2023.08.06 | Practicing the Pause
“Practicing the Pause”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Tenth Sunday of Pentecost
Sunday, August 6, 2023
Matthew 14:13-23 | espanol
A couple of weeks ago I was getting a mani-pedi, and I was reading a book. My nail technician sees me reading and asks me, “Oh, what are you reading?“ Now, I am always hesitant to talk to strangers about the books I’m reading when they are theological in nature. I have found through experience that this might lead to a very engaging and interesting conversation, or it might lead to a really awkward conversation. So I choose my words very carefully and say that I am reading a book on Christian contemplative practice. And my nail technician, who I think is probably a Buddhist, says, “Really? I didn’t think Christians had a contemplative practice.”
I have a feeling that she’s not alone. I’m guessing that most Buddhists don’t think Christians have a contemplative practice, and I would be willing to guess that most Christians don’t think that Christianity has a contemplative practice.
Contemplative practice, or meditation, or mindfulness, is a very important part of the Buddhist faith tradition, and it is part of the path to enlightenment that Buddhists call the Noble Eightfold Path. The Noble Eightfold Path offers practices that guide a follower on the way towards spiritual transformation. In fact, most traditions outside of Christianity have a “universally understood and nameable ‘path’ of [spiritual] transformation.” (1) Hinduism has the Three Paths to Liberation. Sufism has the Sufi Path of Love.
Unlike these more contemplative traditions, our Christian tradition tends to emphasize action over contemplation and transformation. I’m not sure exactly why this is. I have a feeling that early Christians were much more contemplative, in part because the communities of Jewish Christians would have been steeped in the first-century Jewish practices of daily prayer. But after the fourth century, and the Romanization of western Christianity, the focus of Christianity shifted to belief in Jesus, and on emulating his actions, rather than moving along a path of spiritual transformation. But if you look closely at the gospels, Jesus’s contemplative practice is there. It has been there all along — we just haven’t been taught to see it.
I like to say that if a story is in all four of the gospels, you know it was important to the early Christian community. Our text today, of the feeding of the multitudes, is one of those stories that appears in all four of the gospels. Not only is it in all four of the gospels, but it was considered so important that it is told twice in two of the gospels, here in Matthew and also in Mark. So the story appears not four but six times throughout the gospels. It is also the only miracle story, outside of the resurrection, that appears in all four gospels. If you have sat in church services long enough, I'm sure you have heard a sermon or four on the feeding of the thousands. And it's easy to understand why this story was so important to our early Christian ancestors.
It is a rich story that has a lot to say to us about the Christian life. There is so much that one can unpack in the story. It shows Jesus teaching the disciples that, no, you don’t send people away, you help them when they are in need. It shows Jesus modeling compassion for the people, paying attention to their loss and grief, paying attention to their need for spiritual sustenance, paying attention to their physical illness and hunger. It’s a story about the ministry of service, to which we are all called as Christians as followers of Jesus. It’s also a story about the triumphs of abundance over the mindset of scarcity. One interpretation that I have often heard of the story is that when Jesus and the disciples offer their meager rations of five loaves and two fishes, expecting it to feed the 5000-plus crowd, that generosity inspires all the people out there who have brought little bits of food in their pockets and bags, expecting to keep it to themselves. It inspires them to bring those bits of food out and share it with their neighbors, so that everyone has enough.
Indeed, it is an important, core story of Christianity. And I am not actually going to preach on it today. Because what is interesting to me today, this time reading the story, is not the miracle itself, but what happens on either end of the story, and a particular practice that Jesus had that we tend to miss because we’re not looking for it.
If you were paying attention when Yuliana read the text this morning, you heard these words at the beginning, “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” And at the end of the passage is this: “Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat, and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray.” Notice how this miracle that Jesus performs– all the activity of teaching and healing and feeding– are bookended by Jesus going off by himself to be alone to pray.
In all the times that I have read this story, I have missed these bookends, the praying before and the praying after. Jesus going off by himself, and sending everyone away to be alone. How have I missed this over the many times I’ve read this passage over the years? It might be because the Revised Common Lectionary breaks the text up in a way that deemphasizes these moments. If we only ever read the lectionary texts from one Sunday to the next, we miss the small moments of the movement of Jesus’s prayer life.
One of the reasons that I think we miss these moments of Jesus praying, is that we were not taught to look for them. Yet, here is Jesus’s contemplative practice: pause for time alone, engage in action, pause to reconnect with God — all hidden in plain view. And glancing through the Gospel according to Matthew, we see this again and again. Think about these examples: in Chapter 4, right after his baptism: “Then Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.“ Chapter 5: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.” In Chapter 15: “After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the sea of Galilee, and he went up to the mountain, where he sat down.” In Chapter 17: “Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.” And finally, after the Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples: “Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, sit here while I go over there and pray.” Over and over, Jesus practices the pause. Pause. Act. Pause.
Once we look, it’s everywhere here in Matthew, as well as in Luke and Mark. Jesus shows us that, in addition to the important active work of ministry, the Christian path is also about our own spiritual transformation, a transformation that requires us to practice the pause. I believe that Jesus’s contemplative practice is what allows him to have such an active ministry and to remain calm in the face of all the demanding situations he faces. If it weren’t for his contemplative practice, he would not have been able to face the challenges of living under an oppressive regime, the challenges of ministering to so many needy people, and the challenges of facing his own death with composure and equanimity.
All our lives Christians have been told to be like Jesus, to act like Jesus, but we were never taught how he managed to face all those demands and successfully complete all that ministry. I believe that the gospel writers included these passages of Jesus going off alone in the mountains and deserted places to show us what his prayer practice looked like, and help teach us about the path to transformation.
New brain science is revealing exactly what goes on in our brains when we meditate. I am not a neuroscientist, and I’m going to oversimplify things here, but recent studies are telling us that a regular meditative practice actually rewires the brain. It builds new connections between the thinking part of our brain and the fear-based fight-or-flight part of our brain. When we’re under stress, the primal part of our brain floods the body with stress hormones and shuts down the thinking so that our bodies can react quickly– whether there’s really a bear chasing us, or we only think there’s a bear.
But if we have a contemplative practice, and are regularly meditating or praying, we are encouraging our brains to develop new neural patterns that slow that fight-or-flight response and allow the thinking brain to come back online. I have always marveled at how Jesus is almost always calm, cool, and collected in the face of any demand put in front of him. He never gets upset at all of those pesky Pharisees asking him questions. He doesn’t blow his stack when he’s brought before Pontius Pilate. I would like to believe that it is Jesus’s regular practice of prayer and time alone with God, that is rewiring his neural connections and allowing him to have that calm in the face of everything he’s up against.
The gospel writers did not have to show us these little scenes of Jesus praying. They’re so small, they seem so minor, and we usually miss them, don’t we? And yet I think they might be the key to everything. The key to how Jesus is able to practice his ministry. The key to his path of transformation and his spiritual closeness with the divine.
Today I want to challenge us to practice the pause. I encourage us all to take some time each day — even five minutes — to pause, spend time in silence alone with God, and rewire our brains, setting us on the path of transformation that Jesus modeled for us. Amen.
(1) Caroline Oaks, Practice the Pause: Jesus’ Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What It Means to Be Fully Human (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 8.