A few days ago, I was in a workshop on mental health and wellness during the pandemic. At one point we broke into small groups, and I heard in two people’s words a summary of the conundrum of this year. One participant, crammed into a haphazard working-from-home space while two little kids screamed upstairs, quietly said, “I haven’t been alone for an hour in ten months.” Another one, sitting in the beautiful living room of the house where he lived alone: “I’ve never been this lonely in my life.”
It’s the irony of 2020. Without a doubt, COVID-19 is one of the defining shared human experiences of the last two hundred years. You could ask anybody anywhere in the world what their experience of this year has been like, and they will have something extraordinary to say. In recent history, only World War 2 has had such a global effect on ordinary life.
But there’s very little shared about this shared experience. That’s one of the many cruel things about it, in fact. We have, on the one hand, families with all the adults trying to work from home while their kids try to learn from home, waking up early in the morning to send emails while the kids are still asleep and staying up late to finish off the inbox, constantly available to work and to family and never fully present to either one.
And on the other hand, we have—the opposite, in all its many forms. Families suffering from the massive increases in unemployment, doubling or tripling the usual volume of clients at food pantries, month after month. People in jobs too hands-on to work from home, literally risking their lives day after day. Retired people and seniors cut off from their children and grandchildren, from their friends and churches, in a time of tremendous anxiety and fear, with all the usual supports gone. Lonely children whose first written words will include “Mute” and “Start Video,” because they’re learning to read on Zoom.
Most of us who’re still able to have work and human connection are overwhelmed by the demands of both; most of us who have solitude or free time are crushed by its unending expanse. In an ordinary time, of course, we’d shift things around a bit. The lonely, isolated grandparents could help the overwhelmed parents with the kids, and so on. But of course, this year, that’s just the thing we cannot do.
It strikes me that Jesus knew both sides of this. In today’s gospel story, of course, we see him over-worked and under-rested. They bring to Jesus “all who [are] sick or possessed with demons.” (Mark 1:32) He heals “many,” but it could never be enough, because they pile in and flock to him until “the whole city [is] gathered around the door.” (Mark 1:33-34) You’ll notice that they start bringing them to him to be healed “that evening, at sundown” (Mark 1:32); we can only imagine that he heals them late into the night, until he finally begs off to get some rest, leaving many more disappointed at the door. And then he gets up “early in the morning,” long before dawn, “while it was still very dark,” and goes to pray. (Mark 1:35) Jesus is burning the candle at both ends, but at least he knows how to take time for himself to be with God.
But no! Even there his disciples hound him, hunting him down in the desert and, when they finally find him, they bring him news he already knows too well: “Everyone is searching for you!” (Mark 1:37) As if he didn’t already know. As if that wasn’t why he was out here, at cold, dark, dawn.
Soon enough, though, he’ll know the other end of things too well. It won’t be too long before his popularity fades, and the crowds disappear. Soon enough, in fact, he’ll be alone. He’ll have all the space he needs to pray in the dark garden at Gethsemane, and he’ll pray in anguish as his friends fall asleep around him. (Mark 14:34-42) They’ll finally stop demanding his attention, and deny they know him. They’ll stop pressing in on him to feel his healing touch, and leave him alone with God up on the cross, until even God seems to abandon him and he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) And the bystanders, like some kind of ancient social-distancing experts, can only comfort him from yards away, with a bit of sour wine on a sponge at the end of a stick. (Mark 15:36) Jesus will know, soon enough, the depths of loneliness and fear. And if you’ve been there recently—he’s been there, too.
For now, though, Jesus is at the other end of things. For now, Jesus is not abandoned, but overrun. So what does Jesus do, now, overwhelmed? “Let us go on,” he says, “to another town.” (Mark 1:38) “No,” he seems to say, “I can’t help. Not now.”
I have a bad habit sometimes, in my sermons, of undermining my own best efforts at volunteer recruitment. And so I tremble to preach on this story today, in which people beg an overworked and overwhelmed Jesus for his volunteer ministry, and he declines.
The secret, though, is that Jesus doesn’t exactly say “no” to this call for help. He doesn’t even say “not right now.” What he says, instead, is something different: “not right here.” He does not say, “let us go to bed,” but “let us go on to the neighboring towns,” to heal and preach and serve somewhere else, not to stop entirely.
Nobody here is a full-time minister of this Church—and that’s not a comment about my compensation. For five hundred years, Episcopal priests have been married, have had families, have had divided attention and energy between their ministries of love in the Church and the home. And in the last fifty years or so, we’ve done a much better job of recognizing that laypeople are ministers of this Church, every bit as much as clergy. The core of the priest’s calling to ministry happens within the institutional life of the Church; the core of most laypeople’s ministry happens in the home, or at work, or in their neighborhood, but it’s every bit as much a ministry as mine.
Over time, the shape of our lives’ ministries shift and change. We step back from church to focus on our families and our work; we retire and our children move out and we can finally give more time to the church! Some of you, I know, have finally booked vaccine appointments and are overflowing with energy to share here and with your families. And whatever these transitions may be, they usually don’t mean we’re stepping back from ministry, because wherever we go to love God and our neighbor—whatever we do to heal the sick or comfort the afflicted, care for the poor or welcome children as Jesus did—we are ministers of Christ in that place. And in fact, the whole point of our ministry here—of everything we’ll discuss at our Annual Meeting in a few minutes—is precisely to transform us and equip us for our ministry there, out there.
So may we all, at the end of this exhausting year, find the renewed strength that the prophet Isaiah promises. May God “give power to the faint, and strengthen the powerless” (Isaiah 40:28); may God guide us in our ministries, in our church and in our homes and in our world, that we may “mount up with wings like eagles,” that we may “run and not be weary,” that we may “walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28, 31)