8th Sunday after Pentecost
July 22, 2012
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Yet again we have another tragedy to contend with.  There’s yet one more opportunity in our experience to be confounded, confused, angry, and mystified. Most of all in the midst of the happenings in Colorado this past weekend, to be heartbroken again.  We have before us yet one more opportunity to try to make sense of what makes absolutely no sense.  We have one more opportunity to be invited perhaps into a sense of defeat, of despair, or even fear.

 Like many throughout the world and in the United States, we are invited by the barrage of media coverage and their attempt to make sense of a senseless act.  We are barraged as in such a way that we indeed have this trauma extended to us and indeed our hearts break.  Our anxiety rises and the horror of what is so foreign to us mystified us.  For we human beings, particularly for us gathered here in this place, in this context, we are a spiritual people, and once again we might be asking ourselves this question.  So where is our God anyway?  This might be a day we check in with the theology of our hearts. 

So how is it that a reigning God can allow such things to happen?  This might be one of those times as we listen to many who seek to make sense, and again I remind you, there is no making sense that we check our “gut” questions.  In light of these circumstances you might find yourself playing some some of those old theological tapes in response to horror and trauma like this.  “Is this a test dear God?”  Or some even straining to make sense of it might go here—“Perhaps this is God’s will in some way for us to find maybe some pearl that will invite us into a new understanding.”  Those of us who experience clinical pastoral education know that this is not a question or a mindset or a theology that bears much fruit.  For once again, we are faced with a reality of what it is to live in an imperfect world with imperfect people, where evil indeed does rare its head.  And it is as simple and as difficult as bad stuff happens.  So where are we?  We are spiritual people, trying to make sense of a world that is indeed sometimes senseless.  We are trying desperately to pursue a path that reveals some sort of concert with our God and our neighbors.

A friend of mine recently posted a quote from the Chaplain at Williams College whose adult child was killed.  The quote posted reads,   “I wish some people would get it through there otherwise intelligent heads that God does not go around the world with his fingers on triggers, his fist around knives, or his hands on steering wheels.  God is against all unnatural deaths and Christ spent an inordinate amount of time delivering people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy, and muteness.  The one thing that should not be said when someone dies senselessly or even at all is this.  It is the will of God.  Never do we know enough to say that.”

So where does that leave us faithful people, faithful disciples, helpless on this side of the country so distant from that horror yet so close?

I believe as faithful people we are once again asked to place ourselves in the heart of the gospel story.  As we seek to be faithful, living for the good in our society and in our lives, and in our relationships, we might very well once again on this day be like the disciples who have returned from spreading kingdom news.  In our story today in Mark we find that the disciples have returned from extending hands of help and healing and Jesus invites them to “come away to a deserted place and rest for a while.”

 We today might do well to be tempted to join Jesus in the deserted place.  Like the disciples we might also recognize that the world’s needs continue to impress upon us, just as the crowds followed them along the shore bank that day.  Like those disciples who slipped away with Jesus, we indeed do know the world’s needs and hurts are following us, they are inescapable. These needs it seems sometimes even may be trying to get ahead of us, much like the needs of the crowds scurrying ahead of Jesus and the disciples hoping to have already arrived on the shore where Jesus would land his first step. The hurts of the world and the needs of the world await us. 

Once again we’re just asked as disciples to get on the boat with Jesus to go across the shore and moor the boat.  Difficult as it is, we are once again asked to join with the brokenness and the hurt of the world and know that God’s will for us is to share in our brokenness and offer it a balm of healing and love.  Jesus words so powerful then and so powerful now, we indeed are like sheep without a shepherd. 

Jesus’ response to us today is as it was all those many years ago when he looks at us in our hurt, he has compassion upon us.  We find ourselves this day with an opportunity to responds to Jesus’ compassion as those in the crowd on that crowded shore; that is to  crowd around him seeking healing and wholeness even in the midst of things that are beyond our understanding and of which we will never be able to make rational sense of, regardless of the volume of media reporting. 

 Fellow disciples, may I beg you one more time, may I ask you one more time to reach out again in the midst of our broken hearts and spirits and  dare to touch again the fringe of the garment of our Lord.  Can we ask of one another again to believe in healing and in hope and in grace and in a peace that is beyond our understanding, especially in the midst of bitter confusion.  Perhaps in the midst of so many words filling the airwaves trying to make sense of the senseless, we who walk by faith may be best to reach our hands and speak few words;

Lord have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  Lord have mercy.