“Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place,

where you can rest quietly.”

(Mark 6:31)

Our New Testament lesson from the Gospel of Mark states that when Jesus’ disciples came back from a mission on which he had sent them he first invited them to: “Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place, where you can rest quietly.” Did Jesus realize from the report His disciples brought back of what they had “done and taught” that their batteries had run down, that they were making many mistakes, that their nerves were frayed, that their self-assertiveness was getting in God’s way? Is this the reason Jesus said to them: “Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place, where you can rest quietly”? (Mark 6:31 NEB)

Or does Jesus say this because he feels His own need for rest and quiet communion with God? How often the gospel records: “As His custom was, Jesus went apart to a quiet place to pray.”

“These words of Jesus are both a prescription for His immediate needs Himself, and for His disciples returning from a tour of service, and they are words for all our lives at all times.

“Notice that it is first a physical prescription — rest in a quiet place to regain depleted physical and nervous strength. Here surely, Jesus is the Good Physician — watchful care of our physical strength is first of all a religious duty. When we fail to take that care, we sin against God. We snatch away from His full use the instrument that He ought to have.” (Interpreter’s Bible on text)

I met, one summer at a church conference, a missionary who was then broken in health and retired from his foreign service. He said to me: “People often praise me for the sacrifice I made in serving my Lord so strenuously in a remote part of the world that I lost my health. But this is not so. My health is gone because I would not observe the simple, rudimentary laws of physical well-being I know only too well. That disobedience of mine has robbed my Lord of the service I could have and should now be rendering.”

The chief thing for us to notice in this passage from Mark’s gospel is the picture it presents of the great rhythm in the life of Jesus: the spending of Himself in a ministry for many — feeding the hungry multitudes and teaching them the truths for which they are eager; and then, His withdrawal to a quiet place for rest and replenishing of His spent resources.

This is the supreme example of that universal human principle which W. E. Hocking called “the principle of alteration” — the outstroke of activity and the backstroke of renewal. This is what Jesus would encourage us as human beings to do: preserve that essential rhythm, of withdrawal to rest and emergence to serve — of relaxation in order to become taut in service again.

If this gracious invitation of Jesus is first a physical prescription: “Come with me to some lonely place where you may rest quietly”, it is in the second place an invitation to spiritual renewal. After the interruption of the great multitude of 5,000, whom He taught and fed, Jesus pushed on to and longed for, a necessary season of prayer.

One of the principal forces mitigating against our welfare is that strong activism in the American conscience. We feel guilty, lazy, or unproductive if we are not busy all the time, doing something, holding a meeting, going somewhere. But the fact is that we human beings cannot hold that most important meeting of all — with God, unless we will be still, stop what we are doing, and wait on God, in short — pray. This is the only way that we can be recreated in this sort of meeting which Isaiah knew about and described in his unforgettable metaphors: “They that wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

Undoubtedly, the disciples’ request: “Lord, teach us to pray,” rose out of their realization that the secret of their Master’s mysterious, wonderful powers was somehow connected with His prayer practices. They were impressed with how frequently He went apart by Himself to a lonely place to pray, sometimes rising up early in the morning. They saw that prayer made a difference in His life. They wondered: “Was this the source of His intimate, authoritative knowledge of God informing all His clear, original teachings about His heavenly father? Was prayer the channel whence came His strange power to heal and to help distressed humanity?” But most of all, they surely must have connected His strong, untroubled peace with His prayer life.

The interruptions upon His privacy and theirs by unthinking, self-seeking people always irritated them. Here was this crowd of 5,000 who delayed their boat trip when they needed to get away for the much needed rest. Teaching them and feeding them Jesus accepted as an opportunity, though He was so spent. While the disciples were irritated He was moved with compassion. The difference? Why, Jesus just had a reserve supply of inner peace they didn’t have. Where did it come from? Why, it was the peace of God that passes all understanding, and the disciples were sure Jesus’ prayer life had something to do with it.

But how to pray? How does one come apart with Jesus to some lonely place where one may truly rest in Him today? George Buttrick once said that he was chided by a faithful member of his Madison Avenue congregation who said: “You are always exhorting us from the pulpit to say our prayers, or chiding us from the pulpit for not saying our prayers, but you never have from the pulpit, in plain words, told us how to pray.”

A seminary president reports that: “The seminary students we have today are sincere, grand young Christians, but they won’t have anything to do with the conventional forms of piety, worship and prayer that most of us older Presbyterians were brought up on.”

This ought not to be too much of a shocking revelation to us. We know that habits of private and corporate worship have always varied radically from person to person and from denomination to denomination. Episcopalians want written, printed prayers; Baptists want extemporary, entirely unrehearsed prayers; Quakers want silent prayers; Pentecostals want prayers in unintelligible, unknown tongues, and so it goes and has gone for centuries.

But there are some constants through the centuries for all Christian prayer. Until we learn and use these we can’t come away with Jesus for rest and prayer.

First, we must dismiss the crowd. This is a high art, that of dismissing the crowd, and Jesus is master of it. He was moved with compassion for the crowd, scattered abroad as sheep without a shepherd. He postponed His and His disciples’ rest and recreation in order to feed the crowd physically and spiritually. But when that was done, the gospel says, “He dismissed the crowd.”

This we must learn to do or we can never learn to pray. This is the crucial part of Jesus’ prayer instruction when He said: “When you pray, enter your closet, and shut the door, and pray to your father in secret, and your father which sees in secret shall reward you openly.”

“The praying in secret” is not so much the keeping hidden in confidence the words of our petition as it is getting away from the crowd with its insincere ostentation, from crowd pressures and crowd values and crowd thinking.

“We grow so dependent on crowds of one sort or another, not only street corner crowds, but smaller groups in which we submerge our individuality. The alternative in our modern life is a sharp one: we will either learn to dismiss the crowd, or we will dismiss our real selves.” (Interpreter’s Bible On Text)

And the second constant rule for Christian prayer is to face ourselves authentically, really, honestly. Arthur John Gossip says that the basic rule in the devotional life is: “Don’t tell any lies.” So it may be that looking oneself squarely in the face in the mirror while shaving, or honestly assessing one’s motives while cutting the grass, or driving silently cross country, may be more truly prayer than vague words mumbled half-consciously on bended knee.

But the third constant requirement for Christian prayer is that meeting with another, the One Great Eternal Other. Without that meeting of the self and the Lord and Master of all souls, there is no prayer. All this other — dismissing the crowd and honestly assessing the self is prelude.

“Surely Jesus met someone when He prayed,” wrote Harry Emerson Fosdick. Awed disciples watching Him at prayer noticed that the fashion of His countenance was altered by the experience. He was open to His Heavenly Father, and waiting and willing. And His Father honored the appointment.

It was a wise observer of how human nature develops who said that “our souls are dyed in the color of our leisure thoughts.” Can this be the reason our friends and family see so little of the royal purple in our personalities, so little of the blood red of genuine sacrifice, and so much of the yellow of cowardice and the dirty black of smutty selfishness?

There must be this constant, unalterable pole star of all our spiritual zeroing in — we must come to God. Rufus Jones said of St. Francis that, “as other boys run away to sea, Francis ran away to God.” But for most of us, at first anyway, this running away to God in prayer is not high, romantic adventure. There’s really always something irksome about it, as C. S. Lewis affirms from his long experience. Lewis writes: “We are reluctant to begin to pray, and we are delighted to finish. And the odd thing is that this reluctance to pray is not confined to periods of dryness. If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be a delight. Some day, please God, it will be.” And Lewis concludes: “So I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not — just as I must learn my grammar, if I am to read the poets.” (Letters to Malcolm, Mostly on Prayer — C. S. Lewis)

The fourth constant requirement for Christian prayer, whatever its form or formlessness, is this: the Christian must ever judge the validity of the avenues we use to come to God, and all our inner experiences of God, by those Biblical standards of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

Prayer is so subjective and personal. The thoughts, imaginations and emotions of our hearts are so intimately our own, how can we protect ourselves from the vagaries of our own self-deceptions and rationalizations?

How well William Temple put it when he said: “To worship God according to a false mental image is just as wrong as to worship Him according to a false metal image. It can be disastrous. If our mental image of God is radically false, then the more devout we are, the worse it will be for us.”

How gloriously fortunate for us that God has shined into our inner darkness of ignorance and sin to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

It is Christ who invites us: “Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place, where you can rest quietly.” So, the most important part of our preparation for prayer is to read the gospel and learn what Jesus said and did.

The third chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke begins with a listing of some of the most important and prominent people in the first century world. Listen: “In the 15^th year of the Emperor Tiberias, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, when Herod was Prince of Galilee, his brother Philip, prince of Trachonitis, and Lysanias was prince of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And he went all over the Jordan Valley proclaiming a baptism in token of repentance for the remission of sins.”

Please take note of the Big Shots in state and church who were passed by when the word of God was delivered to people about a forth-coming event of importance: the Emperor of Rome, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in Jerusalem, Herod the King, the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas. By all these famous and eminent ones the messenger of the Lord passed, to come to John, a man who lived in a lonely, solitary place, and he immediately went where the crowds were, with the word God had given him for proclaiming the mighty acts of salvation God would soon perform.

Everything in our world today is in chaos and confusion. No one seems to know how to stave off catastrophe or to plot a wise and merciful course into the future. The higher one goes in the upper echelons of church and state and business the greater the confusion seems to be.

Can it be that we aren’t getting the right word because we aren’t in the right place and listening for the right voice? Jesus says: “Come with me, by yourselves, to some lonely place, where you can rest quietly.”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Our Father and our God, who hast set Thy glory upon the heavens, and Thy likeness in the hearts of people: we praise Thy name that all our days arise and set in Thee. May we take them from Thy hand with gratitude, and fashion them with courage, and give them back with joy.

We thank Thee for the grace which with the days Thou givest; light for our task, and strength, and joy in work well done. We praise Thy name for human comradeship and inspiration; and for Thy quickening gift of Him upon the cross; and for Thy Holy Spirit, who forsakes not Thy children.

O God, who lovest with everlasting love all Thy children: forgive our forgetfulness of Thee. Pardon our fear of Thy purity, and our resistance of Thy providence. We have not known the things to which our peace belonged. We have not understood our souls, or Thee.

Father of mercies: we lift to Thee for healing and strengthening our broken purposes and our lives, remembering with ourselves, all needy ones. For this bewildered world we pray that justice yet may come upon the earth with peace. We pray for all those whose lives are like a wilderness: that Thou wilt water them with loving kindness, until they bloom again. We pray for all who are beset by evil: that they may know Thee as their great deliverer. We pray for those who are afraid: that Thou wilt be their confidence. To lonely ones come Thou as brother and sister, and father and mother. Cool Thou the fevered brow. Heal Thou the broken heart. And all who are bowed down do Thou lift up.

Visit us now, through this our prayer, as through an opened door. Abide Thou with us in our homes. Journey Thou with us on our journeys. Shine Thou within our minds with unremitting radiance; that we may be people of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.