Mark 6:30 The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. 31 He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32 And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. 33 Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. 34 As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. 35 When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; 36 send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ 37 But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii[i] worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ 38 And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ 39 Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. 41 Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. 42 And all ate and were filled; 43 and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. 44 Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.
The apostles are tired. That’s where we start. These people who are following Jesus and whom Jesus has sent out to begin organizing the Kingdom of God have just come back from their journeys, from practicing the work that Jesus has called them to do. And while they’re debriefing with Jesus, reflecting on what’s gone well and what they want to adjust next time, people keep coming up to them, and it’s so busy, so many people want to talk to them, want help from them, want to join them, that they don’t even have time to eat. They’re already tired, they’re trying to catch their breath and get some sustenance for themselves, and they just can’t. There’s too much work to do, the task before them feels too big. They can’t even shove food in their own faces. They’re tired.
Can anyone relate? You get up in the morning, you spend your day getting through your work, looking forward to the evening, but then the evening arrives and you have to figure out what to eat for dinner, so that at that point your “rest” feels like a monumental task in its own right? You spend all year getting your kids through the school year, and everyone’s looking forward to the summer, a chance to catch your breath, but it turns out summer is busier than any other time of year! It’s like “I’m breathing awfully hard to catch my breath.” Maybe you’re involved with a community, say a church, which on one hand is a really life-giving space, a place where you can catch your breath and tell the truth about what you’re going through and where you don’t feel so alone, but then at the same time you’ve poured parts of yourself into keeping that community going and even as you’re tired from those efforts there’s still more to do internally, and externally, Christian nationalism gets bigger and stronger and closer to it’s goals. And they had no leisure even to eat…
I think this story invites us to reflect on how we live in these moments of fatigue, maybe even burn out. Often, I think many of us approach that feeling of fatigue through a binary, an either/or, all-in or all-out. We double down and spend energy we don’t have on things that deplete us more or we bow out—if I can’t give it everything I need to give nothing. And sometimes we come to the second place because of disappointment that the first didn’t “work.” So we’re already tired, but we tell ourselves, “OK if I can make this big push, if I can go all in for a couple weeks or six months” or whatever, then I’ll be able to make some space for myself and I can catch my breath then. But then a couple weeks or six months or a year later, you’ve made that push, you’ve put in that effort, and either it didn’t work or there’s another thing that needs to get done, and at that point, maybe you’re frustrated, maybe you’re disappointed, maybe you’re a little embarrassed, and you know you can’t put in the kind of effort you’ve been putting in because now you’re really tired, and in that moment it seems like the only option is to disengage altogether.
And sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes there are relationships and communities that we choose to walk away from altogether. You should walk away from toxic or abusive situations. I’m talking about situations that are good, that are hopeful, but messy and still exhausting. Situations like the apostles find themselves in with Jesus in this story, where it’s good and exciting, but we’re finite human beings who get tired even when there’s still more to do.
And part of what this story shows us is how Jesus breaks that reductive binary or being all go or all quit. In that moment, Jesus invites the disciples to go away with him and rest. They do hit pause, they do set a boundary, they do change up their situation. They don’t just keep doing the same things over and over and expect different results. Jesus makes sure that they get the nourishment they need. Jesus is there for them, too. He doesn’t come to create a class of nonprofit workers who grind themselves to dust to meet everyone else’s needs. Jesus comes to create a movement of mutuality and solidarity where everyone holds all things in common.
Jesus does invite us to take up our crosses, but that very clearly does not mean running yourself into the ground. Jesus is known for hanging out in bars, lounging around in the middle of the day. One of the accusations brought against him is that he’s lazy. And so that’s not an accusation that we, as followers of Jesus need to be afraid of. I would encourage, as a spiritual practice, taking a sick day when you’re not actually sick. Take a day in the middle of the week just to do nothing. Don’t do chores. Don’t try to make the most of your time. I think we as Christians might be missing something that our Jewish and Muslim neighbors have done a better job of emphasizing by keeping the Sabbath and following Ramadan, carving out these little eddies of time to be unproductive, not to store up energy for production, but because rest is the goal of our life, not a means to an end.
And it’s precisely in taking that kind of space that new connections, new possibilities open up for Jesus and the disciples. They don’t make their rest into a rigid thing that gives them an excuse to be jerks or not to pay attention to what’s going on around them. No, it’s the opposite. The moment of rest they take makes them more sensitive. The crowds follow them to their “isolated” place, but in that moment, when you might expect Jesus to be frustrated or angry, he has compassion on the crowd. He spends time with them and invites the disciples to feed them.
For Jesus, it’s not an either/or. Rest vs work, boundaries vs compassion, space vs proximity, less vs more. But when he tells the disciples to feed the crowd, they ask if they’re really supposed to spend 200 denarii, which was a lot of money, to feed all of these people. After being so recently tired, the disciples still assume they’re in a zero sum game. They live in a world with limited resources so that to spend them is for them to disappear. For others to have is for me to lose. Whether that’s energy, food, or money. We’re all competing for resources. Either/or. All in/all out. You have/I don’t. I have/you don’t.
Those denarii, which were coins, would’ve had the face of the king on them. And Jesus describes the crowd as “sheep without a shepherd,” which is a direct shot at the ruling powers, who are supposed to be the shepherds making sure the people have food. And so this sense of fatigue, of never-ending work to do, this sense that things are all or nothing, you either have or you don’t, this sense of implicit competition between my well-being and your well-being, is not natural or necessary—it’s been organized and engineered by the powers of this world. Those people are hungry because Herod is hoarding what they need—you are tired and lonely because we live in an extractive economy that alienates us from our own labor and from connection with our neighbors, too. This is why the only marriage advice I really have to give to people is “Don’t blame your partner for capitalism.” We tend to turn on the people in closest proximity to us, but just ask yourself, “Am I really frustrated with them, or am I jealous of the shred of leisure time my job gives me?” If you can shift the narrative in your head from me vs my partner/friend/child to us vs our bosses, it’s amazing what new reserves of energy and intimacy we can find for ourselves and each other.
It’s Herod who wants us in competition with each other, it’s Herod who wants us fighting for a sliver of the pie, it’s Herod who wants us to feel like we’re in an all or nothing world where all possibilities for other ways of living are flattened to the horizon he wants us to see. In that kind of world, the only possibilities are transactional. Bread for money, fish for money, wine for money. Because bread and fish and wine are just commodities. Bread is just bread, fish are just fish, wine is just wine, until Herod’s willing to trade his image for them.
But when the disciples come to Jesus and say, “you really want us to spend 200 denarii,” Jesus says “Who said anything about money?” No no no, organize the people into groups. We’re gonna share what we have. We don’t need Herod or Caesar. We don’t need money for this. Pass out the bread. Pass out the fish. We can do this together. In the very moment when the powers of this world would leverage scarcity to put us in competition, Jesus shows that there is more, there is enough of creation for everyone if we share it rather than hoard it from each other. There is always more. The bread is not just bread, it’s communion with God. Jesus flesh is not just flesh, it’s the infinite in our midst. A community is not just a collection of individuals, it’s the gathered body of Christ. Eternity can occupy a fraction of a second, infinity can open up within a crumb. Fatigue can be your soul telling you that you need communion rather than to work harder or take yourself away. We all have gifts to offer and we all have needs we can’t meet on our own.
I think this is why some of the changes we’re making at Jubilee make sense, with staff reducing our hours so that we can be sustainable. As one of the pastors here, over the last couple of years I’ll admit I’ve found myself falling into the binary of success vs failure, where success would mean growing to meet the budget we had before COVID, and becoming a spiritual force offering a different way to follow Jesus in America. And that binary, the worry about failing, was a real weight on my shoulders, and I know many of yours too, which I’ll acknowledge is ironic given many of the messages I’ve preached to you over that time. Ultimately, within that binary, success meant we got to keep going, while failure would mean we wouldn’t. But in praying and talking through these changes, I think the Spirit’s been showing us that that doesn’t have to be true, that there might be new possibilities in emptying ourselves rather than trying to hold on to what was at all costs. There’s freedom in not having to stretch 200 denarii, but choosing instead to share to loaves and fishes that we have with us. There’s freedom, and there’s untapped abundance there. Not just the abundance of money but the abundance of solidarity as we continue to grow together and take care of each other in our struggles and exercising our gifts.
In September, we’ll celebrate our 5th anniversary as a church. By all accounts, Ephesus Baptist Church should’ve become condos or a right wing shop, but Jubilee started here. And Jubilee should’ve run out of funds two and a half years ago. But we’re still going. We’ve been through scandal and COVID and found life in the midst of it and kept going. We have so many testimonies here of grace making a way where there was no way, of turning narrowing circumstances into opportunities.
I pray for more of the testimonies in this community and in all of our lives. If eternity can occupy a moment, if infinity can open up in a crumb of bread, then we don’t have to accept Herod’s flattened out world; the depths of the Spirit are all around us, offering rest and communion together. Amen.
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