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in the morning while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a lonely place . It's about time for jesus to take solace in a lonely place where only about one third of the

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way through the first chapter in the Gospel of Mark . And jesus has already started to look like he's running a marathon, like he's the poster child of the classic type, a personality already in Mark's Gospel

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, everything is so breathless. It's as if everybody is always running. There's no time for the setup , no time in Mark for the enunciation, no time for angels and shepherds and quiet mangers and the

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mystery of the incarnation. No time for any word about his childhood. None of that. Mark begins with the urgent words of john the baptist, prepare the way of the Lord make his path straight.

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And then we're off to the races, The baptism with both water and the spirit, the 40 days in the wilderness, no days off, no vacation time, no study leave. It's just temptation by

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Satan who is putting him through his paces and then off to galilee and preaching the gospel of God and calling each of the 12 disciples and casting out demons and healing. And in just 28 verses, he

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has made his entrance and has apparently turned all of galilee upside down. Mark wants us to know that the kingdom of God is at hand in the work of jesus and so it's jesus here and it's jesus

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there. You can't keep up with him as jesus everywhere. Yeah, and in our text for today there is the short bathroom break in Sammons and Andrew's house. Even there he has to work, he

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heals Simon's mother in law, she jumps out of bed and starts making supper and that evening there are more healings, more castings out of demons. And finally it's morning, early morning, the first experience

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of quiet that he has had and maybe forever. So he slipped away to a lonely place and he's praying. But don't you worry salmon? His companions hunt for him. Mark puts it hunt for him

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like he is some sort of showbiz commodity on the loose and they find him, everyone is searching for you. They say we need more miracles, we need more healing, we need more casting out of

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demons. All of that is trending well, we need more of it. We need more like paparazzi on the trail of a celebrity. They've come to find their hot property. They want him to go

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back to the crowds because he is such a hit In that first wilderness. Earlier in the chapter, the 40 day wilderness, there was only one tempter . Now there's a host of temperatures, not satan

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, but his own disciples. And ever since there had been disciples in every age who have always been suckers for the temptation of becoming popular, who's not willing to forgo the quiet time and push the envelope

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and to lose a little sleep for that kind of popularity. The temptation for jesus now is that of going back to camp Ernie um where he has been and where his ministry played well, what with the

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healing of the sick and the dazzling of the people with his preaching and during himself to them he could go back there and stay, settle in, put up some billboards promoting his crusade, raise a family

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, buy a house, packed the auditorium, say the right things and say them well, that's what the temperatures, the disciples say in this moment, their brand new in the discipleship business, they don't

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know any better, so they say to him, everyone is searching for you, those five words by the way, everyone is searching for you Are the five magic words that captivate too many of us who

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served the church as pastors or in some other way , sometimes as a pastor, as seminary president, I love those words, they tug at my incipient messianism, some of you in this very room have

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asked me in recent days, how has it been so far in this new year and I have fallen all over myself answering something like this, so it's been so busy, we came back from being away

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at christmas and then I had to write to scholarly papers for my annual election ERI based cohort that met for a week in Princeton and then I had to stay over on the following weekend to preach in new

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york and then I had to speak about theological education at the board meeting of Union Presbyterian Seminary enrichment. And then I had to go to SAn Francisco for the annual presbyterian seminary presidents and board chairs meeting.

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And then I had to come back and preside over the annual midwinter lectures. And then at the end of that week I had to be involved with the annual boston Seminary board winter retreat. And then I

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had to get ready to preach at the first Eucharist of the spring semester. Everyone is searching for me . It's as if I love overcompensating so because it gives me the opportunity to know I'm busy, therefore

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I am. This is a trap. Everyone is searching for you, they said to jesus, and in spite of them at the beginning of his ministry , not even yet out of the first chapter of

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Mark, he has come to understand what it takes most of us a lifetime to figure out if we ever figure it out that at the end of the day, it's not what, you know, not

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even how much quiet time you preserve. Instead, it's whether you have the capacity to empty yourself, not to fill yourself with your own ego or with the puffery of others, but to empty yourself.

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We tend to think about ministry as us doing something with or two or four others, and we may get self referential as we talk about the need to recharge spiritually as if that were as simple as plugging

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in our devices at the end of the day so that they can light up fully charged the next morning . But here in that particular lonely place, something more profound is going on, Jesus is not just

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getting a good catnap. He is emptying himself. He is preparing to be a vessel for God's intentions , and not for the intentions of others. He is emptying himself, not filling himself up somewhere in

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the epistle to the Philippians, We are encouraged to let the same mind be in you. That was in christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God

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as something to be exploited, but emptied himself and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. The operative greek word in that

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text is stenosis, emptying oneself for the sake of others. There, in that lonely place, Jesus was emptying himself. There was jesus as tom long has put it. With two paths running out.

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One path led back to keep Ernie um with a life of comfortable popularity. The other path led to Golgotha and a costly sacrifice. One path led to a place where everybody was crying Hosanna. The other

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path would lead to a place where people would cry , crucify him. The lonely place was no place of serene reflection. It was a place of momentous decision, the kingdom of self interest versus the kingdom

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of God, Jesus chose not to go back, but to go forward, not to be successful, but to be faithful. Let us go on to the neighboring towns, he said to his disappointed new

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disciples, so that I might proclaim the message there . Also, for that is what I came out to do. The lonely place for him was a furnace, a raging place, a place of conflict

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in which he was able to discern the difference between success and faithfulness between being the hot property of disciples , who seemed at that moment more like stage managers versus following a larger destiny. It was no quiet

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place, this lonely place, but for him it was the locus of vocational discernment and it helped him , no, that his vocation, his purpose was not to go back to calpurnia, but to go

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forward to the cross, to the ultimate lonely place , to leave the place where he's already a rock star. Right here in the very first chapter of Mark is to prefigure his crucifixion at this very moment

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. In the early ministry of jesus, he is leaving that lonely place, having decided not to define his vocation in terms of success, as it is so often measured, but instead to go to the

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next place where nobody has heard of him, no fawning crowd, no cheering audience. What does he know that those disciples don't know and perhaps we don't know, could it be that from the lonely place

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? He already knows that when he gets to the cross, when he screams out into the world, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That very moment will be when God is

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most visible to him, not in some cheap moment of glory, but in the ultimate realization that he lived out his destiny from start to finish. Soon I'll be finished with this sermon. Mhm And when

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I sit down there will be silence. A lot of silence. Enough silence for you to soak in the atmosphere of this lonely place. I invite you to keep your device is dark and to drink in

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the silence for we all have too little of it do with it as you are led. But I beg you to use it and to return here often , either alone or in a worshipping community because important

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decisions are made in this lonely place. But first I'm grateful for a poem. It's by mary Karr , a professor at Syracuse and a noted memoirist from east texas. It's a poem about resurrection, but

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before that it's a poem about the lonely place that is the cross from the far star points of his pinned extremities cold, inched in black ice and squid ink till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in

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that void even for pain, he missed his splintered feet. The human stare buried in his face. He asked for two hands made of meat. He could reach to the end of in the corpses core

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the stone fist of his heart began to bang on the stiff chests door and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now it's your limbs, he comes to fill as warm water shatters at birth, recovering