep away from this. Moses was not speaking metaphorically or abstractly. He had seen poverty’s agony and despair while wandering the Sinai desert for forty long years. We see it displayed in gaunt faces and emaciated bodies, in communities that subsist in slums, in persons who rake through heaps of garbage searching for food, in neighborhoods whose only economy is the drug trade. Moses knew that this was not conquerable. Not ever. Four thousand years after his address, our world has not changed. No solution has been found. Economic theories have come and gone, countless policies have been tried, only to be discredited and rejected. Millions have participated in programs and initiatives and reforms of every sort. But poverty continues. Government has not changed this. Business hasn’t. Nor has charity. Nor has the church. It never ceases.

As a result, we adopt any number of other responses to the poor. Avoidance is one; periodic pity is another. We settle safely secluded away from them. We become practiced in assigning blame. We learn early that we have to strive to earn our own living, that there is little mercy in open markets, that competition is our basic reality. After all, there is only so much pie to be sliced, and all of us want some of our own. Inevitably, some will be denied. Hopefully, it will be those who deserve the nothing they receive. Thus we can spend our lives spinning all sorts of excuses and accommodations and denials, shoring up our own security, dispatching others to their own lot, here and there offering a token from our remainders.

It is extremely hard to deny that this is the essential nature of our world. It is, in fact, dog eat dog. It is, in fact, a race for survival. And it is scientifically and philosophically and pragmatically asserted now that our primal, hardwired drive is pure survival – by means of personal acquisition and public resignation. For you see… there will never be a time when poverty ceases. So don’t waste your time, your energy, your life, in pursuit of a lost cause. See to yourself. That’s duty enough.

Into this context, however, there erupts the command of God. And, significantly, it neither explains nor really accomplishes anything, directly. Moses didn’t offer the people of Israel an economic policy by which they could achieve equality. He didn’t play out a scenario by which they could envision and realize a just society. The command of God wasn’t intended to be a solution to a problem. It’s simply a directive placed against the resigned fate of the world. “Regardless!” God says, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor.” No limit is established to this. No minimum is declared. This command has no borders. If it included specific instruction it would become only one more dreary attempt at problem management – when what is really at stake is a much more profound trust. Because care for others, hospitality, generosity, have no true quid pro quo. They are not meant to be efficient or measured in fairness or subject to statistical analyses of effectiveness. They are excessive, exuberant, and often unexplainable acts that spill out. They are, in this way, super-natural. And thus, in their extraordinariness, they reveal God. And in revealing God, the truth of our world is revealed as well. And so too, the possibility and promise of our lives.

In the Book of Genesis, the very first words of the Bible, no explanation is given for why God chose to create our world. There is no preamble that declares why, God being God, he should call creation into order. There was, we are told, only an elemental poverty, to which God then turned an open hand. And after each turn of his hand, there came the response that this was good. It was good – but it was not resolving. God’s order was not absolute or permanent. It wasn’t meant to be a solution, from which God could then walk away, because creation isn’t an entity. It’s a relation. Before it is any thing, it’s the open hand of God, a generosity that never ends – and never succeeds, for there is always another need, another shift, another generation. All of the world’s subsequent history is the testimony of God’s continuous bestowing, of God’s applying himself to our poverty, even our own self-impoverishment. And we, who have been made in the image of God, who have been called to be stewards, have not been asked then merely to keep order or maintain a status quo. We have been commanded to take on ourselves the same generosity, to show something of God’s roving generosity in our own lives.

This isn’t grim duty, a task that prevents us from being ourselves. It’s our opportunity to be fully ourselves in the vast expansiveness of the world, just as God is. For we see ourselves best not in the mirror of self-reflection, but in meeting the eyes of others. We know who we truly are when others respond to us. Our giving is our receiving, most explicitly, when we stand face to face, with open hands. Our isolation and loneliness are most apparent when, face to face, we choose to offer nothing at all.

Our fate is not to be resigned and to, then, scramble to carve out for ourselves our own world, apart from and secure from others. God has invested in us his own generosity. His command is the way we may hear in our own lives the gleeful response that resounded at creation: it is good! – not the strange goodness that we pinch and distort into awful, suffocating moralisms, but the goodness that explodes with integrity, intimacy, and connection.

In the story we heard this morning from the Gospel according to Mark, there are two parallel paths described. One is defined by fear and ridicule and resignation to death. The people knew the facts. They weren’t naïve. The girl was dead. But at each step along the way, they were countered by Jesus: instead of fear, he offered them a solid confidence and assurance; subject to their ridicule, he maintained a quiet trust; rather than conceding death, he called this young girl back to life.

This latter path is the form of Christian faith in regard to all things. It’s the opportunity we too often close off with by our own stubborn anxiety and listless indifference. It’s the the joy we sabotage, thinking law, when God offers Gospel. Sleeping, thus, however, the same Gospel word is addressed to us, “Rise up,” we are commanded. Be amazed.