YouTube video sermon

Various Texts

I sit in a bright-lit June meadow at the Abbey of Gethsemane, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It’s early afternoon, and I’ve been here since morning in what can only be described as an uneasy solitude. Time is measured here in the chant of crickets and frogs, in the syncopated litany of songbirds, in the silence of tattered wildflowers.

Even though I yearn for this acre of solitude, some other part of me hungers for the larger world of “relevance,” as if my solitude were a rarefied form of loitering. By most standards, I’m not being productive, efficient, or the slightest bit useful. And I can’t help feeling… what? Extraneous? Indolent?

It seems I should be writing something, cleaning something, fixing something. And I still have this tiny but stubborn repository of conditioning inside that tells me I should focus only on others, that sitting around in a monastic meadow is withdrawn. Navel-gazing self-indulgence. Shouldn’t I be back home working in a soup kitchen or something?

Being alone in order to find the world again sounds ridiculously paradoxical. It seems so even now that I’m here. But somewhere along my spiritual journey, I’d stumbled upon a difficult and enigmatic truth: True relating is born in solitude.

Those are the words of author Sue Kidd in her book Firstlight. And perhaps that’s what you imagine when you think about solitude – going to a monastery or a convent and sitting in silence. But that’s only one form of solitude. As another alternative, try this description by Ruth Haley Barton in her book Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence.

My entry into solitude often feels like the hard landing of an aircraft that this flight attendant humorously describes: “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Captain Crash and the crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are silenced, we’ll open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal.” When life is as noisy and fast-paced as mine, it feels as if my approach to solitude involves slamming to a screeching halt.

The smoke of clutter and distraction billows around me, and warning bells sound, telling me that I have been in a bit of danger and it’s a good thing I’m on the ground. Picking my way through the wreckage of external distractions, I stumble off the plane into the presence of the One who has been waiting for me to arrive, the One who loves me no matter what kind of disheveled shape I am in and is so glad I’ve made it home.

Either way, one of the more controversial issues in ministry and church circles today is busyness and speed. How quickly do we expect the “lost” to be saved? How soon will new churches plant other new churches? How fast should a new believer move into a leadership role? How long should cross-cultural missionaries work on learning a language?

Our internal speedometers are being conditioned to the quickening pace of modern life with its rapid flow of technological innovations. So, in our “age of accelerations,” pressing questions relate to speed – not only for effective Christian mission but simply for healthy Christian lives. Will we be driven by the hurried pace of our world? Or, with the help of God’s Word, the Holy Spirit, and His church, will we find a more timeless (and human) pace for life and mission – a pace that has produced health and fruit across the ages?

In his book Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global, Andy Johnson says this: “The work of ministry and missions is urgent, but it’s not frantic.” That’s good, and the same is true of the Christian life and of the health and growth of our own souls. So, let’s sit together at the feet of Jesus, and consider the pace and patterns of His life and ministry. He wasn’t idle. But neither was He frenzied. From all we can tell from the Gospels, Jesus’s days were full. I think it would be fair to say He was busy, but He wasn’t frantic. He lived to the full, and yet He didn’t seem to be in a hurry.

In Jesus, we observe a human life with holy habits and patterns: rhythms of retreating from society and then reentering to do the work of ministry. Even Jesus prioritized time away with His Father. He chose again and again, in His perfect wisdom and love, to give His first and best moments to seeking His Father’s face. And if Jesus carved out such space in the demands and pressures of His human life, what might we learn from Him, and how might we do likewise?

Now, we have only glimpses of Jesus’s habits and personal spiritual practices, but what we do have is by no accident, and it’s not scant. We know exactly what God means for us to know, in just the right detail – and we have far more about Jesus’s personal spiritual rhythms than we do about anyone else’s in Scripture.

And the picture we have of Christ’s habits is not one that is foreign to our world or our lives and personal experience. Rather, we find timeless and transcultural postures that can be imitated and applied by any follower of Jesus, anywhere in the world, at any time in history. So, what might those be? Let’s look at three.

Jesus Retreated and Reentered

Jesus made a habit of withdrawing from the world and the engagements of fruitful ministry, and then reentering later to do more good. And the same should be true of us. The healthy Christian life is neither solely solitary nor constantly communal. We learn to withdraw, like Jesus, “to a desolate place” to commune with God (Mark 1:35), and then we return to the bustle of daily tasks and seek to meet the needs of others. We carve out a season for spiritual respite in some momentarily sacred space to feed our souls, enjoying God there in the stillness. Then refilled, we enter back in to be light and bread to a hungry, harassed, and helpless world (Matthew 9:36).

For Christ, “the wilderness” or “desolate place” often became His momentarily sacred space. He got away from people. He regularly escaped the noise and frenzy of society to be alone with the Father, where He could give God His full attention and undivided heart.

There is, of course, that especially memorable instance in Mark 1. After “his fame spread everywhere” (Mark 1:28) the day before, and “the whole city was gathered together at the door” (Mark 1:33), Jesus took a remarkable step the next morning. He was up before the sun and slipped away from town to restore His soul in secret communion with His Father. “Rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, He departed and went out to a desolate place, and there He prayed” (Mark 1:35).

Given the fruitfulness of the previous day, some of us might scratch our heads. What a ministry opportunity Jesus seemed to leave behind when He left town! Surely some of us would have skipped or shortened our private spiritual habits to rush to the demands of the swelling masses. How many of us, in such a situation, would have the presence of mind and heart to discern and prioritize prayer as Jesus did?

The Gospel of Luke also makes it unmistakable that this pattern of retreat and reentry was part of the ongoing dynamic of Christ’s human life. Luke 4:42 tells us that Jesus “departed and went into a desolate place” – not just once but regularly. Luke 5:16 says, “He would withdraw [as a pattern] to desolate places and pray.”

So, also, Matthew 14:13. After the death of John the Baptist, Jesus “withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by Himself.” But even then, the crowds pursued Him. And He didn’t despise them, but here He puts His desire to retreat on hold and has compassion on them and heals their sick (Matthew 14:14). Then after feeding the five thousand, He withdraws again to a quiet place. “After He had dismissed the crowds, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray” (Matthew 14:23).

This leads to a second principle – and not just that He withdrew but why, for what purpose? What did Jesus do when He withdrew?

Jesus Withdrew to Commune with His Father

He got away from the distractions and demands of daily life to focus on, and hear from, and pray to the Father. At times, He went away by Himself to be alone (Matthew 14:23; Mark 6:46–47; John 6:15). His disciples would see Him leave to pray and later return. He went by Himself.

But He also drew others into His life of prayer. The disciples had seen Him model prayer at His baptism (Luke 3:21), as He laid His hands on the children (Matthew 19:13), and when He drove out demons (Mark 9:29). And Jesus brought His men into His communion with His Father. Even when He prayed alone, His men were often nearby. “Now it happened that as He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him” (Luke 9:18; also Luke 11:1).

Jesus Taught His Disciples to do the Same

Jesus didn’t only retreat to be alone with God. He also taught His disciples to bring this dynamic of retreat and return, communion and compassion, into their own lives (Mark 3:7; Luke 9:10). In Mark 6:31–32, Jesus invites the disciples to join Him, saying, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” Mark explains, “For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves.”

The same is true in the Gospel of John, as His fame spreads, Jesus retreats from more populated settings to invest in the disciples in more desolate, less distracting places (John 11:54). And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches everyone (including us) not only to give without show (Matthew 6:3–4) and fast without publicity (Matthew 6:17–18), but also to find our private place to seek our Father’s face: “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). The reward is not material stuff later but the joy of communion with God now, the excitement of fellowship in the present, in the secret place.

Like last week, I want close on a personal note, I want to ask you about your pace and your patterns. First, your pace, ask yourself, “How deeply do the world’s assumptions and expectations about speed and productivity and busyness affect my life? How hurried is my life?”

Second, your patterns. How about rhythms of retreat and reentry? Do you get away daily to commune with God in His Word and prayer, in an unhurried, even leisurely way – resting, restoring your joy, feeding your soul in the grace of His presence? And what are your patterns or rhythms of life for retreating from the noise of the world to focus on and hear from the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, and then come back to meet the needs of others?

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World, Mike Cosper explains the value in persevering through the difficult realities of practicing solitude.

Solitude has a learning curve. It’s a practice we embody, and like anything worth doing, our first efforts will be pained. The “terror of silence” (as David Wallace called it) will tempt us away from the quiet.

We will long for email, to-do lists, a sink full of dishes, the unread messages on our phone – anything that can turn our attention away from that quietly simmering something that makes solitude so troubling. So, we practice solitude like a beginning violinist; we practice poorly. But poor practice – marked by a wandering and restless mind – isn’t bad practice.

Done with some regularity, it can become rich. We can discover a space in our hearts and in our world where the Lord meets us. As we’ll see, it’s the beginning of the end of our religious efforts, a chance to face both the reality of our spiritual poverty and the wealth of God’s spiritual blessings.