Today’s scripture is just a snippet from Mark chapter 6, a couple sentences of introduction to the feeding of five thousand. Jesus has been traveling all around Galilee, calling disciples, healing people, and offending his hometown on a visit to the synagogue.  By this chapter he has already taught six of the nine parables in Mark’s Gospel. Patches, wineskins, lamps, and seeds are the tangible, ordinary objects Jesus used to describe the indescribable life with God.

Life with God is a present possibility even in anxious times. The verses just before this reading recall the death of Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, who was beheaded by Herod; a stark reminder that Jesus’ life is set in the context of the violent and oppressive first century Roman Empire. This little bit of text is sandwiched between a funeral and a miraculous feast:

The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught. Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them.

They went away by boat to a solitary place to get some rest, though the crowds were rushing ahead of them. The text does not tell us how long they rested, what they did to recreate, or if Jesus and his disciples were able to unplug knowing that this break would end with the crowds clamoring for more. We can imagine that they settled their toes into the sand, lit a fire, and fished for their supper. Perhaps they watched the sun set over gentle waves. Did they sit in comfortable silence or initiate those kinds of deep, vulnerable conversations good friends have as the stars twinkle overhead? We don’t know if they got a full night of rest or only a 20 minute power nap and a protein bar. There’s a poetic gap in these lines of text in which our imaginations might wonder about the details of Jesus and his friends resting at a secluded place by the sea.^[1] After teaching about the kingdom of heaven, did they find a slice of it together?

Our poem for this final sermon in our Poetry Church series that Katie Lancaster and I have been preaching also takes us to a quiet place at on the shoreline:

At the Creek David Romtvedt
I go to the creek with my daughter.
We squat at the water’s edge
and look around. Some pebbles,
a few sticks, a cottonwood leaf.
With these we make a tiny world
in which nothing moves. 

Would that be heaven then
where all things come to rest?

 It’s as if I stand
once again by my desk
on the first day of school
and the teacher calls my name,
and I say, “Here.”
She looks up and smiles
at me and I at her. “Here,”
I say again, “Here.”

“Would that be heaven when all things come to rest?” is the center hinge of this poem that contrasts two different scenes: a playful moment near the water with his daughter and a decades old memory of the first day of school.

Would building a universe of sticks and stones with one you love be heaven? Or could the kingdom of heaven be as simple as announcing, “Here I am” in the presence of a teacher who welcomes us with a smile?

David Romtvedt builds a timely bridge for us between this last summer weekend where many of us will sit on a shoreline and the start of the school year. He is the former poet laureate of Wyoming, the state he has called home since marrying his wife and moving to her family ranch. A wordsmith who also bucks hay, a repairer of windmills, and creator of metaphor, who says he is “alive in the dying” possessing “two lives that have mysteriously become one.”^[2] In his essays you can hear the struggle of never quite fitting into the cowboy clique or the “upper class” writing establishment.^[3]

But here at the creek with his daughter he finds a moment of belonging.

On Thursday my usual day off I went to one of the homes I grew up in which sits on the shore of a small lake. My mom and Brian and I spent lazy hours on inner tubes on the still lake surface, which was having its own rest before the holiday weekend officially kicked off. As we floated my mom made sure I was caught up on changes to our small town since I last visited, using our own language of landmarks that haven’t existed in decades. The old elementary school with its once cutting edge open concept has been torn down. There’s a great new restaurant on the east side of the street. Near the old hardware? I wonder. My mom replies: In the old hardware store. As she talks my eye wanders around the lakeside. I babysat there. I rowed my pink boat to fish there. A friend’s grandfather lived there. A classmate who died too young there, where my bus turned around on the ridge. Resting on the water I felt part of two worlds at once, one of memory and one where my toes dangled in the cool water.  “Here” my heart said again “Here.”

Would that be heaven where all things come to rest?

Did you know there is a Nap Bishop? I started following Tricia Hersey and her Nap Ministry on social media several years ago. She is a womanist theologian and activist who preaches rest as resistance. She writes “poetry, like rest comes from the silent place of our listening. Poetry, like rest opens up corners of the unknown while guiding effortlessly.”

Like Jesus who rests while grieving John the Baptist's death at the hands of the Roman Empire, Tricia Hersey’s call to rest stems from her own exhaustion from work that exploits and grief over lives lost at the hands of those in authority. Her response to the weight of the world and the crush of oppressive systems is to remind people that there is no need to earn rest. You can simply lay down on one of her art installations, or your own couch, or a hosted nap session where a guide shares contemplative poetry.

“Poetry like rest, opens up corners of the unknown while guiding effortlessly.” If rest might be heaven then could a poem be too in its ability to open us to mystery?

As I was crafting this sermon I started to feel aware of the number of questions left lingering on the pages. Spoiler alert, this last sermon in the series will ask more questions than it answers, and that may be a bit uncomfortable. We live in an age where all the world’s knowledge is spread out like what one author from the Christian Century called “An all you can eat buffet.”^[4] Quoting the Distracted Mind, the article noted that “Humans seem to exhibit an innate drive to forage for information in much the same way that other animals are driven to forage for food.” And so we become addicted to the devices that connect us with the cloud of knowledge.

But there is another cloud the article pointed out, the Cloud of Unknowing, a poetic turn of phrase that comes from the title to a guide to contemplative prayer written by an anonymous mystic in the 14th century. There are spiritual practices that are methodical and answer driven and others that lean into accepting the unknown that we might draw close to the mystery that is God.

Ada Limón is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. She was drawn to write poetry because of its ability to hold the unknown. In an interview with Krista Tippett she said “[At 15] there was a part of me that felt like so much of what I had read up until then was meant to instruct or was meant to offer wisdom. And here was [a poem] that was so well crafted…and yet it doesn’t actually offer any answers. It just offers more questions. And there’s sort of an invitation at the end. And I think it was that. I think I trusted its unknowing and its mystery in a way that I distrusted maybe other forms of writing up until then.”^[5]

Poetry and scripture share an ability to evoke questions that cannot be answered, but they do leave room for meaning to be made. What is the kingdom of heaven like? A tree grown from a tiny seed? A stolen bit of time with friends in an overwhelming season? Or could heaven it be an ordinary moment where we find ourselves present to the world, present to one another, present to God?

*You may use these prayers and/or sermons for non-commercial purposes in any medium, provided you include a brief credit line with the author’s name (if applicable) and a link to the original post.

^[1] Marilyn McEntyre also wonders how the disciples rested in “July 19, Ordinary 16B: Mark 6:30–34, 53–56” The Christian Century, July 2015, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-06/july-19-16th-sunday-ordinary-time

^[2]David Romtvedt, “Alive in the Dying” in The Sun Magazine, https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22036-alive-in-the-dying

^[3] Tricia Hersey “A Soundtrack for Rest” in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/04/29/rest-soundtrack-tricia-hersey-nap-ministry/

^[4]Heidi Haverkamp, “The Wisdom of Not KNowing,” in the Christian Century, April 2024 https://www.christiancentury.org/features/wisdom-not-knowing

^[5]Krista Tippett and Ada Limón, “To Be Made Whole” OnBeing with Krista Tippett Podcast, February 2023, https://onbeing.org/programs/ada-limon-to-be-made-whole/