REST

 

Exodus 20:8–11

Let’s take a moment to try something. Think about the last 24 hours of your life. And make a list of three people who were a part of it – in big or small ways. They might even be strangers, whose names you don’t know. Then list three things that you engaged with – things you made, washed, ate, threw away, something you did something with.

Now list three choices that you said yes or no to. Can you see how in each of these things, people, actions you listed you were entering into God’s creative field? How does it feel to think of yourself and your daily life in this way?

The creative process that we have been talking about these past six weeks is really just the natural flow of our lives. When you analyze it, you could break it down into six stages. But we do better to imagine them as waves in a cycle, a cycle that continually plays out – the cycle of God’s creativity.

We began with the dream. Every creation begins with a dream – before the work begins we have to dream up what we want to create. The dream of some possibility that doesn’t already exist. Our ability to dream is essential for us to be able to envision God’s kingdom and then begin the work of bringing it to fruition.

Next is the hovering. God hovered over the waters at the very beginning, and each day God brought some more order to the universe. We too must practice hovering, which I think closely aligns with the incubation stage of creativity. The process of creating is a combination of making something happen and letting something happen, so sometimes we step out of the way and let it happen.

And then, at the right time, we step forward and take a risk, we try something new, not knowing how it will turn out. But if we don’t try it we will never find out.

Then we step back again. We listen. We watch. We pay attention to what happens with the new thing we put into the world. We pay attention to what might be the next step, the next right thing to do.

And then we re-integrate. Everything new must find its place in the world. The old must make way for the new. Every time something changes everything changes. This world is in a constant state of creation.

Constant! And it could be thoroughly exhausting – if we did not include rest.

Rest was an essential part of God’s creation of the world. On the seventh day God rested from all the work that God had done. God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, according to the story of creation in Genesis. And so from this we derive the laws regarding the sabbath day.

We have this text from Exodus, which clearly states that the seventh day, the sabbath day, is for rest, not work. And the law then proceeds to delineate everything that cannot be done on the sabbath day, everything that counts as work.

It can seem to verge on extreme. I thought so when I was in college and shared a dorm suite with a Jewish student. She asked me to leave the bathroom light on from Friday evening through Saturday evening because she was not permitted to turn a light switch. This was considered operating machinery, work, which is forbidden. If I forgot and turned the switch off, she explained to me, she would have to use the bathroom in the dark. To be helpful, she would leave a little note on the switch each week, in case I forgot.

It seemed a little bit silly to me. Although I have come to understand since then that the sabbath restrictions are a way of articulating a rhythm, the rhythm of God’s creation which includes rest. I have grown to appreciate the rhythms of daily life under the law for Jews who live lives of observance.

Still, I think it might feel suffocating at times. Because I think that Jesus felt that. Mark’s gospel tells a story of a time Jesus and his disciples were walking through fields of grain, and as they walked they plucked off some heads of grain. It was the sabbath day. The Pharisees watching them charged them with breaking the law. Plucking grain was forbidden because it was work. But Jesus turns to them and reinterprets the law. He says, “The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath.” In other words, God does not intend for us to be slaves to the sabbath.

Jesus did all kinds of unlawful things on the sabbath day, like healing people of their afflictions. As he did with so many aspects of the law, Jesus challenged the traditional understanding of it.

Not to say that Jesus was opposed to rest, however. For he also said, “Come to me all you who are weary and 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” (Matthew 11:28-29).

Eugene Peterson, in his translation of the scriptures called The Message, says it this way: Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.

Jesus moves our understanding of sabbath away from a rigid form we force ourselves into, toward a delicate, gentle, rhythm of finding grace.

Perhaps I am treading into a minefield when I say this, but I wonder if we let church become a form we force ourselves into, rather than allowing it to be a gentle rhythm of God’s grace.

I say this out of love for the church and concern for the church’s life. Because too many people have walked away from the church because it felt like this to them – rigid, joyless, something that just didn’t fit. Something lacking that gentle rhythm of grace.

If we allow the church to become just work, we have lost our place in the rhythm of God’s creativity. To the extent that we shut out dreaming, we lose our rhythm. To the extent we shut out play, to the extent we shut out rest, we lose our rhythm – the unforced rhythm of God’s grace.

We give it up for the sake of the artificial rhythms of religion.

We need the holy, creative, playful, loving Spirit now more than ever.

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash