Jesus and his disciples were exhausted.  Just before we drop in on this chapter in his life Jesus calms a storm at sea, exorcises a demoniac, raises a little girl from the dead and heals a woman who’d suffered from an uncontrollable hemorrhage for twelve years.  Shortly after all that, news arrived that John the Baptist had been beheaded in Herod’s prison.  Now, the unrelenting demands of people for his time and energy are mixed with personal grief over the murder of his cousin.  Jesus and the disciples were exhausted.

This is one of those times in Jesus’ life John Killinger once likened to “life in the piranha bowl.  People always taking little pieces of you.  A little bit here and a little bit there.  Pretty soon there’s nothing left of you but a stain in the water.  Eventually we feel depleted, worn out, exhausted.  Nothing left to go on with.  All periphery and no center (John Killinger, Christ in the Seasons of Ministry, Word Books, 1981, pp. 43-44).”  Do you ever have times like that in your life?  Jesus did.  No wonder he finally invited the disciples to, “‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest (NIV).’”

Just the words themselves are restful, aren’t they?  An invitation to a quiet place.  We don’t often see them because they’re overshadowed by what happens next when Jesus miraculously feeds 5,000 people with only five loaves of bread and two fish.  If this whole event were a DVD movie, this is where we’d probably fast-forward to the next action scene.  Unless the idea of a finding a quiet place with Jesus and getting some rest has any special appeal.

There are two ways of approaching this sermon this morning, the first in a six-week series based on our church’s Core Values and Mission Statement, Sharing Christ Through Caring Relationships.  Today’s message is based on our first Core Value, Devotion to Prayer and Bible Study.  There are two ways to approach it.  One is to spend this time trying to convince people who already believe it that the Bible is the word of God and that truly committed Christians only take a break from Bible study to pray without ceasing.  To come at the whole thing saying, “We ought to read our Bibles and pray more often” though well intentioned, might only succeed in increasing everyone’s burden instead of easing it.  I’m assuming some basics. 

First, we believe the Bible is God’s revelation of himself and his purposes.  Despite this twenty-odd-year battle among Baptists over who believes the Bible more than whom I’ve yet to meet the first Baptist who doesn’t believe that the Bible is God’s word.  We may argue about exactly how we got the Bible and how it should be interpreted and, more specifically, whether the Bible in any way even implies that one person has the right to impose what they believe the Bible teaches on the consciences of others and such.  Those are very important discussions with enormous ramifications.  But, we don’t argue that God reveals himself to us through scripture.  That’s one reason I have the scriptures read apart from the sermon every Sunday.  I believe that the simple reading of scripture is not only its own act of worship but that it is also God’s word to us, separate and apart from the preacher’s commentary on it. 

The other assumption is that most of us already feel pretty guilty about not reading our Bibles or praying more.  I know I do.  I’ve yet to hear the first person say, “I’ve been studying and praying too much, I think I’ll cut back and watch more T.V.”  Two fundamental assumptions.  We believe in the Bible and prayer and that we ought to read and pray more than we do.  So, I decided to ditch the idea of laying more guilt on you by telling you what you probably already believe, that you ought to read the Bible more and pray more. 

Instead, I’d like to invite you to a quiet place.  A restful, quiet place with God.  A quiet place where he will speak very personally to you.  A quiet place where you can speak to him, or just listen, if you’d like.  Would that be of any interest to you? 

Most people I encounter these days have been living in the piranha bowl.  Life has taken more out of them than what it has given back.  Single parents performing juggling acts any two people would struggle to balance.  Two-income families driving hard charging careers that even four people couldn’t manage.  Widows and widowers, alone for the first time in decades, trying to rebuild.  Students pushing themselves to the limits of physical and emotional exhaustion so they’ll get into the right college.  Other people constantly take little pieces, one bite at a time.  All that with a good helping of personal grief mixed in.  Grief over lost loved ones or lost dreams or personal shame over some moral failure or the inability to manage life better.  Life in the piranha bowl.  Pretty soon, there’s nothing left but a stain in the water.  May I invite you to a quiet place where you will get some rest? 

A quiet place where scripture is our resource.  If we think of devotion to Bible study as nothing but an obligation, or worse, a discipline we must maintain in order to gain God’s favor, oddly, we’ll likely read it less.  There is something about the weight of legalism that makes us throw off even good disciplines because they become yet one more drain on our already overburdened lives.  If, however, we think of scripture as a place where our malnourished souls find nourishment, our flagging spirits are upheld by hope’s strong arms and our minds are cleared of anxiety by winds of fresh and timeless truth, then we’ll more likely to be truly devoted to it because we have let it be what it was always meant to be, a resource, not a drain. 

The Psalmist spoke of persons who experience that kind of life-giving devotion to God’s revealed truth as being “like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither (Psalm 1:3).”  Reminds me of the mesquite trees in my native West Texas.  No matter how long the drought, how hot the summer, they stay green when everything else turns brown.  They’re almost indestructible because their roots go further down into the soil in search of water than their branches reach up searching for the sun.  Trees planted by streams.  What deep roots tapping into a never-ending water supply do for trees, the word of God does for our souls if our roots go deep.

Late one recent evening there weren’t any John Wayne reruns on and I found myself watching a zebra give birth on The Discovery Channel.  Did you know that once a baby zebra is born the mother won’t let it get close to or even see other zebras for several hours?  Turns out that every zebra has its own unique striping pattern.  The mother zebra keeps her baby close so that her striping pattern will be imprinted in its memory and the baby will always know its mother from all the other zebras.  Otherwise, the imprints of other zebras will confuse the baby, it will lose its mother in the herd and starve to death looking for nourishment from other zebras who don’t have it’s mother’s milk to give.

Just as modern psychology has helped us understand the imprint of our parents on our psyche the scriptures help us understand the imprint of the divine in our souls, the very image of God in which we were created.  If we do not stay close to his word, the revelation of his very imprint on us, we’ll get confused and starve to death looking for nourishment in places that don’t have the food only our Father’s word does.  When Satan offered Jesus the opportunity to look for soul food in other places, Jesus told him, “‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4).’”  If we don’t ever read the Bible, where will we get food for our souls?  How will we stay in touch with the imprint of God in us?  What is our resource?  The evening news?  John Wayne?  The Discovery Channel or water cooler conversations?  When we look closely, as Jesus did with the woman at the well, most sin is the result of people looking for love in all the wrong places. 

Jesus invites us to a quiet place.  A quiet place where scripture is our resource.  A quiet place where prayer is a relationship. 

Dad was telling me recently of an older couple, friends of theirs, who like to take long trips with each other.  They just don’t like to talk.  Once they get in the car, she does her thing and he puts on headphones and listens to tapes.  They’ll drive for hours without saying a word.  Maybe he got tired of her telling him how to drive and she got tired of him not listening when she did.  Who knows? 

Not long ago they were on a road trip together and she suffered a stroke right there in the front seat.  Fortunately, she later recovered but not before they drove quite some distance with him totally unaware of what was happening to her.

It’s difficult not to wonder what kind of relationship two people have if one could have a stroke within arm’s reach of the other without them even being aware.  It’s truly amazing what can be happening in the lives of those we’d say we love most, within arm’s reach, without our even being aware.  We can never get so old or be married so long that we can afford to stop talking.  Our conversations are about far more than just sharing factual information.  They are one of the most significant ways our souls commune, of sharing our feelings, our needs, our fears, hopes and dreams.  Words keep our souls bridged together no matter how the long journey may cause us to drift apart.

Meaningful prayer has always been difficult for me.  It gets more difficult when I only think of it as spelling out for God what I think he should do for me.  Not that we shouldn’t tell God what we need.  We should ask him to “‘give us our daily bread (Matthew 6:11).’”  If nothing else, prayer for our physical and material needs reminds us that all of life, even the ability to work for our bread, is a gift from God and that, if for even one moment he withdrew his presence from us, we’d cease to exist, unless that’s what we want. 

Fred Craddock, a great old Disciples of Christ preacher, tells about growing up in rural Georgia and how he and his brothers and sisters liked to play hide and seek.  One day, when his sister was “it,” he went and hid under the front porch.  He just knew she wouldn’t look there.  Sure enough, when she finished counting she started looking everywhere.  Down by the barn, everywhere.  She ran right by him more than once.  Fred was so excited.  He kept saying to himself, “She’ll never find me under here!  She’ll never find me under here!”  Suddenly, it dawned on him, “She’ll never find me under here!”  So, the next time his sister ran by, he stuck his big toe out from under the porch just enough for her to see.  Even as a little boy, he knew that the only thing worse than hiding was never being found. 

No one has ever written a love song or a poem about how much two people in love need each other that even comes close to describing how much we need the God who has come to rescue us from the places we are hiding out from him, the God who is the very breath of our souls.  John Killinger, whom I quoted earlier, wrote a little book I read fifteen years ago that continues to help me keep a healthy balance between my private life and my public ministry.  His words remind me that we minister to people, for better or worse, out of the depth or shallowness of our own relationship with God.  “Ministry is a lonely place without Christ.  Ministry is exhausting without Christ.  Ministry is impossible without Christ (Christ in the Seasons of Ministry, 51).” 

What Killinger wrote to professional ministers is also true of all who minister.  We cannot genuinely share Christ through caring relationships unless we are intimately connected with the Christ who cares for us.  What is true of ministry is also true of life.  Life is a lonely place without Christ.  Life is exhausting without Christ.  Life is impossible without Christ.  Prayer is never harder than when I am so exclusively focused on what I think I need God to give me that I forget how much I just need him.  That prayer is not so much me trying to get God’s attention as it my responding to the God who wants mine.  Prayer becomes more meaningful when it becomes an on-going conversation with our Father, as we travel down the road, a way of just being conscious of his presence. 

Maybe, finally, that’s why we don’t read the Bible and pray more.  Doing so tends to expose us.  Over time, it’s very hard to read God’s word or listen to him in prayer without learning the truth about ourselves.  It’s easier just to hide.  Isn’t what we often fear the most coming out of hiding from behind our fears, prejudices, our selfishness and, yes, even our sins that we just don’t want to give up yet.  We’re afraid of a life we can’t totally control even if, in feasting on what we can control, we’re starving to death.  Isn’t it true, though, that the only thing worse than hiding is never being found? 

Jesus invites us to a quiet place.