The Land of And…

Rev. JT Smiedendorf

June 1, 2025

Text: Matthew 14:13-23

CENTRAL POINT:

The inward contemplative life must be integrated with the outer life of expression and service (and vice versa).

When Jesus heard about John, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. When the crowds learned this, they followed him on foot from the cities. ¹⁴ When Jesus arrived and saw a large crowd, he had compassion for them and healed those who were sick. ¹⁵ That evening his disciples came and said to him, “This is an isolated place and it’s getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”

¹⁶ But Jesus said to them, “There’s no need to send them away. You give them something to eat.” ¹⁷ They replied, “We have nothing here except five loaves of bread and two fish.”

¹⁸ He said, “Bring them here to me.” ¹⁹ He ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves of bread and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed them and broke the loaves apart and gave them to his disciples. Then the disciples gave them to the crowds. ²⁰ Everyone ate until they were full, and they filled twelve baskets with the leftovers. ²¹ About five thousand men plus women and children had eaten.

²² Right then, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead to the other side of the lake while he dismissed the crowds. ²³ When he sent them away, he went up onto a mountain by himself to pray. Evening came and he was alone.

May the words spoken and the words heard become your Living Word in us, among us, and beyond us.

AMEN

Some of you know the elder Roman Catholic Priest Father Richard Rohr who is the founder and driving force of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He once offered this illustration…

“When people ask me which is the more important, action or contemplation, I know it is an impossible question to answer because they are eternally united in one embrace, two sides of one coin. So I say that action is not the important word, nor is contemplation; AND is the important word!”

Through his books and recordings, Father Rohr’s has been an important teacher for me, particularly as an articulate voice and presence for evolving Christianity, for the kind of Christianity that takes the best from our tradition and moves it forward with both accessibility and depth.

Like Father Rohr, I don’t find the essence of Christianity problematic; I find that too often our way of understanding it and living it over the centuries has been problematic and immature. Indeed, our faith has too often been captured by the individual human ego and the collective ego (known as Empire) and used for their purposes. This capture involves the ego and its fondness for splitting things into two and confirming its bias. The ego thrives on either/or; my way or the highway, I’m in and you are out, heaven or hell.

The personal and historical consequences of that capture are grave. Derek Chauvin could not find his way to humanity and safety for both himself AND George Floyd, self AND other. He chose the Either/Or path.

The consequences of liberation from that ego and Empire capture are nothing short of wondrous, a peace that passes all understanding, a justice that can endure. Humanity has only begun to explore that liberation.

Taken as a whole, and in its highest and deepest teaching, the Gospel is bigger than ego, bigger than either/OR. Our spiritual lives are meant for more. The Realm of God, of which Jesus spoke so often, is a big enough circle, a wide enough vision to include all, even paradox and seemingly opposing energies. In short, the Realm of God could also be called the Land of And.

Father Rohr quotes Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, who wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” And Rohr says that everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all, but always have been connected at a deeper level. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level where the Divine can hold contradictions and paradox. (Some call this place the unified field or nondual reality or wisdom.) This creative work of living in the Land of And is the creative work of a lifetime and a sign of maturing faith and psychology.

We could spend a long time exploring the many seemingly opposing energy or value poles of life in which we move, like continuity and change, structure and flow, accountability and mercy, self and other, and countless other pairs. Today, I invite us to travel in the Land of And—and learn about it by focusing on the two important poles initially mentioned by Rohr: action and contemplation.

Did you notice the integration of these two in our Scripture story today?

Just below the plot, just below the surface, Jesus is in the dance of action and contemplation. He seeks solitude and prayer both before and after his communal feeding of the 5,000. Just before our story in Matthew’s Gospel version, Jesus hears of John the Baptist’s cruel execution at the hand of Herod, and he seeks solitude, contemplation time and space. And after his action with the crowds, showing them compassion and healing, offering them food for their hunger, he seeks again solitude and prayer time. This is a deep pattern, contemplation and action and then contemplation again and so on, each feeding and informing the other, each a timely creative expression of life, each an element of an interdependent whole.

You might say that Moses was in this cycle on Mount Sinai, first having a mystical experience of the burning bush and having that lead to his actions for liberation of the people. It’s as if the bush burned before him, then in him, and then through him in action in the world.

Now, you might come to the Land of And from either side of this or any polarity. For example, you might be a person of social action like Simone Weil, an activist who fought against totalitarianism and worked for the French Resistance based in England during World War II. What you might not know is that in the 1930’s as a young activist, her atheist, communist sympathies soured and it was no longer religion that she considered the opiate of the people, but revolution. A mystical experience in the Church while on a visit to Assisi changed her life and changed the framework and the fuel of her activism. She realized that activism without a spiritual framework, a framework capable of getting beyond the ego, was deeply limited and even dangerous. Said Weil, “God is not present, even if we invoke God, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good.” Weil had the spiritual insight of the unity and equality of humanity. Weil began in action and found her way to the inclusion and integration of contemplation, of inward spiritual practice, which in turn altered and inspired her continued activism. She found her way to the Land of And where action and contemplation were one dance, indispensable and interdependent elements, each helping the other.

Others have journeyed the other direction from contemplation to action. Saint Oscar Romero might be one example of this. The quiet studious priest earned his doctorate after ordination and then eventually served in parishes and as a church official in various capacities including running a conservative Catholic publication. He certainly got some things done in his early ministry, yet was considered a conventional, contemplative, and conservative choice years later when he was selected as Archbishop of San Salvador, selected as someone to quietly preserve the status quo. Yet, it was Saint Oscar’s painful, prayerful contemplation of the assassinated body of his activist friend and fellow priest, Rutilio Grande, that transformed Romero, transformed him into a prophet of profound action who led actions of liberation for the people, actions borne of compassion that came out of his wrestling in prayer, his inner spiritual contemplation.

The invitation to the Land of And begins when we draw the circle wide, including both energies, both values. As simple as the inbreath and the outbreath in our bodies, we come back to the necessity of each and their interdependence. Any energy or value pole can be held as superior, can polarize, and in so doing, look in distortion negatively toward the other needed pole and suffer the consequences of focusing too much on one side. In most congregations like this one, to oversimplify, there will be fans of action and of contemplation (or any polarity), people who lean one way or the other. Or perhaps those who value continuity and tradition and those who are focused on change and innovation.

In the Land of And, each pole can have an upside and a downside. When we are compulsively with one pole, we tend to be suspicious of its interdependent pole, judgmental and only focusing on the downside of that interdependent pole. If you are preferring action, you might be suspicious of those who talk about prayer or meditation or mysticism: Pie in the sky, all talk no action, not realistic, hypocrites.

Breaking through this polarization involves trying to see the other pole’s upside and your own preferred pole’s downside. So, let’s say we guarantee that the action pole will be served, what could one gain by also serving contemplation? Energy, inspiration, insight for wiser action, care for the self and inner life, integrity of spirit when engaging action, etc.

Reverse it. If you prefer the inner life, the contemplative life of Spirit, you may have been suspicious of those always in action. What are your concerns? Burn out, reactivity, not strategic, peace marchers who not peaceful, etc. But what could be the gain in adding action to one’s contemplation? Integrity of doing what you say in prayer, new learning from engagement in action, connection to others in action, grounding in the tangible world, tangible world improvements.

It’s worth remembering that both King and Gandhi, known for their actions to make tangible changes, considered their movements spiritual movements that were fueled by prayers of song and speech. Gandhi once said, “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”

If we are to see the possibility and then miraculously deliver such abundance as to satisfy the hunger of body and soul of the 5000 as Jesus did, we will have to imitate Jesus in the cycle and the integration of action AND contemplation. We too will have to journey to the Land of And.

Let us hold this prayer as we approach God’s Table of bread AND cup. AMEN