Mark 1: 9-15

Stress Fractures

Elizabeth Macaulay

3/5/06

Years ago I was a life guard. For five summers, I was able to work outdoors around water and children. It was a pretty perfect combination.

Three of those years I guarded at an outdoor beach in Moose Lake. The water was - and is - almost orange it has so much iron in it. There was a raft that made for great swimming challenge and sunning.

It was usually not a crazy busy beach, except over holidays. Moose Lake does the Fourth in great small-town style, so the population of the town - and the beach - more than doubles over the weekend.

On the Fourth, I was guarding out on the raft. It became clear that a young boy was heading for the raft and he was not a good swimmer. He started with a lot of confidence, but half way to the raft, he started to get tired, and he started to panic.

With adrenaline zapping my system, I jumped in and swam over to him and pulled him to safety back on the raft.

Later, as I was talking with my other guarding buddies, they asked me a really good question. After applauding my fine life saving, they asked me why I had pulled that boy all the way back to the raft.

I had been maybe three strokes away from being able to stand on shore.

I suppose if I had stopped to think, I would have realized that there was an easier way. But I didn’t stop to think. I just knew that where I had been was safe and given the stress and sense of danger I was feeling, I was going to go back there.

Jesus was baptized. He saw the sky split open and God’s Spirit, looking like a dove, come down on him. Along with the seeing, he heard these words: You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.”

And at once, we are told by the writer of Mark, that same Spirit pushed Jesus out into the wild. There he was tested by Satan. And from there, he began his ministry, preaching to people that they were called to change their lives and believe the Word of God.

Like the raft on Moose Lake some thirty years ago, I believe that what got Jesus through the time of testing in the dessert was this: he knew where safe was. He knew, he had heard it and seen it and believed it, that safe WAS and the safe he knew was that he was beloved of God, the pride of God’s life.

This season of Lent, we are offering a series called “Bridging the Gap” on Wednesday nights. We’ll eat at 5:30, and then at six we will learn together about a significant current issue. We will be talking over five weeks about how it is we live as people of faith when dealing with the issues of body image, money and soul, drugs and alchohol, sexuality, and stress. We’ll learn from a speaker some things about the issue, and then we will learn from our youth what it is their generation believes about those things. We’ll end the night with brief worship.

The reason we are offering these Lenten learning opportunities is because we know that wandering in the wilderness happens every day to so many of us. There are days when the waters of baptism and the assurances of God’s love feel so far distant. Remembering the words and reminding each other of the words- you are God’s beloved, the pride of God’s life - is the work of our church. So when we struggle with how to honor our bodies and how to be good stewards of God’s abundance and how to celebrate our sexuality and how to let go of the stress-inducing sense that we must be all things to all people. When we struggle with how it is we are called to live life fully and well - It is then that we are so very necessary for each other.

To watch for floundering and be ready to pull each other to the safety of God’s words to us each - we are God’s beloveds, the pride of God’s life.

This Wednesday evening coming up we’ll consider stress. What’s it all about, and how do we draw upon our faith life to deal with it?

In thinking about stress, I figure it all boils down to this.

We are stressed because we don’t believe in “enough”. We don’t believe that we have enough, can do enough, have enough time in the day and really, at core, the real “enough ness” we struggle with?

We don’t believe we are enough.

Don’t you suppose that was one of the greatest temptations faced by Jesus in the desert? The voice of Satan telling him that he wasn’t enough as he was? That God’s grand vision for Jesus was surely foolish packaged in the flawed human flesh that he was?

Is it that voice that tells us that in our not-enough ness, we need to work harder, smarter, better, longer? Is it that voice that tells us that in our not-enough ness, we need to make ourselves small so we won’t get hurt by trying to live into our hugeness of soul? Is it that voice that hurtles us down freeways and is it that voice that causes us to busy our lives so fully that we forget about God in the sea of this life and we feel as though we are surely going to drown from the too-much we live in order to hide for our sense of not-enough ness?

Every muscle in our tense bodies.

Every clench in our ulcered stomachs.

Every beat of our constricted hearts… are reminders.

We have forgotten that we are enough. Through our baptism we are enough. We are claimed as beloved and claimed as pride and we can let go of our need to be God because we are washed in the waters of God’s grace and that - that is the safety we cling to when the times of desert some upon us. The raft we drag our tired and frightened bodies to.

This week I ask you to pay attention to the level of stress in your life. When do you feel it? Where does it come from? What sort of whispered “not enough” sounds in your heart that provokes it?

Pay attention to that stress. And then bring it to God. Be conscious of breathing it out or praying it out or relaxing it out. Find the things that feed your soul. The things that remind you that the raft place in your life is present and strong. Be conscious about practicing prayer and gratitude and every time you feel the clench of stress, pull you soul to this place of safety:

You are enough. Let go, and let God.

Amen