Mark 6 30-34 enet4

Prayer And Compassion Fatigue
Sermon by ROGER G. TALBOTT

They were tired and they needed a day off. The crowds kept getting larger. More and more sick people were being brought to Jesus and his disciples were getting burned out dealing with all that human misery. So Jesus declared a holiday. "Let's go camping," he said. At least that is what I think he said. Matthew makes it sound like he said, "Let's go off alone to a deserted place."

My guess is he got no arguments from his disciples. They took off their beepers, unplugged the phones and put up the "Closed for the Day" sign in the window. They got out the coolers, the tents, the sleeping bags and, of course, their fishing poles, put them into the boat and headed toward the undeveloped shore of Lake Galilee. We can just imagine the conversation on that boat: "Man, I'm goin' to spend the whole day just doin' nothin'." "Whooee! The biggest problem I want to deal with today is whether I'm going to take a one hour nap or a two hour nap." "I'll be so glad to get away from people and their problems. I don't want to talk to anyone today except the fish."

Of course, there's always one worrywart who feels guilty about taking a day off who says, "Yes, but people have so many needs and Jesus does them so much good." The others have more sense: "Hey man, there's only so much to go around. Can't you see that Jesus is exhausted? He's the one who suggested this. After all, he's only human. We're all only human. We've got to take care of ourselves or we aren't going to do anybody else any good." So they get to the other shore. Pull the boat up on the beach. Set up the tents. Somebody builds a fire. Somebody else starts tossing a frisbee around. The fishing poles are out and they are just tying their flies on to the end of their lines when the first people start showing up. The disciples try to ignore them. Maybe they are just the people at the next campsite, but soon there are more and more and they come crowding down on to the beach and they are carrying people on stretchers, and some of them are hobbling on crutches and the disciples have the feeling that they aren't the campers on the other site.

You know how they felt when the crowd showed up... The two of you haven't had a night out without the kids in weeks. You finally get away. The waiter has just brought your appetizer when the baby-sitter calls and tells you the youngest has a high fever and has started throwing up. You've been planning this vacation for six months. Your reservations are all made and three days before you are scheduled to go your mother calls and says your Dad is going to have a quadruple bypass as soon as the doctors can get his sugar stabilized. You haven't had a day off in three weeks. Friday morning your sister calls, says her father-in-law has died and wonders if you could take her kids for the weekend. It has been a very long day. You woke up before dawn because your arthritis hurt so much. You had to go to the grocery store and take your dog to the vet and on the way home your car started to act up and you had to leave it at the garage and get a taxi to take you home. All you want to do is go to bed when the phone rings and it's your friend who lost her husband last month and she just needs somebody to talk to.

And always, when we think we have given all we have to give there is always more need: the starving people in the midst of a famine; refugees from war; the devastation of floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes; to say nothing of our neighbors who are hungry; the children who need someone to care about them; the youth in our community who have nowhere to go and nowhere to grow.

We know how the disciples felt. Matthew doesn't have to tell us. We know that they either felt frustrated and angry or they felt secretly pleased that they were so needed -- or both. Matthew doesn't have to tell us how the disciples felt. He does have to tell us how Jesus felt. He felt "compassion" for the crowd. That is, he felt what they felt. He felt the pain and desperation that would drive people to come so far to such an inconvenient place in the hope that they might find healing for their bodies and spirits and maybe even some meaning for their lives.

Matthew doesn't tell us what the disciples did. We know what they did. Some of them put on their false smiles and when people in the crowd apologized for interrupting their day off, they said, "Oh that's all right. Really! We weren't doing anything." Others were less pleasant about it. "Come on! Now that you're here, get into line." Others, the ones that were terrified at the prospect of having a whole day off with nothing to do, threw themselves into their crowd control mode and went about being aggressively helpful with all the sick people, proving once again that they were good and feeling once again that they were superior.

Matthew doesn't have to tell us what the disciples did. Matthew does have to tell us what Jesus did. Matthew says that Jesus cured people. He wasn't nice to them. He didn't harangue them and make them feel guilty because they had problems. He didn't take care of them in order to make himself feel superior and make them more dependent. He cured them. He gave the lame what they needed to stand on their own two feet. He gave the blind what they needed to see clearly again. He gave the deaf what they needed to be at peace with themselves. He gave the dying what they needed in order to live. Then Matthew says when it was evening the disciples came to Jesus and finally said what they probably had wanted to say since the first person showed up that morning: "Send the crowds away."

In some ways that is one of our more honest prayers. We see the hungry on television or the homeless in our streets and something inside of us says, "Send these crowds of needy people away." Wouldn't the world be a better place without all this human need? A friend of mine loves to go to Disney World because "there aren't any poor people there." She thinks the world would be so wonderful and happy if it were just like Disney World.

"Send the crowds away" doesn't mean the crowds that go to Disney World or the crowds that show up at the mall on Sunday afternoon. We just want to send away the crowds of human need, and human need doesn't always come as a crowd. Sometimes we pray a modified form of this prayer about just one person, when a sick child wakes us up for the third time in the middle of the night, when we have been to the nursing home and heard the same old complaints for the hundredth time, when the phone rings and the voice on the other end is crying about her unhappy marriage, we pray our own modified prayer about sending the crowds away. Send John away; send Mother away; send Susie away. Just send them away to the villages round about so that they may find food -- in other words, let them solve their own problems.

There's a lot to be said for that. We hear a lot about "co-dependency" these days and I alluded to it a few minutes ago when I mentioned those people who immerse themselves in other people's problems partly as a means of avoiding the pain of their own lives. Often the "good feeling" that we get when we help other people comes from the superiority we feel when we encounter people who seem to have problems that we don't have. "You are poor and I am not. You are sick and I am not. Your life is messed up and mine is not."

Wanting people to solve their own problems is a lot healthier than wanting to be a caretaker just because it makes us feel superior when people are dependent on us or it gives our lives meaning if we think we are indispensable. So, in some ways, the prayer "send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves" is a healthy prayer. "Jesus, teach these people to take care of themselves."

Jesus, of course, answers their prayer. Jesus, of course, answers their prayer differently than they anticipated. Jesus always seems to answer our prayers differently than we anticipate. He says, "You give them something to eat." Now how is that an answer to the prayer, "Send the crowds away so that they may buy food in the villages round about?" It is an answer because, as we have already seen, the real prayer, the underlying prayer -- which is always the prayer God hears -- is, "Eliminate human need by teaching people to take care of themselves."

How is Jesus' answer, "you give them something to eat," an answer to the prayer, "Eliminate human need by teaching people to take care of themselves?" Listen to the story. The disciples complain that they can't give this crowd something to eat. There must be over 5,000 men here plus their wives and kids. We are talking a baseball stadium full of people. That's a lot of hot dogs. Jesus says, "What's in the cooler?"

The disciples say, "Five loaves of bread and two fish." He tells them, "Bring them here to me," and when the disciples bring them, Jesus does exactly what he would do at the Last Supper. He looked up to heaven, blessed the food, broke it up into small pieces and gave it to the disciples. The disciples then distributed it to the crowd. There is a lot of speculation about what really happened next. Some say the bread and the fish just kept miraculously multiplying. The daughter of a missionary once told me about a barrel of flour that the mission board sent every three months to her family as part of their support.

Transportation was so uncertain and the mission board's finances were so shaky that sometimes it took four months or more for the next flour barrel to come. Every day her mother would go to the barrel and scoop out flour but never look in to see how much was left. She never ran out of flour, no matter how long it took for the next flour barrel to arrive.

The world is full of stories like that, so I don't doubt that Jesus could have miraculously multiplied the loaves and the fish. I am also intrigued by another theory, however. That is the one that suggests that people in the crowd had brought food with them, but nobody wanted to bring it out and eat it because they figured nobody else had any and they would have to share and there wouldn't be enough for them and their family. When the disciples shared what they had, people were inspired to share their food, too and it turned out to be like one of our church pot-luck dinners. Everybody brings a dish large enough to feed their own family, puts it on the table and somehow we have so much food that we all eat too much and there is plenty left over.

Either way, it is a miracle. A rather ordinary miracle in a way. An everyday miracle. It's a miracle that as many people get fed in this world as do every day. The greater miracle is the miracle of empowerment. Jesus empowered his disciples to work a miracle, this everyday miracle of feeding people. They didn't know it then, but he was answering their prayer, "Eliminate this human need by having people take care of themselves." He was answering their prayer by teaching his disciples that they could not only take care of themselves but that they had the power to do far more for others than they ever dreamed. The only people who can really help other people are the ones who have themselves overcome helplessness. Only the empowered can empower others and empowerment is the only real help there is. Yes, some people have some real physical and mental limitations and they need our aid. Yes, some people are hungry today and they need to be fed.

Small children need to be cared for, but small children need to be taught, day-by-day, that they have the power to take care of themselves. They need to be taught to hold a spoon and a fork and to feed themselves and the only one who can do that is someone who has learned how to use a spoon and a fork. They need to be taught to tie their own shoes and the only one who can do that is someone who has learned to tie his or her shoes. They need to gradually make more and more of their own decisions, handle more and more of their own emotional issues and the only one who can do that is someone who has taken charge of his or her own life. Children need to be empowered.

The sick need to be empowered. Dr. Bernie Siegel says so many true things about taking charge of one's own life, even when we are ill. Yes, he says, that does involve asking people to help you with your shopping, or driving you to the doctor if you need it. It also means questioning what the doctor is prescribing; thinking through what kind of treatment is right for you; being in charge of your illness instead of letting your illness be in charge of you.

Some friends of mine have a son who has severe dyslexia. They spent thousands of dollars that they could ill afford on a minister's salary to send him to a special school that taught him that he wasn't a problem. He was a person with a problem and he could be in charge of that problem.

Sometimes our prayer, "Send the crowds away," is even about ourselves. "Send my problem away. Eliminate my needs." And the answer comes back, "You give them something to eat. You do something about it. You handle it." When we say, "We can't," Jesus asks us what we have, what our resources are. Sometimes our greatest resource is the knowledge that we have overcome problems in the past. Sometimes the best thing we have to give others is that knowledge. We did it and so can you. We fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish. So can you. Gloria Steinem tells about the Confidence Clinic, a group of single mothers and other women who were divorced, widowed, deserted and often on welfare who opened a clinic for women in similar circumstances in rural southwestern Oregon. They couldn't get government funding because they weren't "professionals." They were just women who had been through it and they offered a 12-week program in job skills, legal rights, survival as a single parent, money management and even a clothes bank so that women could dress up appropriately for job interviews. Ninety-eight percent of the women who went through the program who had dropped out of high school earned their diplomas in those 12 weeks. Within a year, most were employed or in training for a specific job or in college.1

Jesus solved the problem of human need by empowering the disciples to meet their own need -- their need to eliminate the need of the crowd -- and, having been so empowered, they taught others the same thing. They actually began to see the world differently, which is the key to empowerment.

There is that famous opening scene in the movie The Wizard of Oz. We see Dorothy's life in Kansas all in black-and-white, which was what audiences in 1939 were used to. Then, when the tornado blows her and Toto and her house "somewhere over the rainbow," Dorothy opens the door on Oz and suddenly everything is in color.

That's what Jesus does for us when we take stock of our resources in the face of any need and put them into his hands and then go ahead in faith with what we have. Our eyes are opened to just how powerful he is -- how abundant the resources of God are. I know that this sounds like pie-in-the-sky to the person who feels burned out this morning. But I urge you, as you come to this table to receive this bread, to think what it would be to take what little you have and give it to solving some personal or family or global problem that seems overwhelming to you. Do it and see what happens. Amen.
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1. Steinem, Gloria, Revolution From Within, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992) pp. 177-178.

GOOD NEWS FOR THE HARD OF HEARING, ROGER G. TALBOTT, CSS Publishing Company, 1995, 0-7880-0507-3