A summer day at the lake with Jesus.

When I first looked at today’s Gospel lesson I didn’t recognize it. The phrases were familiar but the story wasn’t familiar …  On closer examination, I found that the framers of our new lectionary have omitted 19 verses in the middle of this—those 19 verses have the stories of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on the water—the lectionary often leaves out extraneous parts of a passage for the sake of conciseness and to focus the story.  So we take out the two stories and collapse the beginning and end together and what do we get?  A day at the lake with Jesus and the boys.

Indeed it starts like a summer day might:  the apostles return from their first mission, and tell Jesus of their adventures and difficulties, healing and teaching in the surrounding towns, and Jesus says: let’s go away to a quiet place by ourselves and rest for a while.   The crowds are always closing in on them with needs for healing, and so forth—so they get in the boat and head off toward a secluded spot for a picnic.  Like us all, at a certain point some leisure and recreation becomes essential or we crash, or worse, we become incapable of being relaxed and hospitable with people or of hearing when family or co-workers say something important.    But this excursion ends up like a few summer vacations do:  all the plans are disrupted.

These crowds that are the source of all the stress anticipate where they are going and rush to cut Jesus and the Apostles off at the pass.  So much for the picnic.  Of course, if you read this in the Bible, they do have a picnic, a little intimate affair with 5000 guests.  One of the useful things about looking at the lesson as we have it today is that it gives a perspective which is a little different from the way we usually look at this story.   The disciples and Jesus had to sacrifice for this crowd, but sharing the contents of the picnic basket wasn’t the difficulty.  Sharing the time allocated for rest and quiet intimacy with one another is a real problem.  You can almost hear the tension and exhaustion in the famous exchange that’s left out of today’s reading:

     “Send them away …so they can go buy something for themselves to eat.”
     “You give them something to eat.”
     “Are we supposed to spend two hundred denarii for bread for all of them?”
     “How many loaves do you have?”

They just couldn’t get Jesus to send the crowd away.   But sometimes, something is important enough to interrupt a well deserved and much-needed rest.

Our lesson emphasizes that no sooner did they minister to this crowd than they had to cross the lake again; to what is a gentile area and more people flock to him.  On all three locations around this lake, the people gather around Jesus, primarily because he is a healer.  Wonders and miracles were not so much the thing bringing these people together, it was healing from illness.  In our lifetimes, at least in this country, illness is taken care of by the healthcare system.  Wherever you are, it’s not too far from a doctor’s office, you go there, sit in the waiting room, which may be more or less crowded, then you go in, eventually see the doctor, get a prescription or a treatment and some time later you have some relief from your illness.  This may work better or worse, but even when we complain, we complain about problems with the healthcare delivery SYSTEM.  Such a system did not exist in Jesus’ day.  Even a hundred and thirty years ago, healthcare in this country was mostly a hit-or-miss proposition.  Even trained and respected physicians had few effective remedies, and they were often harsh and even dangerous.

In the town where I became vicar of Trinity Episcopal Church in the early 1980s, there was a physician about a hundred years before that who developed a method of diagnosis and treatment of patients which he called Osteopathic Medicine.  He had some success in treating patients with little more than manipulation of the bones of the spine and recommendations about diet and exercise.  Within a few years, several trainloads a day of patients arrived in Kirksville, Missouri to be cured.  Even in the 1980s the only public library in that town belonged to an organization which had been founded to provide hospitality and recreation for the many patients and their families that stayed in town for long periods for treatment of illnesses.  So wherever Jesus went there were plenty of people looking for a healer with a reputation for effectiveness.  They rushed around, bringing people in on their mats if they couldn’t walk, reaching out to touch Jesus, or even the fringe of his clothing, so they could be healed.

It’s not exactly the day at the beach that the disciples were expecting.   Jesus certainly had compassion for those disciples.  He knew they needed rest and refreshment.  But being Jesus’ disciple entails being his companion.  Sometimes Jesus’ compassion isn’t convenient for his companions.  Jesus’ love interrupts more than summer vacations and the responsibility to be with him as he heals broken people in this broken world call on us to develop maturity and compassion of our own.

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Anaheim California adjourned on Friday.  All of the various decisions which they made, whether it be the somewhat muted endorsement of gay people as bishops, or the substantial cuts in the national church budget, will have effects which we will have to live with.  For instance, former students who I know will probably be laid off from the Episcopal Church Center and certain mission related services will be cut.  There are painful times ahead for all of us with the reactions around the Anglican Communion and in the Episcopal Church as the practice of deciding whether or not more gay bishops will actually be elected and consecrated is worked out.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus took his disciples all over.  If you superimposed a map of New York City on the Sea of Galilee, they were in all five boroughs.  The disciples were less comfortable in some places than in others, but in every place Jesus healed the people who were there and the disciples had to put up with it.  We should remember, in this time ahead that there is plenty of hurt and brokenness on all sides of these issues.  As Jesus’ disciples we are called to be there to heal, particularly when we are uncomfortable.  And Jesus won’t let us limit ourselves to our intramural concerns in the Episcopal Church.  Perhaps a consequence of reducing mission expenditures at 815 2^nd Avenue is that we must redouble our outreach beyond our accustomed pathways, to un-reached places where brokenness and hurt go unhealed.  Today’s Gospel ends with Jesus and the disciples on the other side of the lake, among the pagans and gentiles of all sorts.  “And wherever he went…they laid the sick in the marketplaces,…and all who touched even the fringe of his cloak were healed.”