2 Samuel ; Mark
July 19, 2009
My friends and I have a joke: We say that as pastors, part of our hope for people is that they find balance in their lives. We wish this for everyone – well, except our real estate agent and doctor. We want them to be on call 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Of course, it really isn’t a joke. It is exactly that kind of sentiment that puts pressure on all of us to feel ultra responsible; it creates a culture of expectation none of us can live up to. But, as we all know, we sure do try.
We are, in general, a rest-less people. And we rest less and less every day. To give just one example, I read this week that real wages have remained stagnant for 20 years while corporate profits have exploded and the concentration of wealth has increased. This is what creates the rat race we talk about. We feel like we need to work harder and longer just to stay in the same place. And this way of life is so imbedded in our society, it seems normal for us. We can’t really imagine it any other way.
Today, the words of Jesus come and speak to us in the midst of that culture of expectation: “Come and rest yourselves,” he says. And I have to admit, he probably even means to include my real estate agent and doctor.
In these simple words Jesus speaks to the disciples, he touches on something that hits a nerve for most of us. Our lives are permeated with the belief that the busier we are, the more we are worth. And that’s the nerve Jesus touches. Jesus’ words to the disciples cut to the quick of our lives and our identities. He challenges the pace of our lives, and our belief that the world needs us so much we can’t slow down even for a moment. At first, his words feel cozy – come and rest for a while. But in truth, this is a harsh wake up call to our rest-less world today.
There are two kinds of rest Jesus offers in this passage that apply to two different groups of people. The first is the lack of rest he sees in the people who are crowding him and the disciples wherever they go. These are people who are in need of healing. They are frantically following the disciples and Jesus at the mere possibility that the ailment that has besieged them for so long might be healed. They are desperate, and so they are chasing after Jesus, as if he is an aberration that will disappear at any moment. We have probably all been there in some way at some time, whether with physical ailments or non-physical ones. In the end, for those experiencing this day in, day out, life draining lack of rest, Jesus has great compassion and provides them rest through healing.
The disciples, on the other had, are suffering from a different kind of restlessness. And we all can certainly relate to this as well. Jesus knows that this massive demand for healing by the crowds could easily tempt the disciples into a lifetime devoid of rest. This restlessness is what so many of us deal with and face every day. And Jesus’ response to the disciples is different than how he responds to the crowds. He simply tells them, “go rest”. And in contrast to what must have been such welcome rest to those in need of healing, I truly believe the disciples did not find this idea of rest an easy one to accept.
Here’s the scene: Prior to this encounter with Jesus, the disciples are out doing exactly as Jesus told them to: They are ministering to the lost, the wounded, the sick, the poor. And they have been successful. Mark tells us at the beginning of this same chapter that they “cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” That must have been so cool. They meet this guy Jesus, and all of a sudden then can do things they never thought were possible. They can help people in ways that really do make a difference.
And now they are back with Jesus, and the gospel tells us, “they gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught.” I am sure this “telling” looked nothing like orderly reports we give at meetings. I think it went something like this…One disciples says, “There was this man who was sick and I was able to heal him, and then…” Another disciple breaks in and says, “yeah, and when I talked about the good news you shared with us, people listened and were…” and yet another, “but listen to me, listen to what I did; I worked with a neighborhood to put together their resources and help out this guy who just couldn’t work.” 12 men bursting with excitement, wanting to share it with Jesus. I think it was a pretty restless scene.
They were intoxicated by their success and frantically anxious to do more: because surely more of a good thing is even better. Think of how many people they could cure if they worked 12 hours a day and only slept a few hours at night. The less they worked, the disciples probably thought, the less people they could help. And look at the crowds – they just keep getting bigger. The more they heal the more word gets around and so the number of people coming to them grows – which just increases the need to heal even more, even faster. And Jesus breaks into this frantic mood of the disciples and says, “rest”. I suspect the disciples said exactly what we would say; “That doesn’t make any sense.”
We can all relate to the need to keep on working at the fast pace, producing more, learning more, doing more. Because no matter what it is that we are doing, the more we do it, the greater the results. We are so used to this, it has just become how we live our lives – how we do our jobs, how we parent, how we vacation, and of course even how we minister to this world. More is good. More is better. More is best. More of a good thing can only be a good thing.
The disciples have been working – hard. And they were doing really good, important work. And of course in telling them to rest, Jesus is not telling them to stop and take a week’s vacation in the Caribbean while people all around them suffer. He wants them to stop and worship, pray, support each other, listen to Jesus to find out what’s next.
Obviously we are called to work as disciples as well. We go out from this place each week called to heal people in body, mind and spirit. We go out to serve the poor and break down barriers and resist the consumer culture, and on and on. It does require hard work. That just part of what it means to be people of faith. Yet we are called to rest, even from this good work – just as the disciples were.
Jesus knows that the rhythm of our lives must include this time regularly to disconnect from the pace of the world and reconnect to God. This is why Jesus has the disciples take so many boat rides in the Gospel of Mark. And when you look at the pattern of trips they take across the sea, it makes no sense in terms of efficient travel. In this passage we see why. The disciples just need to rest sometimes and the boat ride gives them this chance.
And this is one way that we follow Jesus’ command to rest – this right here, right now. Our call to worship every week is a call to shift our attention from those things that keep us busy and tired and focused and distracted. “Come away with me to a quiet place,” we heard in our call to worship this morning. The words of Jesus echoing through the centuries call us to stop, take a breath, reconnect with him, rest – what we religious folks call Sabbath.
Our God did not suggest that we rest. It is one of the ten commandments. And it’s not just God giving us permission to take a break from time to time. Rather we are to take the commandment to keep the Sabbath as seriously as the commandment to not kill.
Which leaves us with a fairly important question: What is this rest? What is Sabbath? I don’t think that is an obvious thing in our society. Our rhythm is work-work-work, and then collapse from exhaustion, completely checking out from the world around us. Then we call that collapse “Sabbath”. Watching TV, going on vacation, collapsing in to bed, falling asleep before your head hits the pillow. It all feels like rest, so why is it different from what Jesus tells his disciples to do? Because Sabbath, while removing us from the world, does not mean we are to “check out” from everything.
We are fortunate to have sages in our midst that remind us of what this Sabbath might be. Henri Nouwen was a priest and author who wrote a lot of books on the spiritual life. He also kept a journal on and off over his life, and one time in his journal he was lamenting how bad we are in the United States at “resting”. He writes: “Oh how important is community, prayer, silence, caring presence, simple living, adoration, and deep, lasting faithful friendship.” That is his understanding of Sabbath. Connecting with those spiritual disciplines that get lost in this busy world. This Sabbath is active – it’s just not busy. It is just not imprisoned to the idols of our world. It’s about freedom from the idols of the world and deep human connection. It’s about prayer and connection with the Divine.
Quite the opposite of collapsing, this Sabbath requires us to work in a different way. This work, to be frank, is much more difficult for most of us than our daily…weekly..work in the frantic world. Prayer, silence, simple living; many of us don’t even know where to start to be able to rest in these ways.
The story from 2 Samuel this morning seems an unlikely partner with this passage from Mark. It is about whether or not, now that David rules over a united Israelite kingdom, to build the temple – which was to be the permanent home of God. David says yes. And David’s trusted prophet thinks his plan is great. But as we read on, we know it is not God’s plan.
Here’s the important part – here’s where our stories connect; David changed his mind because he heard God’s word telling him he was off course. And listening for God requires some time away from the demands and voices that fill our every day lives. After the frantic life that the Israelites lived ever since leaving Egypt – a life of wandering and battles and famines and death – God tells David to take a breath before forging ahead with the next thing. “When the king was settled in his house,” our passage begins, “Yahweh had given him rest from all his enemies…” God gave him rest.
It’s only because of that breath that David takes that he was able to hear God and abandon his own plan in favor of God’s. This story shows us the cost of not accepting the rest God allows for and even commands. We are a rest-less world and the cost is our connection to God and creation. Is there any greater cost?
Most of us, I would venture to say, are not great Sabbath keepers. With the exception of coming to worship every week, a full day of “Sabbath” is not a part of our weekly cycle. And if we’re honest we realize that because of the realities of church, there are some each week who are even busy during worship…making coffee, readying the kitchen for third Sunday potluck, making sure everything goes smoothly with the sound and the lights and the music. Sabbath is just plain hard. It doesn’t mesh with the daily realities of our lives.
But here’s the thing: Without the rhythm of Sabbath we can’t help but lose our ability to listen for God. We can’t help but believe that whatever standard of living we have reached, we have to do more just to maintain it. We can’t help but build our identity and measure our worth in terms of how busy we are. We can’t help but stay imprisoned by the needs for money, power, prestige, worth – because we never really rest from those things in order to realize there is another way. And without Sabbath in our lives, I truly believe we can’t help but grow to believe that the world depends on us so much that resting would be letting others down. Not to mention that when we move from one thing to the next, running frantically in place in the hopes that we are moving forward, we stress our bodies, our spirits, our environment and the world. We leave absolutely no space for connecting with God, even when we are doing what we believe God wants.
I want to end with one other sage: Rabbi Abraham Heschel. In writing about the Sabbath, he says, “To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, [a day free] of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow human beings and the forces of nature – is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for humanity than the Sabbath?” Amen.
