July 21, 2024
William G. Carter
The
apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and
taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves
and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even
to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by
themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried
there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went
ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were
like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
I don’t know of a more inviting invitation: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” Jesus 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. His invitation is for all us. Everybody come, come and rest.
What intrigues me is why so many
people turn him down. Have you ever noticed that?
Some of us resist because of how we
have been shaped. I think of my father who always put in a long day’s work. He
was raised on a farm and filled all his spare time with activity. 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. Every day was long and there was precious little rest.
There are 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 dawn at the teenage Bible
camp:
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.[2]
This is a compelling lesson from
nature. In case you don’t know what a “sluggard” is, the New Revised Standard
translates the word as “lazybones.” Go 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.
Yet the Bible also issues 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.” We
don’t need a dictionary to tell us that. We know what rest is. The problem is we
don’t do it very well.
As Jesus suggests, this is a matter
of the soul. Elsewhere, he says, “Come to me, and I will give you rest for
your souls.” The soul is the part of us that’s alive. It is the
intersection of thought, feeling, and breath. It is 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 also the part of us
that can be traumatized, anxious, and fearful. When a soul is wounded, one
typical response 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 on 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, a terrible, aching void
with nothing to fill it... 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.[3]
He is right about that. At
restaurants or over kitchen tables, some folks would rather stay attached to
their smart phones than have an intelligent conversation. Or go the shore to breathe
some fresh, ocean air. Then you notice the people at the next umbrella check in
with the office from their laptops.
Most of us do this. One summer, I
spent a week in a remote monastery, fifteen miles from the highway,
seventy-five miles from nowhere. I was furious that I couldn't get a cell phone
signal. Not even if I stood on a rock with one arm extended as an antenna.
Why do we resist the rest that
restores our souls? I can tell you it's easier to preach on Sabbath than to
observe it. Perhaps the fuzzy nature of our lives is addictive. To hear some folks
talk, they have resigned themselves to the weariness and befriended the heavy
burdens.
Yet the invitation or Jesus
persists. "Come away and rest." Not come to church. Not come to
another meeting. Not one more spiritual exercise to check on the to-do list.
Not one more thing before gulping down another late meal. "Come away,"
he says, which by implication is a “come away with me.” It is gentle, far gentler
than we are willing to be with ourselves.
I think, at heart, this is an
invitation to grace. We come away with Jesus by hearing him say that every one
of us has inestimable value. We come by chewing on his promise that we “do not
live by bread alone;” he speaks the life-giving words that come from God. We
come by paying attention to the birds of the air, noticing how they are cared
for by an Unseen Benevolence. We come by admiring the wildflowers that shimmer
with beauty we did not plant.
Life is all about grace, the
invisible goodness and favor which creates and surrounds all life. If all we
know is weariness and burden, then it is time to pause, to step out of the
fray, and explore the truth that everything is a gift, a generous gift. We can
do this any time during a day.
A friend who is a spiritual director
keeps a votive candle and a couple of matches in his desk. A few times during
the day, he physically pushes back from his desk and creates his portable
monastery. After chewing on a few verses from a psalm, he sits in silence,
takes a breath, and starts up again. "More often than not," he
confesses, "I am strangely refreshed."
We know all of this; but blessed are
those who do it. And blessed are you for carving out the time to spend an hour
in worship. I do not take that for granted. This is a pause within the week to welcome
the grace of Christ who does not expect you to produce anything for this hour.
He invited you to lean back into the eternal arms.
Wendell
Berry, the Kentucky poet farmer, is a keen observer of grace. For forty-five
years, he has taken a Sunday walk, sat beneath a big Sabbath tree, and written
short verses on some of these themes. In the preface of his last collection of
poems, he wrote:
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 tha any work we have ever done or will ever do. It is more complex and beautiful than we will ever understand.[4]
What he has discovered is that the world doesn’t revolve around him, any more than it rotates around you or me. His invitation is to choose the better portion, to orbit around the One who makes all of it, to return to the One who fills all things with abundant life.
“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, my wife 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 nail gun. Meanwhile I sit in my red 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 is 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. This is 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.
That’s why we keep coming into this place for worship. 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.
______________________________________________
[1] Proverbs 16:23, The Living Bible
[2] Proverbs 6:6-11, Revised Standard Version
[3] Wayne Muller, Sabbath (New York: Bantam, 1999) 51-52
[4] Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2013), introduction.
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