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I’m wondering if you can identify with this experience: I wake up to the sound of my alarm, overly tired. I sit up and turn the alarm off, then sit there for several seconds. I know the next move is to stand up and start going through the routines of the morning, but moments pass by, waiting for my will power to click in, to make that next move.

Sometimes it can be a while. It’s as though I have to wait for the part of me that wants to engage the day to grow strong enough to overcome the part of me that just wants to crawl back into the bed. Finally, the threshold is passed, and I stand up.

You know what I’m talking about?

There are, if we think about it a number of factors involved in determining how quickly I will proceed to step two.

One factor is simply, how tired am I? Last week I talked about fatigue — about how the life energy that God gives us is not limitless, and that we must pay attention to ourselves to recognize when we are overly tired, both physically, emotionally and spiritually. We need to make a point of getting the rest we need — the rest God desires for us that we may be restored — in order to regain our capacity to say “Yes” to the gift of our lives. That without enough rest, life begins to appear bleak indeed — a burden, not a blessing.

But rest isn’t the only factor. In fact, it is possible to get too much rest.

This morning I hear the scriptures calling us to consider other factors involved in the “what does it take to get out of bed” equation. We are to rest, yes, but we are also to work, to expend our energy creatively engaged in this world.

And just as it is easy to neglect the rest we need, it is also quite possible to turn a deaf ear to the call to action that God speaks to us throughout our lives.

There are some subtleties involved in this morning’s Gospel lesson, of which it’s helpful to be aware.

Here’s what appears to have happened, pointing to an ongoing challenge in Bible interpretation. Somewhere along the line a scribe whose job it was to copy the manuscripts was going about his job when he came to the word “anger”, and he said to himself, “That doesn’t make sense, I’m going change that to pity.”

First, Jesus is angry with the whole religious establishment, the system by which this man is forced to be an outcaste, that his disease is viewed as an expression of him being sinful, thereby allowing the healthy people to feel superior. He’s angry that the system requires the leper to pay the temple priests money, (which someone with leprosy generally wouldn’t have) in order for the man to be restored to his community. He’s angry with the system that keeps people out of the circle. (We know that Jesus had this anger from other stories from his ministry, including what his cleansing of the Temple on Palm Sunday.)

The second possibility is that Jesus is angry because the leper is pushing him beyond his comfort zone — pushing him to take a stand against the powerful entrenched system — a stand which is going to cause Jesus conflict and a lot of personal suffering. And although he is indeed willing to go there, it makes him angry nonetheless. Perhaps you’ve had the same sort of experience: a friend or mentor pushes you to go beyond what you are comfortable with, and we resent the person for doing this, but a part of you realizes, nonetheless, that it’s what you need to do.So if Jesus really was a human being who struggled with the same issues the rest of us human being struggle with, it is not hard to imagine him in this story as being angry with the leper for pushing him, even as he realizes that there is a larger principle at stake here that requires his action, calling him beyond his natural concern for his self-preservation. The idea that Jesus was angry with the man is reinforced by the fact that at the end we are told he spoke sternly to him, telling him to tell no one, which, the newly healed and cleaned man, tired of being told what he could and couldn’t do, doesn’t obey.

Throughout me life, I have had a love/hate relationship with sports. As a kid I wanted to be a professional athlete: a football quarterback, or a baseball pitcher. There was passion there, let me tell you.

When I got to ninth grade, things didn’t go so well for me in regard to the school teams. I experienced defeat and some humiliations, and in time I largely gave sports up.

The sports world can be pretty brutal sometimes — actually a lot of the time. I took a beating and got out.

I declared loudly that sports really are pretty trivial, and destructive at times, and that we Americans put way to much energy into them when there are all kinds of things that are far more important.

And there was truth to that.

And then I had a son who showed an inclination to competitive sports, and his interest awoke within me the original passion I had felt about sports. Over the past seven years, Bobby, with me standing behind him, has invested a great deal of time and energy to sports.

There have been some rough spots — times when defeat, not victory was experienced, and times conflicts with teammates and coaches made for  tough going.

But the one thing that seems clear to me is that although sports really aren’t all that important in the big picture, they do provide a great opportunity to learn lessons about self-discipline — about focusing our attention and perseverance. There have been for Bobby discouraging times when he has been tempted to quit, but so far he has managed to find the will to push on, and sometimes anger has been a large part of what has motivated him.

Our church family was inspired three years back when Bart Routhier, a senior in high school at the time, got a hold of the idea that he wanted to join the Navy when he graduated. Bart was significantly overweight at the time, and in order to achieve his dream it was necessary for him to lose a hundred pounds, which he set out to do. He watched what he ate and began walking, then jogging around Lake Parsippany. Slowly but surely the pounds came off, but more importantly, Bart discovered what he was capable of doing in this world when a dream took hold of him in such a way that he was motivated to discipline himself in order to achieve the dream.

It is the army that has the motto, “Be all that you can be.” The motto could be applied to the kingdom of God as well. Be all that you can be, not just for yourself, but for God and for your fellow human beings who need you to be all that you can be.

Every body’s journey is different. Unlike the world of sports, we aren’t competing against other people. Rather, we are competing against that part of ourselves that just wants to take the easy way out, the path of least resistance.

In the particular circumstances we find ourselves in, no matter how humble they may be, can we be the best we can be, and as such be put to use by God?

During his presidency, Abraham Lincoln regularly attended worship services at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. One particular evening, while walking home from church, an aide asked President Lincoln what he thought of the preacher’s sermon.

The President replied in fragmented phrases: “The content was excellent… he delivered it with eloquence… he had put work into the message…”

The aid pressed him: “Then you thought it was a great sermon?”

“No,” replied the President. “I did not. The preacher forgot the most important ingredient. He forgot to ask us to do something great.”

A sermon preached on February 8, 2009 based upon Isaiah 40:21 – 31 and Mark 1:29 – 39, entitled “Exhaustion and Renewal.”

The passage we heard from Mark takes place during, and after, the Sabbath, the day of rest. One of the underlying assumptions of the Old Testament, a truth we often refuse to acknowledge, is that there is this rhythm knit into creation — that there is day and there is night and the night is the time for rest to recoup from the work of the day. That the seventh day of the week is the day for rest — And that one should work hard, and then truly really rest.

And so the Jewish religion took this very seriously: when the sun sets and the Sabbath begins, you stop working. You quit fixing problems, you ponder the goodness of it all. On Saturday morning you gather in the synagogue to contemplate the gift of the Torah, and afterwards you return to your home to be with your family and friends, to enjoy a good meal together, and to relax.

As a faithful Jew, Jesus was there in the synagogue on the Sabbath joining with the community in worship. He was compelled into action, however when an unclean spirit that was tormenting a member of the congregation began to scream at Jesus. Jesus demonstrating his authority to cast out unclean spirits, acts to make the man whole.

The disciples are pretty impressed by what they have witnessed, and so following the temple services, as soon as they arrive at Simon’s house for the Sabbath meal, Jesus is immediately compelled to act once more, this time to heal Simon’s mother in law who is upstairs sick with a severe fever.

Indeed, the whole community has been impressed by Jesus’ extraordinary capacity to heal. So, when the sun sets marking the end of the Sabbath — a Sabbath that in a certain sense Jesus didn’t get to keep because twice he was compelled to do the work of healing — dozens of people line up at the door of the house with afflictions with which they want Jesus to minister. Jesus works well into the night, giving his attention, indeed his very life force, to each of these sick people.

At some point the last needy person departs, and maybe Jesus got a couple of hours of sleep, and maybe he didn’t. He left the house well before sunrise, sneaking out to spend time alone in prayer in a secluded place, telling no one where he was going. Jesus is determined that he will have some Sabbath time of his own. He is depleted, the life energy largely drained from him in all his work of healing, and he knows that he must be replenished.

Eventually though, after looking all over, his disciples locate him. They are excited by the remarkable success of Jesus‘ ministry in the past 24 hours, but also perplexed. Everybody in town wants what Jesus has to offer. “It was a great start, Jesus, but you’ve only scratched the surface of all the need that is in this town. There’s more to be done — much more.” Who knows, maybe in a couple of years of devoted work they can turn this town into perfection, with no disease or demons hanging about.

But Jesus says no.

There is a certain sense in which human life comes down to a simple choice of yes or no that each of us has to make daily, hourly, indeed, in each moment of our lives. God gives us life, and we choose whether to embrace the gift, or reject it. In a certain sense, it is as simple as that.

Whether to receive the gift in the spirit in which it has been given; gratefully, with a desire to share rather than hoard what has been given.

One way of understanding the preaching of Jesus was that he was reminding all of us of this fundamental choice, and letting us know that we are empowered to say “Yes” because in spite of everything, God had said an unabashed “Yes” to us.

In a certain sense, the relationship between the healing ministry of Jesus and his preaching ministry is obvious: It is can be tough to say “Yes” to your life — “Yes” to God’s gift of life if your body is racked with pain.

We have a family friend, a pediatrician named Dr. Charles Ray Jones, who has treated our children for years. When I first met him, Dr. Jones expressed great interest in my work. He shared with me how as a young man he had started out in seminary; he was, in fact a classmate of Martin Luther King, Jr. He told me he was moved to change his vocational path when he visited a very sick woman who was in a great deal of chronic pain, and he felt inadequate in his inability to offer any practical help for her suffering. And so he had left seminary and enrolled in medical school instead, in the hope of being able to relieve the suffering of people like the one he had visited.

It is not hard for me to understand Dr. Jones’ motivation to leave the ministry for medicine, and I don’t think it would have been hard for Jesus either. Pain in the body, as well as the bondage of poverty or injustice can make it tough to say yes to the gift of one’s life.

And yet, if Jesus had stayed in that town devoting himself to curing every disease and fixing everybody’s problems, there is no assurance that everybody would have been filled with gratitude; in fact we can assume, human nature being what it is, the people there would simply have found new ways to grumble and murmur.

There are plenty of people who live in palaces who don’t say “Yes” to the gift of their lives; and there are plenty of people living in poverty who do.

And there are lots of people who never really appreciated that their life was a gift until they were brought low by disease or disability.

Dr. Bernie Siegel quotes a cancer survivor by the name of Hans Selye. Following his diagnosis, he writes,

“I was sure I was going to die, so I said to myself, `All right now, this is about the very worst thing that could happen to you, but there are two ways you can handle this; either you can go around feeling like a miserable candidate on death row and whimper away a year, or else you can try to squeeze as much from life now as you can.’ I chose the latter because I’m a fighter, and cancer provided me with the biggest fight of my life. I took it as a natural experiment that pushed me to the ultimate test whether I was right or wrong. Then a strange thing happened. A year went by, then two, then three, and look what happened. It turned out that I was that fortunate exception.”And so it goes both ways; our bodies can affect our spirits, but our spirits can affect our bodies: The ability to say “yes” to the gift of our lives can have a profound effect on our bodies as well.

The passage we heard from the prophet Isaiah echoes themes found in the Gospel. As adults, especially the older we get, we look at the energy of children, and we say, “What wouldn’t we give to have their energy?”

But the words from Isaiah remind us that even the energy of young ones eventually runs out. Even youth run out of energy, grow weary, stumble and fall. The passage does make a promise, however, that those who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed — they will mount up on wings like eagles.

I so appreciate the practical example set by Jesus. Even Jesus ran out of energy. When he gave his attention to people, acting as a channel of God’s healing, it drained him. In another story we hear him speak of power going out of him when a woman with a flow of blood touched him, seeking a healing. Jesus became depleted and knew he needed his own time of waiting upon the Lord — his own Sabbath rest, or else he, too would find life a tough gift to embrace.

And so Jesus said “No”, in order to be able to say “Yes.” If Jesus’ needed to recognize this, so much so the rest of us.

Exhaustion pays its toll. If you’re like me, it is when I am exhausted — either physically or emotionally, that the whole notion that life is a gift becomes toughest to embrace. We have to find ways to rest — truly rest, or our helping will end up harming. God didn’t make us limitless, and it is prideful to imagine that we should be. God is the one who has unlimited energy — not us. God is God and I am not.

Wait upon the Lord, and in time you will rise up one wings like eagles.

One of my all time favorite movies is “Zorba the Greek.” It involves the relationship between an intellectual, restrained young man who hires Zorba the Greek to work for him. Zorba is everything the young man is not; he is uneducated, passionate, a man of action, a dancer and a lover. In the course of the story, Zorba teaches the young man how to embrace the gift of life.

The young man has inherited some mountainous timberland on the coast, and together they set out to construct a conveyor system for transporting the timber logs down the mountain to the sea. It had been a very ambitious and difficult undertaking, and in the final scene it is ready for testing.

But when the first log comes whizzing down the mountain, the whole conveyor system of cables comes crashing down. The project is a disaster.

The two men lie defeated on the beach, surrounded by broken cables and logs. Eventually though, Zorba rises to his feet and slowly begins to dance on the beach. There is nothing to do but dance, he says, as the joy of life wells up within him. And the young man joins him.

A sermon preached on January 28, 2009 entitled “Timing”, based upon Jonah 3;1 – 5, 10 and Mark 1:14 – 20.

There are a whole bunch of questions that might come up for us in relation to the story of Jonah — for instance, how was it possible for Jonah to be swallowed by a big fish and remain there alive for three full days? But the question that interests me about Jonah is this one: how is it that a sermon preached so unenthusiastically by one who so clearly didn’t have his hear in it — how could such a sermon be so phenomenally successful – perhaps the most successful sermon of all time, in so far as we hear that everyone in from the king down in the huge city of Ninevah repented as a result of hear it?

I think it is obvious that the reaction brought about by the sermon didn’t have much to do with Jonah — that it was simply a matter of his being in the right place at the right time — that all the heavy lifting had already been done by God, working behind the scenes in the hearts of people, so that all that was required from Jonah was the least bit of obedience — to show up and proclaim the message.

It wasn’t about Jonah.

Similar sorts of questions arise for me in relation to the Gospel lesson. Mark recounts the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus is in his early thirties; fairly old in those days. Why hasn’t he gotten on with it before now?

Again, the answer would seem to be a matter of timing — God’s timing. The time is right now, whereas it wasn’t right before. The holy spirit has been working behind the scenes in various ways to make the time right. This probably included Jesus’ personal readiness in the depths of his heart to undertake this ministry, but it also involved the readiness of the world to receive it, including, but not limited to the preparatory work of John the Baptist.

The time now is right in a way it wouldn’t have been before, and part of the giftedness of Jesus is his ability to read the times — to be able to recognize, as he says, that “the time is fulfilled.”

And then there are the questions that arise in relation to the four fishermen who suddenly respond to the call by Jesus to follow him. Our tendency in hearing this story is to stand in awe of Simon and Andrew and James and John — how could they, in a moment of time, leave everything in obedience to Jesus?  What great faith they must have had!

As in the case with Jonah, I think we misunderstand this story if we think it’s all about the disciples. There was something about that moment that had been prepared for in more ways that we could possibly know that made it possible, indeed, relatively easy for those four ordinary fisherman to respond to the call.

A couple of other Gospel stories come to mind that lead me to reflect on “timing.” In the story Jesus told of the prodigal son, why can’t the son understand at the beginning of the story the depth of the love that his father has for him? At the end of the story he will get it, but it seems simply beyond him to perceive it at the beginning of the story. Again, it is a matter of the timing. And it is interesting that the father, a man of wisdom born in part presumably of age, seems to recognize this intuitively. At the start of the story he doesn’t waste his breath trying to argue his son out of leaving. He seems to know that at this moment in time it simply won’t work. But he also seems to trust that his son will one day return; that there will come a time when his son will come to recognize that which he couldn’t see before, as is represented in the story by the fact that the father keeps watch for his son’s return every day.

Another story: a rich young man comes running up to Jesus. Clearly God has been working in this man’s heart, and it is showing up in the form of restlessness. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks Jesus. He’s been following the commandments, but still his is not at peace in his soul. Jesus looks at him, loves him, and says, “You lack one thing. Go, sell all that you have, give the money to the poor, and come, follow me.” The man goes away sorrowfully, unable to do what Jesus prescribes for him. The interesting thing here is that Jesus doesn’t run after the man trying to persuade him. Jesus recognizes that the time is not yet right for the rich young man to give up his great attachment to his wealth. Eventually, it will be. But not now.

What are we to make of these stories? Three things come to me.

First, if we understanding what these stories are saying about God’s timing, it can remove a heavy burden from our shoulders. Everything doesn’t depend on us. Have a little trust. God is working behind the scenes in ways we can only begin to imagine, making something possible in the future that is not possible now. Just because a problem can’t be fixed in the present time doesn’t mean it won’t be possible to fix it in a future moment. Have a little faith. Don’t despair.

Secondly, a big part of life is simply showing up. Do your job. Keep chopping wood, even when you don’t feel especially inspired. There will be times when, by virtue of simply showing up, you will be surprised to find that the time is ripe, and surprisingly wonderful things happen because you were there.

Thirdly, learn to discern the times, and act accordingly. If the present moment is not the right time for something to happen that we want to happen, if we start to press harder and harder in an attempt to try and force the thing to happen, we will probably just end up making things worse. On the other hand, if we keep our hearts open and pay attention, we may notice that subtle changes have taken place that make something possible now that wasn’t possible before, and the time is ripe now for action on our part.

What we’re talking about here applies to a variety of settings in life. Child rearing, for instance. We can expend an incredible amount of energy trying to curtail certain behaviors in our children, or trying to get them to master certain skills, and for a long period of time it can be so frustrating, and we may be tempted to conclude that our children, and ourselves as parents, are hopeless. But then one day when we aren’t even trying to bring about progress, we may discover that our child has moved beyond those troublesome behaviors and mastered the longed for skills.

We may find ourselves stuck in an important relationship — a marriage, say, and we are tempted to use a battering ram to bring about a break through. But the battering ram just might make things worse. There tend to be rhythms to relationships — times of intimacy, followed by times of distance. Sometimes what is needed is faith — to trust that the time of intimacy will return and that it is necessary to have some distance at the present time.

Some of us have lost jobs in the midst of the recession. We may send out a thousand resumes looking for a new job, and nothing seems to come of it. And then one day we’re having a cup of coffee with a friend, and they happen to mention they know someone who might need someone with your particular skill set, and suddenly the right job falls into your lap.

We have witnessed the mystery of God’s timing in regard to major societal, political problems. In the late 20^th century, most people were astonished when the Berlin Wall came down. What seemed intractable suddenly gave away with relative ease. The same was the case with apartheid in South Africa.

I came across a whimsical little story about one man’s personal healing. He was diagnosed with a painful ulcer. His doctors offered treatments that either gave him no relief or made him uncomfortable. He decided, literally, to sleep on it. He had a favorite cat that began, every night, to curl up on his stomach. She would wiggle underneath the blankets as he slept, and remain on his stomach all night long. She would periodically get out, stretch, take some fresh air, and crawl back in. Within two weeks the man’s ulcer was completely healed. (recorded in Sabbath, by Wayne Muller.) An old hymn that I never particular appreciated began to make sense to me this week as I thought about what it means to take seriously the concept of God’s timing. I end with he words of the chorus:

Trust and obey,