Come Away

In her book Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living, acclaimed Georgia author Bailey White tells wickedly funny stories about Southern women, especially about her elderly mother, Rose.

One of my favorites goes like this. One day, Bailey begged Mama to knit her a sweater out of some unscoured wool. Mama said, “It stinks!”

“Just hold your nose and knit,” Bailey told her. So Mama did.

But four year-old Lucy was there, too. Lucy loved the clicking of the needles and begged her grandma to teach her how to knit. “No, you’re too young,” Mama said as she kept on knitting the stinky wool Bailey had given her. But Lucy leaned on Mama’s lap and begged, and said, “My baby doll knows how to knit…. Her grandmother taught her how….”

So Mama took on the task of teaching Lucy to knit.

Then her daughter Louise came over waving a steamy novel at her and saying, “Mama, you’ve got to read this! It’s due back at the library so I’ll give you two days.” So Mama started to read.

Then her niece Sophie, a fundamentalist Christian, stopped by and saw her with that book and said, “If you have time to read, don’t you think you should be reading the Bible?”

That night, Mama gathered her girls together. Her lap was empty – no knitting, no four year-old, no novel, no Bible. Mama said to her daughters, “Girls, I have an announcement to make. I’m going camping.”

“Camping!” Louise said. “You’re too old and feeble.”

“You don’t have a tent!” Bailey added.

“I’m tired,” Mama told them firmly. “I’m tired of breathing the essence of a sheep fold; I’m tired of teaching babies to knit; I’m tired of being set upon by crazed Christian one minute and unbridled libertines the next. Girls, I’m going camping.”

And she gathered up her grandson’s cowboy sleeping bag, her walking stick, matches, food, and all four volumes of The Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, and walked out the door.

“How long are you going to stay?” the daughters called out after her.

“Just as long as I want to,” she replied. And off she went.

She was gone for days. At night, Bailey could see the tiny glow from her fire. And at dawn, if Bailey went out to the edge of her pasture and listened very carefully, she could just barely hear her Mama singing, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”[i]

Sometimes a person just needs to get away. Sometimes we wait until we’re totally worn out before we recognize it. And yet even then, when we are so tired and spent, there is often this nagging sense of guilt about our need to step back, check out, recharge, rest. Even when we’re exhausted, sometimes even we’re sick, it’s hard to feel okay about resting, when there is so much that must get done.

It’s not just guilt, though, is it? There is pride in it, too. “How are you?” someone asks us. “Busy,” we say. “I’m so busy.” And it may be wearing us out, but isn’t there some twisted part of us that feels like somehow being busy justifies our existence? If we’re busy, we must be necessary. If we’re busy, we must be valuable – perhaps even invaluable.

This isn’t just the way we live our professional lives – it’s the way we live our personal lives, too. The kids, the pets, the house, the yard, the errands, the emails, the projects, the endless to-do list. There’s just too much to keep up with. Even in summertime, we feel it. Even going on vacation means a lot of work before we leave, a lot of work after we get back, and maybe not much rest while we’re actually gone. Even in retirement, even when we’re ill, even when we’re old, we feel the pressure to be busy, to be useful.

Jesus knew what it was like to have a lot of demands on him. He went from town to town, village to village, home to home, teaching, preaching, healing, exorcising, confronting, touching, loving, listening. And the people would take everything he had to give and then ask for more. There was no bottom to their need. And Jesus gave and gave and gave and gave.

But he didn’t only give and do and serve. He also obeyed a deeper, God-given rhythm. He practiced Sabbath – that command from God to lay down all work and obligations for a day and rest. Sabbath is a liberation from the illusion that we are going to get everything done, that we have to get it all done. Sabbath is a liberation from the illusion that our worth comes from what we do.

Jesus did not wait until he and his disciples had finished all their work and met every need. As we heard in the Gospel of Mark this morning, the apostles came back to Jesus from their work in the villages, to tell him all they had done and taught. But when they returned, so many people were continuing to come to them for help, that there was not even time to eat. In the midst of all this need, all this urgency, Jesus beckoned the disciples, “Come away with me to a quiet place so we can rest awhile.” It was in the midst of all that work, when there was no time for leisure, that Jesus called them to make time. “Come away,” he urged.

Those are some sweet words, aren’t they? Come away. Those words are always invitation, never reprimand. “Come away,” is very different from “Go away.” Come away means someone is beckoning you towards, not dismissing you from. The words are focused less on what you’re leaving behind, or leaving undone, and more on what lies ahead. And to hear these words means you won’t be going alone. It means you are going with someone and you are going towards something.

All the better, then, that Jesus is the one saying such sweet words. Come away, he says, and he means with him. And they get in the boat with Jesus and go to a deserted place. Mark doesn’t tell us anything about what that quiet, isolated place was like, other than the fact that a large crowd of people ended up finding them even there. Sometimes that’s the way it goes. When Jesus saw the large and needy crowd, he had compassion on them, and began to teach them many things.

And he teaches us something in this, too. Sometimes rest doesn’t have to be long in order to recharge us, to fill us up with what we need for what’s ahead. We don’t have to wait until we can have a nice big vacation in order to find the deep, true rest God invites us towards. It doesn’t have to be a trip or even a retreat. And it’s not the same as zoning out, checking out, or vegging out – though sometimes those things have to happen before we can tune in to the “something deeper” God wants for us.

Moments to rest, renew, recharge – moments of coming away with Jesus – these are things we can carve out a little bit of time for any time. It can be a whole day, an afternoon, an hour, or a few moments. It can be dedicated time early in the morning or late at night, time to pray, time to read the Bible. Or it can be various moments throughout the day, when you allow yourself to be drawn into the depths of God by taking time to delight in the little wonders of life – the beauty of the bird outside your window, the laughter of a child, the words of a friend, the taste of coffee, the smell of rain, the sound of your favorite song, the colors of the sky at twilight, the touch of someone who loves you. Any one of these can whisper to you Jesus’ ongoing invitation: Come away.

Minister and author Wayne Muller writes that Sabbath time is not just about what we usually think of as the Sabbath day, it is “anything that preserves a visceral experience of life-giving nourishment and rest…. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.”[ii]

So many of us are shackled to the idea that we need something more than everything we’ve already got – more money, more space, more time. To come away is a chance to see the abundance and beauty and blessing in everything we already have, to feel the contentment of that, the “enough”-ness of that, and be grateful, and to be so filled up that we can’t help but be less focused on getting more and more focused on giving more. This kind of Sabbath living can reorient our whole lives.

The fact that Jesus began helping people again so soon after carving out time away teaches us one more thing: rest isn’t just for our own sakes. It makes us better able to respond to the needs around us. It grounds us, makes us calmer and steadier in the face of the increasingly distressing news of our world. When our souls are well-rested, then whatever we do to help heal the wounds of the world will be done with deeper wisdom, deeper joy, and deeper love. When we are filled, we have more to give. Again in the words of Wayne Muller, “Once people feel nourished and refreshed, they cannot help but be kind; just so, the world aches for the generosity of a well-rested people.”[iii]

The generosity of a well-rested people. Can you imagine? That could be us. Just think of what we could give to this world, do for this world, change in this world, if we, each of us, listened and responded to Jesus’ deep, beautiful invitation to come away.

I’ll confess, I’m not very good at it myself, though I’m trying to get better. Oh, I pray and read my Bible and try to sit in silence for a few minutes every day. I watch birds and take long walks and try to practice mindfulness and gratitude and delight. But I still make a god out of busyness. I live under the tyranny of my to-do list. My eyeballs are consumed with too many screens for too much of the time. I don’t get enough sleep.

I want to get better at this. Don’t you want to get better?

Your worth does not come from your usefulness or busyness. You were created as a valuable, worthy, beloved child of God, created to be partners with Jesus in spreading this good news, and in loving and healing the world. Come away, Jesus keeps calling. Pray. Play. Laugh. Love. Sing. Sleep. Stop. Be silent. Be still. Look. Listen. Taste. Touch. Delight. Come away.

In her poem, “Camas Lilies,” the writer and minister Lynn Ungar puts the invitation like this.

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.[iv]

—

[i] Bailey White. “Camping.” Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living. 36-38.

[ii] Wayne Muller. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. New York, New York: Bantam Books. 1999. 8.

[iii] Muller. Sabbath. 11

[iv] http://www.lynnungar.com/poems/camas-lilies-2/