Matthew
11:28-30
July
2, 2017
William G. Carter
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy
burdens, and I will give you rest. Take
my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and
you will find rest for your souls. For
my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
I don’t know of a more inviting invitation. “Come
to me and I will give you rest.” He speaks to the woman who cannot sleep, to
the child who is anxious, and to the man is bone-tired. Come . . . rest. The
invitation is gentle, not forceful. He speaks from a level place, a humble
place. And his invitation includes all: “all you,” or as they say in the South,
“you all.” There’s not a single person excluded. Everybody come, come and rest.
What intrigues me is why so many people turn
him down. Have you ever noticed that?
As a kid, I learned from my father. He knew how
to put in a long day’s work. At his desk by eight every morning, home for
supper by six, then he would change his clothes and go outside for a few more
hours of labor. Dad came from a family of farmers. They didn’t sit very much,
unless Grandpa was riding the red tractor in his straw hat and a strand of timothy
grass in his teeth. Even then, the days were long and there was precious little
rest.
When we would visit those grandparents, we’d
leave at the end of an IBM workday. Mom would have the kids bundled up and
ready go. Dad would roar up the street, run in and change his clothes, and off
we’d go, six hours in the car, along endless Route 6. Next morning, he would
wake early on his parents’ farm, slug down some coffee, and ask if there was
anything he could do to help. He didn’t rest when he went on vacation.
I know a lot of people like that. They can
quote the Bible: “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” says one version of a
verse from the book of Proverbs.[1]
Or there is that section that somebody read to us at the teenage Bible camp:
Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be
wise.
Without having any chief, officer or ruler, she prepares her food in summer,
and gathers her sustenance in harvest.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond, and want like an armed man. (Proverbs 6:6-11, RSV)
Without having any chief, officer or ruler, she prepares her food in summer,
and gathers her sustenance in harvest.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond, and want like an armed man. (Proverbs 6:6-11, RSV)
It’s a compelling lesson from nature. And in case
you don’t know what a “sluggard” is, the New Revised Standard translates the
word as “lazybones.” Go to the hard working ant, O lazybones, and learn your
lesson. Work hard. Don’t ever sit still. The Calvinists didn’t invent a hard
work ethic. They found it in their Bibles.
But there’s also the invitation to rest.
According to the Greek dictionary, to rest is “to cease from movement or labor
in order to recover and collect (one’s) strength.” Now, we don’t need a
dictionary to tell us that. We already know what rest is. It’s just that we don’t
do it very well.
And do you know why that is? As Jesus suggests,
it’s a matter of the soul. “Come to me,” he says, “and I will give you rest for
your souls.” The soul is the part of us that’s alive. It’s the intersection of
thought, feeling, and breath. It’s the gift breathed into us by God’s Spirit
that makes us human. The soul is the wellspring of our dreams, the anchor for
our imagination, the seat of all passion and hope.
And the soul is the part of us that can be traumatized,
anxious, and fearful. When the soul is wounded, one of the typical responses is
to keep pushing on, persisting through, often in the vain hope that if we just
add another inch to the span of our day, we will speed by or gloss over the
deep wound that we are trying to avoid.
That’s what Wayne Muller identified as he
reflected the practice of keeping Sabbath – and why so many people resist it.
He writes:
This
is one of our fears of quiet; if we stop and listen, we will hear this
emptiness. If we worry we are not good or whole inside, we will be reluctant to
stop and rest, afraid we will find a lurking emptiness terrible, aching void
with nothing to fill it, as if it will corrode an destroy us like some
horrible, insatiable monster. If we are terrified of what we will find in rest,
we will refuse to look up from our work, refuse to stop loving. We quickly fill
all the blanks on our calendar with tasks, accomplishments, errands, things to
be done . . . anything to fill the time, the empty space.[2]
He’s right about that. Go to a restaurant
and watch the people around you. Some of them would rather stay attached to their
smart phones than have an intelligent conversation. Go the shore to get away
from it all, and when you realize that others had the same idea, take note of
how many of them are staying tethered to email and internet.
It is simply the next extension of what
I discovered about two weeks after I bought my first laptop computer some
twenty-five years ago: because we can do work anywhere, we never stop working,
especially if the work is mental, or emotional, or virtual, or expected of us.
Let me tell you it was interesting to spend four days last week in a place in
the New Mexico desert where there was little internet service, and you only got
cell phone service if you stood on a table with your left arm in the air as an antenna.
Don’t ask how I discovered about the cell phone service.
So what is the rest that restores
our souls? That is the invitation of Jesus Christ. We find it by “coming to
him.” And what is that? Coming to a
church? No, we come to him. If you merely come to church, it will exhaust you.
But we can’t see him. How do we come to him? I think we come by
paying attention to his grace. We come by listening to Jesus say that every one
of us has inestimable value. We come by chewing on his promise that we “do not
live by bread alone,” but by the life-giving words that come from the mouth of
God. We come by observing the birds of the air and how they are cared for by an
Unseen Benevolence. We come by admiring the wildflowers which bring beauty to life’s
path and we did not plant them.
It’s all about grace, the invisible goodness
and favor which give us our lives in the first place. If we’re convinced that life
is only weariness and burden, then we’re missing how everything is really a gift,
a generous gift. If we are obsessed with the latest stupid stunt of some public
figure, then we’re missing what a wonderful blessing it is to be together, to
pursue the dreams we have in common, to work for the benefit of all of us.
Maybe the saddest addiction of all is
to be consumed only with myself – my views, my fears, my worries, my hurts, my anger,
my wounds. I don’t know if there is a heavier burden than that. There is only
one way to have that burden lifted from our shoulders. It is to come to Christ,
who alone is saving the world as an expression of the goodness and grace of
God. We really do have to give up the burden of being addicted to ourselves.
I
recently picked up the latest collection of Sabbath poems by Wendell Berry, the
Kentucky farmer. For forty years, he has spent Sundays resting, going for a
walk, and writing short poems on Sabbath themes. He pays attention to the world
that thrives even on his Sabbath day off. In the book’s preface he writes these
words:
We are to rest on the Sabbath in order
to understand that the providence or the productivity of the living world, the
most essential work, continues while we rest. This work is entirely independent
of our work, and is far more complex and wonderful than any work we have ever
done or will ever do. It is more complex and beautiful than we will ever
understand.[3]
The
world doesn’t revolve around us. Maybe it’s better for us to orbit around the
One who made it all, the One who fills it with life and brings it to such
abundance.
“Come
to me . . . and I will give you rest.” That’s why the invitation persists. We
don’t rest once and then think we’re done with it. Neither do we sit on our
hands while others labor to benefit us. A full life is a rhythm of work and
rest, of task and reflection. And if life is out of balance, if the rhythm is
limping, the invitation is to come. To keep coming. To persist in coming to the
grace of Jesus Christ.
At
its heart, this kind of rest is about one thing: what will fill me with God’s
abundant life? What will restore my soul?
What are the practices that create a song in my heart? What is it, for
you, that brings you totally alive? That’s the kind of rest we’re talking
about.
Every
one of us has an answer unique based on who they are, how they are growing, and
how they are wondrously made. In my house, one of us picks up yarn and needles,
and imagines a hat for a premature infant; although these days, she is just as
likely to design and create a kitchen table or a backyard deck. (It is an
awesome thing to be married to a woman with a nailgun.) Meanwhile I sit in my
blue chair, juggling metaphors or scratching out a new jazz melody. All of us
are wired differently.
The
lady up the street has an enormous flower garden; tending it is what gives her
life. Or there’s the man who persists in welcoming cast-off puppies; they keep
him company and he returns the favor.
For
some people, it’s running marathons (which I can’t understand) or singing difficult
songs (which I do). For other people, it’s providing a happy table, where joy
is the main course.
For
some people, it’s the solitary work of quiet prayer for the needs of the world.
For others, it’s translating those prayers into acts of mercy and justice. It
gives life to them and to others.
This
is what it means to come to Christ in restorative rest. In the grace of God, we
find what gives us life and we pursue it. And we keep pursuing it, not for the
sake of indulgence, but in the pursuit of a greater integration and health. It’s
a different kind of yoke to be placed upon our shoulders. We give up all the
other slaveries and take on the disciplines that heal our souls.
And
that’s why we keep coming into this place and gathering at this Table. For this
is where we hear once again how much we are loved, how deeply we are saved, and
how greatly the world is kept in hands far more gracious and just than our own.
May
you have a blessed Sabbath, again and again.
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