Sermon
Mark 1:29-39
Too Busy Not to Pray
Check out these helpful resources
Biblical Commentary
Sermons
Children’s Sermons
Hymn Lists
Mark 1:29-39
Too Busy Not to Pray
| Bill Hybels is Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill. In 1998, he published a book entitled, Too Busy Not To Pray. In it, he stressed the importance of prayer for those whose lives are overly hectic, stressed out and scheduled to the max – those who, like us sometimes, complain: “I have so much to do that I just can’t seem to find time to pray.”
This leads to his thesis: The more you have to do, the more you need to pray. The less time you think you have, the more time you need to spend with God. Hybels says if you’ll first take time to pray, you’ll actually have more time for everything else – that it’s not a matter of time, but a matter of priorities and a matter of trust: When you put God first and rely upon the strength of God’s grace to get things done, you become more effective and more efficient. Most importantly, you realize it’s not all up to you – God is up ahead, clearing the path and guiding the way. |
I thought about Hybel’s book when I read the gospel lesson for today. To recap, it follows what we’ve heard in the last two weeks: When Jesus heard that John the Baptist was in prison, he left Nazareth and moved to Capernaum, where he called his disciples and started his ministry. The first thing he did was to go to the synagogue to teach, and there he met a man with an unclean spirit who challenged his authority. He cast the spirit out of the man, leaving the elders and scribes in utter amazement.
Then he took a short walk from the synagogue to Simon’s house. Mark says James and John were with him. When they got there, they found Simon’s mother-in-law sick in bed with a fever. According to Mark,
“He came and took her by the hand, and raised her up.
The fever left her, and she served them.” (Mark 1:31)
News spread fast. Before the sun went down there were hordes of infirmed and demon-possessed people standing outside hoping to be healed. Mark says simply, “All the city was gathered together at the door.” (Mark 1:33)
|
A SUBSCRIBER SAYS: “I’m afraid I am ‘hooked.’ Your research is so good ‑ I’ve come to really look forward to it in terms of being a great inspiration for my own sermons.” TRY SERMONWRITER! GET YOUR FOUR FREE SAMPLES! |
The next morning, there would be others. By the time Jesus went to bed, he must have been exhausted. You couldn’t blame him for sleeping in the next day or taking the day off. But, no, according to Mark,
“Early in the morning, while it was still dark,
he rose up and went out, and departed into a deserted place,
and prayed there.” (Mark 1:35)
Jesus set the example Hybels was talking about: The busier you are, the more you need to pray. The less time you think you have, the more time you need to spend with God.
Well, if Jesus first looked to God for strength and direction and peace in the midst of clamoring voices, shouldn’t we?
A long-standing practice in the Presbyterian Church is to pray before every meeting. Every Session meeting begins and ends with a prayer. So does every congregational meeting – and committee meeting, for that matter. Before we get down to business, we pray.
To be honest, that used to frustrate me. Especially in larger churches, there’s so much to do. I’d come a Session meeting and there’d be so many items on the agenda I didn’t see how we were going to get out before midnight. Still, we checked to see if there was a quorum, we called the meeting to order, and we prayed.
And our prayers were never a simple nod to God. We prayed that God would be with us and that we’d have the mind of Christ to be led by the Spirit, so that everything we said and did would be in accordance with God’s will for the church and all concerned.
The busier you are, the more you need to pray. If it was true for Jesus, it’s just as true for us.
Now, it’s interesting to note that Jesus didn’t just get up early in the morning and kneel by the side of his bed. Mark says, “He went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”
Our English translation doesn’t do justice to the words here. In the language of the New Testament, this “deserted place” where Jesus went was the eremōn.
• When it’s used in other places, such as when John the Baptist said he was “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” – in the eremōn (Mark 1:3) – it refers to the Judean wilderness east of Jerusalem.
• And when we read of Jesus’ temptations, where Mark says, after Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan, “the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness” – again, the eremōn – (Mark 1:12) he’s talking about the barren land east of the Jordan.
But, at this point, Jesus is no longer in the south, he’s now in Capernaum on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, where there are rolling hills and running water and lush vegetation. So, when Mark says he went out to a deserted place – when he went to the eremōn to spend time alone with God in prayer – where, exactly, did he go?
The traditional site of the Beatitudes, where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), is Mount Eremos, near Capernaum. Hear the word? The Byzantines built a church there in the 4th Century. They also built a small chapel just down the hillside in a grotto they called the eremōn. Many believe it was here that Jesus often came to pray.
Well, whether or not this is the place is not the point. The point is Jesus went somewhere to get away from the crowds and the pressures and the expectations of another miracle. Just as he was too busy not to pray, so was he too consumed by others not to go off by himself and be alone with God.
You see my point: If Jesus needed a quiet place to talk with God and listen for the voice of God’s Spirit giving him comfort and strength and direction, don’t we?
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned his disciples not to practice their piety in such a way as to draw attention to themselves (Matthew 6:1). Then he went on to say,
“But you, when you pray, enter into your inner room,
and having shut your door,
pray to your Father who is in secret,
and your Father who sees in secret
will reward you openly.” (Matthew 6:6)
A member of my church in Odessa took that verse literally. She was an older woman who lived alone in a small one-bedroom house just up the street from the church. On my first visit she insisted on showing me her home. She’d designed it herself and had it built, and she was justly proud of it, so she showed me every nook and cranny.
The bedroom was in the back, and it had a walk-in closet – not a big walk-in closet like you see in homes nowadays that have their own heating and air-conditioning systems – hers was just a small space, but with a door of its own, which she proudly pointed out to me.
Inside the door, in the middle of the closet was a little bench. The clothes hung to the left and right. There was a light with a draw string overhead. On the bench was an old tattered Bible.
“This is my prayer closet,” she said. “The Lord told us when we pray to go into a room and shut the door. Well, I don’t shut the door since there’s no one here but me, but this is where I sit and read my Bible and pray.”
As I stood there in front of the closet door, I knew I was standing on holy ground made sacred by the prayerful devotion of this blessed saint. It was her eremōn – the one place she knew she could go to get away from the clamor of the world and be refreshed and renewed in the Spirit.
What about you? Do you have an eremōn – a special place you like to go to be apart with God? If not, think about creating one. It doesn’t have to be a closet, though, if that works for you, go for it. It can be as simple as a favorite chair or a tree in the back yard.
And it doesn’t have to remain the same all your life. My little eremōn today is a place at the kitchen table, where I have a cross and a candle. It’s not all that special. It’s just where I feel comfortable reading a passage or two from the Bible and offering my morning prayers.
So, if you don’t already have one, I invite you to pick a spot where you can spend a few minutes each day to retreat from the pressures of everyday life and be alone with God.
Jesus left the home of Simon and his family early in the morning while it was still dark and went to the eremōn to pray. It wasn’t long before Simon and the others found him. Mark says,
“Simon and those who were with him followed after him;
and they found him, and told him,
‘Everyone is looking for you.'” (Mark 1:36-37)
Dick Donovan points out that the word, hunted, has an almost hostile ring to it – like hunting for ducks or quail or going deer hunting. If you look closely, you’ll find that it’s often the case that, in Mark’s gospel, when people hunt for Jesus, their intent is not to sit at his feet, but to stand in his way. (SermonWriter, Volume 13, Number 6, ISSN 1071-9962)
For example, early on in Jesus’ ministry the religious leaders started spreading dirt on Jesus. They said he was beside himself and possessed by a demon. They sent word to Nazareth for his mother and brothers to come and take him home.
So, they did; at least, they tried. They came and hunted for him, and they found him teaching in a home. The place was so crowded they couldn’t get in, so they sent word, “Behold, your mother, your brothers, and your sisters are outside looking for you.” When he got the message, Jesus said,
“Who are my mother and my brothers?…
For whoever does the will of God,
The same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.”
(Mark 3:33-35)
No, when Simon and the others hunted for Jesus, it was not to join him in the eremōn for prayer; it was to scold him for not being in his place: “Where have you been?” they wanted to know. “Everyone is searching for you.”
But, remember, Jesus was not driven by the expectations of others; he was grounded in his relationship to God.
• Yes, there were a lot of people waiting outside Simon’s home hoping to be healed.
• Yes, there were a lot of people expecting Jesus to give them more words of wisdom, like when he taught in the synagogue last Sabbath.
• And yes, there were a lot of people hoping he was the long-awaited Messiah, who would restore Israel to her rightful place of prominence as the people of God.
All this, and yet … instead of going back to Capernaum, Jesus said,
“Let’s go elsewhere into the next towns,
that I may preach there also,
because I came out for this reason.” (Mark 1:38-39)
How was Jesus able to stay so focused? I can tell you in a word: He first took time to pray.
A woman battling the chaos of cancer treatment wrote of her experience in this way:
“Suddenly I found myself swept up in the storm of the vast waves of the medical ocean. Up and down. Tossed and blown. Surgery now. Chemotherapy later. Try this. No, try this. That’s better. Or is it? CT Scan doesn’t look good. Try this. IVs. Lab work. More tests. More needles. More LIFE? Maybe. X-rays. More chemo. Experimental drugs. Nausea. No. No more.
“… Early on in my illness a friend gave me a book that has given me hope. It’s entitled, The Triumphal Patient, by Greg Anderson. I rehearse the “Triumphant Patient’s Creed” every day and share it with others. It goes:
‘Hope reigns in my life today. My illness does not rule me. Daily I seek to acknowledge the physical, be positive in the mental, transcend the emotional, and anchor in the spiritual, knowing that God’s Presence is my goal. Thank you, Lord, for today’s blessings.’ (Wichita Falls Medicine, Nov-Dec., 1996, pp. 25-26)
Here’s what I hope you’ll take home with you today: We live in a hectic world where any number of voices are crying out for our time and attention. I think about the mother in California with the fourteen babies all whining, “Mama!” at the same time. How are you going to keep your sanity and stay in touch with God when the world around you is in such turmoil?
So, before you get consumed by the craziness of it all, find yourself a little eremōn and let it become for you a sanctuary in which you, too, are anchored in the spiritual and attuned to God’s will for your life. Face it: With all you’ve got going on, you’re too busy not to pray.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Copyright 2009, Philip McLarty. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB), a public domain (no copyright) modern English translation of the Holy Bible.