“When evening had come, Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Let us go across to the other side.”  Mark 4:35

          Up to this point, in this gospel we have received from Mark and his community, Jesus has been spending a lot of time teaching in parables.  This is teaching by awakening.  Teaching by opening new doors on reality.  Teaching by trusting the inner life of the Spirit to stir within the soul of the disciple, to stir and break open old ways of seeing, doing, knowing.  You have to give Jesus this: he is a master at making us uncomfortable.

          Parables don’t move in a logical progression.  They are parabolic, they pull us into ways of perceiving that might be likened to quantum mechanics or the new astronomical views of the universe.  In other words, parables de-center our little egos.  They move us beyond ourselves.  They draw us to “the other side”—to seeing and hearing in new ways.

          So, we catch up with the poor disciples moving from being somewhat dumbfounded by the parables to Jesus teaching them in a very different way.  He is still teaching by parable, but this time it is by action rather than words.

          Now Jesus says to the disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.”  If I had been there, I have a feeling I would have been saying to myself, “Oh great.  A boat ride is just what I need after this head long rush into trying to perceive the kingdom of God.  And not only that—a boat  ride in a little boat, in the midst of the storm, just so we can get to the other side.  Where’s the sense in this?”

          Following Jesus inevitably challenges us to go to the other side.  Inevitably, Jesus will lead us, step by step, through waters of life over which we have no control.  Inevitably, as sure as the sun comes up and the sun goes down, life will serve up those rough waters.  And in passing through them, we come to the other side. 

          We begin to figure out that it just might be that we aren’t the center of the universe.  And it begins to occur that reality is far more complex, far more interdependent and incredibly rich, than any of our sound-byte theology might suggest.  Going to the other side opens us up, opens up our hearts.  At a minimum, that movement issues in a direct invitation to open up.  Some people choose to shut down.  Some people choose to say “yes”.

          Since this is Fathers’ Day, and I’ve been reflecting all week on this gospel, I began to see some connections with my own dad, Gene Colbert, who is a member of Reconciliation here in town.  I have had the great mercy of having a father who has been willing to go to the other side with Jesus.  Dad is a graduate of Alamo Heights High School and the University of Texas at Austin.  He fought in the European theater in World War II, landing on Sword beach, and living through the battles at the Bridge at Remagen and the Battle of the Bulge.  He came home, married my mom, and they had me, the first of four kids, in 1948.

          When I was young, and we were renting a house in Olmos Park on East Mandalay, Dad was a member of the volunteer fire department for that incorporated city.  Our part of Mandalay was pretty modest.  Smaller homes, families with lots of kids.  Well I remember when a siren would go off in the middle of the night, and Dad would rush out—more often than not to fight a fire in Kenwood.  Kenwood was on the other side of McCullough.  Much of that area has now been reshaped through urban renewal.  In those days, Kenwood was inhabited by impoverished citizens.  Some houses were literally falling apart.  Some did not have adequate water.  And Dad would come home from fighting a fire in Kenwood, and talk to us about his distress that just on the other side of McCullough, in the late 1950s, people were living in such a state of lack.

          Dad has continued to go to the other side throughout his whole life—to Inner City Development, to the NESA Coop (a hunger ministry on the northeast side), to the Battered Women’s Shelter.  Every time he has done that, he has found his own assumptions challenged, politically, economically and theologically.  When he has followed this parabolic track of going to the other side, he has seen things he might not have wanted to see.  And those same things, he would say, he has needed to see so that he can be a better citizen, a better Christian and a better man.

          I don’t think that when Dad and Mom helped to start St. Luke’s here in San Antonio that he knew that this was where it would lead.  They just wanted for the kids to go to Sunday School.  Yet it did.

          In the mid 90s, my husband Doug and I were vacationing in Guatemala.  It was a time when that country was barely beginning to see the ebb of horrific violence in an ongoing civil war, when many civilians were brutally murdered.  A friend had given us this trip, knowing that we loved textiles and folk art.  We had been in Antigua, and decided to go to Lake Atitlan.  We were staying in a comfortable hotel, not fancy.  As we were sitting at dinner one evening, a man approached us and asked if we would like to go across the lake to see the villages where the women wove beautiful huipiles—those stunning garments whose designs signal which village the wearer is from.  We agreed to meet the man the next morning.

          Early in the day, just after dawn, we boarded the boat.  It was such a little boat.  And the lake was so big.  The man took us across the lake, and began with a regular tourist-oriented round of the town.  As we spoke in Spanish to each other, we told him that we were Episcopal priests.  He knew of the presence of the Episcopal Church in Guatemala.  He knew that the bishop had spoken out against the violence.  Over the course of the morning, something shifted in our relationship.  He asked if we would like to see a particular taller or workshop, where women were weaving, a place where tourists never went.  We told him yes. 

So we entered a big thatch roofed building.  We could see women sitting on the floor, visiting with one another in the Mayan dialect of that area.  Their back-strap looms were filled with the luscious colors of the huipiles being woven as they visited and watched their children.

          And then we began to see this: almost every woman bore some mark of physical violence—a scar on a face, a missing foot, recent bruising.  We had been taken to a cooperative that had been established for the purpose of allowing these women and children to find a way to keep going, to live, to weave together the colors of hope, while seeking to heal from violence to body, mind and spirit.  Women and children who had lost health and livelihood to the warfare were helping each other start anew.  Our trip to the other side of the lake brought us face to face with the effects of inept policies, of greed, of warfare, of the crazy rage of power run amok.  We saw those effects, and we saw women with the grit, the creativity, the community and the support to bring forth beauty from the violence and the death all around them.

          Whenever Doug or I come to this gospel text in the lectionary, we always remember those women.  And the guide, the guide who took us to the other side.  The guide who sought us out, took us to the boat, helped us open our eyes to what is going on in the world about us. 

          On the way back across the lake, at evening, the sky darkened and the clouds opened up.  That little skiff was buffeted by great waves.  I kept thinking, “If I die here, my sons won’t know where I am.”  It was truly frightening, and I am one who likes to be out on the water.  It was a reminder of the fragility of life, the need for an experienced guide, and the teaching that going to the other side not only opens our eyes, it may shake us into remembering our own littleness and our own fragility.  Going to the other side inevitably changes how we see things.  I think of Harry Gunkel, our friend, physician and missioner from St. Mark’s who is working in the Holy Land.  I think of all of you who have been on medical missions in Honduras and Piedras Negras.  I am reminded of each one who has helped out at the Good Samaritan Center, the SAMM Shelter, Christian Assistance Ministry, the Battered Women’s Shelter, the Rape Crisis Center.  

          We always have a choice when life serves up that kind of encounter.  We can choose to shut down, hole up, lock the door and stay inside.  Or we can receive the words of St. Paul, “Open wide your hearts.”  (2 Corinthians 6:13)

          One of the aspects of life at St. Mark’s that I cherish the most is that when I am tempted to hole up and shut the door, someone else in this community says, “Let’s go to the other side.”  Someone else in the community—one of many varied voices, calls me to remember the hungry, the sick, the needy.  And in a strange way, the other side begins to feel a little like home.  The other side begins to reveal itself as the place where unexpected gifts are given and received.  The other side—whatever that may be for you, for us, this sweltering summer of 2009 in San Antonio, helps us see as Jesus sees, leads us into the parabolic arc of his ministry, seeking the other side, opening our hearts.  Amen.

The Rev. Mary C. Earle
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
San Antonio, TX
Proper 7b, June 21, 2009