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Ritual
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Because knowing that you are valued for your contribution, this is one of the most deeply satisfying emotions that we can have as human beings. But feeling like we are valued only for our next contribution, This is one of the most dehumanizing experiences we can suffer through. Welcome to the commons cast. We are glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. My name is Jeremy. And if we haven't met yet, I'm part of the team here at Commons, and we are in the midst of a series about rituals, particularly in our rituals of work and rest and play. Before that, though, a couple things here. Last week was Father's Day, and I could not in good conscience move forward celebrating fathers without also lamenting those families that had been separated in our world.
Speaker 1:Whether that is by misguided politics or wars or injustice wherever it emerges, This week, we have celebrated National Indigenous Peoples Day and World Refugee Day. And while we want to lean into the contributions and the beauty of First Nations and our participation with refugees here in the city, we also cannot look south of the border with contempt if we are unwilling to look critically at our own history here and even our own present in Canada. Because let's be honest, we have separated children from their parents. And we have treated some humans as less than others. Today, we worship on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, and we too have much to make up for as we work toward reconciliation.
Speaker 1:And so today, we acknowledge ourselves and indigenous neighbors and migrants searching for safety and families internally displaced and refugees seeking to build new lives here among us as equally shaped in the image of God and worthy of our deepest respect. May the creator God reshape each of us in the divine image of love. Now, last week, I started a new series talking about work. Today, I wanna talk about rest, and then next week, we will talk together about play. But quickly here, let's look back at last week before we jump in today.
Speaker 1:Because last week was all about work. And one of these topics, work, is that we sometimes have mixed and deep feelings about. Some of us really like our work. Some of us dread going to work. For some of us, work is just simply what we do until we can get back to what we really want to spend our time and our energy doing.
Speaker 1:And all of that is fine. The simple fact is that we live in a social construct where we need to work in order to survive. And we don't all have the luxury of getting paid to do the thing we will felt like we were meant to do. Your work is not the totality of who you are, and so it should not be able to say everything about who you are. That's where rest and play come into the equation, and we'll talk about those.
Speaker 1:And yet, there is an imagination in the scriptures that work is holy. Even if it's not fun. Even if it's not where you ultimately want to be, your work and your contribution to the world around you. It says something. It is somehow an image or a parable of God's presence in the world.
Speaker 1:You see, our story is that God creates creative beings that were meant to participate in the ongoing creation of the world. That's Genesis. And so part of what I talked about last week was the work that it sometimes takes to perhaps uncover the ways in which our work teaches us something about God. And whether we tell stories about Jesus for a living or we teach kids or we engineer roads or we can cut and pile spreadsheets, there is, in the words of John Ben Slotin, a parable to be uncovered in our work. Some image of God's redeeming, creating, sustaining, healing, compassionate, revealing presence in the world around us.
Speaker 1:So a few weeks ago, we had a new movable wall installed here at the church, and we have a gym that we use as an overflow for every service. But we also use that during the week for sports and different events, and the divider needed to be replaced. And so there was a crew working in here for a couple weeks. But as it got closer to completion, there was only just one guy left who was finishing up the drywall and making it all look nice again for us. And so he was working by himself for a couple days.
Speaker 1:The staff would come and go throughout the day and say hi, but at one point I went down to speak with him and ask how things were going and we chatted for a bit. I asked if he wanted it in espresso and he said no. But then I was about to walk away and he paused and he said, I have a question for you though. You see, apparently, earlier that day, a wasp had found its way into the building and it was buzzing around near him while he was working up on the scaffolding. And he tried to ignore it, but it would not relent and so he had tried to catch it so he could release it outside, but he had accidentally killed it in the process of trying to get it into one of his pails.
Speaker 1:And he was somewhat concerned that this was not going to be okay in a place of worship. Now I assured him that this was all fine. Bees, of course, we do everything that we can to look after and protect, but wasps are inherently evil, part of the fall, therefore fair game wherever they are. But that opened up a conversation, and we talked about his experience of spirituality and religion and our particular expression of Christianity here at Commons. And yet what struck me about this random interaction with a subcontractor finishing drywall in our dream was the myriad of ways in which a simple generosity and concern and extension of one's work out beyond oneself could turn something like that into a holy encounter.
Speaker 1:And if we are willing to work at it, my conviction is that each of us can find such moments in our work as well. Now last week, I said that work is holy, but work on its own is hell. And so today, we need to talk about rest and Sabbath and break and space to breathe in our lives, and why this is just as equally important for all of us. But first, let's pray. God of real rest, who breathes out creation, and then slowly, lovingly relaxes to inhale the good of it all.
Speaker 1:Might you invite us and show us. Might you guide us into what it means to rest well. Where we have worked hard and enjoyed the fruit of our labor. May you bring peace to us and allow us to rest well. May we come to see the beauty of what amounts to nothing.
Speaker 1:What cannot be measured or assigned a value, but simply what is there to be enjoyed. Might we realize that just as important as our contribution to your world is, our ability to breathe in and fill our lungs with goodness, to simply rest in the beauty of what is, this too is part of our worship. Where we have at times derived our value through what we make. Might we know that we are loved regardless. And where we have at times perhaps assigned significance to others based on what they contribute, might we see the beauty inherent in them.
Speaker 1:And in this might we come to know ourselves and you with more depth and clarity through stillness and rest. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Alright. Let's talk about rest.
Speaker 1:Because as soon as I bring that up in the context of a sermon, probably if you've been around church before, one of the first things that comes to mind is Sabbath. And Sabbath was the ancient Hebrew practice of resting on the seventh day. Last week, I read from Genesis. And if we return to Genesis, this time the start of chapter two, we read that thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. And by the seventh day, God had finished the work God had been doing.
Speaker 1:And so on the seventh day, God rested from all work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, God rested from all the work of creating that God had been doing. So right from the start, we have this biblical imagination of God at work and now God at rest. And that's really interesting to me. That God leans in and God leans back.
Speaker 1:That God is not static or one note. That God somehow has rituals and rhythms, patterns that God enjoys. And then there's this line that God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it God rested. And that's fascinating because the word because is this little word key in Hebrew, and often what that simply means is when. And so this could just as easily be translated as God blessed the seventh day and made it holy when God rested.
Speaker 1:And I like that idea that it was the simple act of resting that somehow made this day holy. And that kinda works because the word holy is the word kodesh in Hebrew, and that word simply means to set apart or to make different. And so maybe it simply was the fact that God did something different that day that made it holy. Except that that means that rest is somehow holy in its relationship to work, and that maybe work and rest make each other holy, and that maybe neither has much meaning on its own, and maybe that's the whole point of the story. You ever found yourself where one feels like it gets in the way of the other?
Speaker 1:Maybe either you work so hard that rest seems like a distraction to you. That's where I live, like, 95% of my life. I have this very deep and profound sense that my work is part of my worship of my creator, and it's beautiful. It's what drives me. It's what gets me up in the morning.
Speaker 1:But the problem is sometimes if I'm not at work I'm not contributing, if I'm not making and creating, then it's really hard for me to feel connected to the divine. Maybe for you, it's the opposite. You feel like Sunday is holy, and this feels like worship. And to gather and to sing and to listen and to take in and talk about God, it renews and deepens something inside of you. It's good and it's holy, but Monday.
Speaker 1:That feels like diving back in below the water and holding your breath until you can come back up again in seven days. The thing is neither of those seem to image this holiness indifference that work and rest seem to play off in Genesis. And so right from the start of the story, we have this dynamic dependent relationship between work and rest That provide meaning and context for each other and that are somehow deeply embedded in the very nature and actions of God. Work is holy because the universe works. And rest is holy because the universe rests, and we are created in the image of this working, resting, holy God who shapes all things.
Speaker 1:So that's how the story starts. It's where the idea of Sabbath originates from. But let's skip ahead now to see how things develop. As in Leviticus 23, we read that there are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of Sabbath rest. A day of sacred assembly.
Speaker 1:You are not to do any work on that day wherever you live. It is a Sabbath to the Lord. Now, we did an extended series in Leviticus for a few months, about a year and a half ago. You can find that on our podcast or on our YouTube channel if you're interested in Leviticus. But a few things here have happened in the time since Genesis.
Speaker 1:At first, the stories that we read in Genesis and Exodus are now being codified into laws in Leviticus. So Genesis and Exodus, as you read them, they tend to tell their tales with out much exposition. They don't really explain why. They don't add a lot of meaning. They just kinda tell you what happened, and they invite you to pull out the why.
Speaker 1:And it's actually one of the really compelling parts about reading Hebrew narratives. It's learning to read between the lines. We did this a lot in the fall when we worked our way through the story of Jacob together. But notice a couple things here. As the story is being turned into rules, it says, there are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of rest.
Speaker 1:A sacred assembly, you must not work wherever you live on this Sabbath day. So in Genesis, it was a day has been made holy simply because God rests. Now it's we're gonna need to put some rules in place to remind us to take a rest. And that kinda seems like how it goes. Right?
Speaker 1:We start with a good thing and we find a good balance and then slowly we drift. But one of the interesting things here is that it seems that we tend to drift toward the things that we can measure. Now one of the things I think about a lot when it comes to commons is that we will inevitably become what we measure. If we count who comes in the door, we'll likely get more people coming, but we also will become the pursuit of more people. And if we measure dollars, we might get more money, but we risk becoming the pursuit of more resources.
Speaker 1:And neither of those are necessarily bad, but I'm not sure either are what we really want to be. At the same time, of course, we need something to measure. Right? It's what keeps us focused. I came across an article about a grocery store, a chain down in The States that wanted to increase the amount of fresh produce that they were selling.
Speaker 1:Produce is expensive. It goes bad quickly, and, obviously, it would be good. It would be healthy if we ate a lot more vegetables. So the question was, well, how are they gonna do that? And the solution they came up with was very simple.
Speaker 1:They took all of their shopping carts and their baskets, and they painted a little green strip down the center of each carrier, about one third of the surface area, and on that they wrote, put your vegetables here. And that very little simple visual cue to bind remind people to buy vegetables and also with a goal of filling the vegetable area with vegetables actually increased produce sales by more than 50% across the entire chain. Because goals and metrics and and measurables, these are incredibly powerful things in our lives. And whether it's an organization like Commons that needs metrics to keep ourselves improving continually, or whether it's you as an individual or a family who needs some kind of goal in your life to keep you headed where you want to go, all of this is important. But what you choose to measure is a very delicate decision because it will inevitably shape you.
Speaker 1:But here, God says, for six days, you can work and measure and reach and achieve all the goals that you want. That's good. But you must also learn to rest as well. And I like here that God says, you may work, but you must rest. Implying that somewhere inside, God assumes that we all want to be working towards something.
Speaker 1:And I think this is because our work often has more tangible outcomes. And things we can hold on to, things we can see and make and measure and value where rest was always going to be something that was harder for us to make sense of as human beings. And so God says, this one, rest, that's where you're going to need to put some special attention. See, in Genesis, rest is holy because God rests. In Leviticus, rest has become a necessary antidote to our fixation with what we can achieve.
Speaker 1:In fact, God says not only must you rest, but you need to do it together with other people who are resting so that you can all get together and not work at the same time. And maybe part of the point here is that we all need to learn to see each other not being productive if we're ever going to be comfortable not being productive ourselves. But the next question is then, well, what constitutes rest? Because in Genesis, rest starts as a holy invitation. By Leviticus, it becomes a necessary imposition.
Speaker 1:And then throughout the rest of the Old Testament period, it somehow mutates into this exhaustive list of permitted and forbidden actions. Now some of those interpretations are in our bible. Most of them come from something called the Talmud. And this was a collection of Jewish interpretations and teachings that were based on the Hebrew scriptures. And one of the things that's really interesting about archaeology and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that some of these documents that we have found come from a very strict religious Jewish sect.
Speaker 1:And they give us a lot of insight into the precision with which some of these communities delineated the terms work and rest. Ironically, they put an incredible amount of work into defining exactly what rest was supposed to look like. There are actually 39 categories of forbidden activities in Talmud. And then the community that lived at Qumran, which was uncovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls, added to that something called the Damascus document and the community rule, which outlined their very specific interpretations and practices when it came to rest. Now one of the more eccentric interpretations was that these documents forbid walking more than 1,000 cubits beyond the community on Sabbath.
Speaker 1:You can go for a nice walk, but make it short. Now that's nice, but where it gets tricky here is that in the book of Deuteronomy, there are rules about how far a latrine has to be placed away from the community. And in Deuteronomy, it says at least 1,500 cubits, preferably 3,000 cubits. Either way, both of those are beyond the 1,000 cubit boundary that was laid out for Sabbath in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And unfortunately, archaeological digs have uncovered a latrine near Qumran, and it was exactly 1,500 cubits away.
Speaker 1:And that meant that this community had the intestinal fortitude to refuse to, and I'm quoting from the literature here, go to stool on the Sabbath, which does not sound particularly restful to me at all. And so what we have here is this invitation to rest that becomes a command to rest, that becomes an incredible focus of work just to ensure that one fulfills this obligation to rest. As if over time, the desire to measure and quantify, to have a metric to achieve a level of success overrode the intent that was there in rest all along. In other words, we made rest a job. And so it's fascinating to me then that when Jesus comes on the scene and begins to both challenge and deconstruct, but also at the same time reconstruct the biblical imagination of rest, he does this in a way that both challenges the patterns of his day and draws us back to God's intent.
Speaker 1:And so one of the passages I wanna turn to is in Mark two, but it's also found in Matthew 12. And I think this passage is instructive for us particularly because Jesus challenges not just what constitutes work on Sabbath, but that he's really going after the nature of our relationship with rest. Mark two we read that on one Sabbath day Jesus was going through the grain fields. And as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. And the Pharisees said to him, look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?
Speaker 1:So one of the rules was that you could eat on Sabbath, but that you had to do your preparation of food ahead of time so it would be ready for you to eat. And different rabbis had different rules around exactly how much preparation could be done on Sabbath, but the act of harvesting, no matter how slight, that was basically universally off limits. And so this is very clearly breaking the rules. And yet Jesus says, have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abathar, the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat.
Speaker 1:He also gave some to his companions. Now, we're gonna keep reading here in a moment, but a couple things. One, notice here that Jesus doesn't challenge their interpretation of the rules. He doesn't say, look. It's just a couple heads of grain.
Speaker 1:It doesn't count. He doesn't say harvesting a snack isn't work. He says, no. This is work, but have you never read? And that is kind of a cheeky way of throwing it back in their face.
Speaker 1:These are religious scribes. Of course they have read this. Of course they know this story. And of course they know that there are exceptions buried all throughout the Hebrew scriptures. So what's interesting here is that Jesus doesn't challenge their understanding of work.
Speaker 1:He actually agrees with them this is work. Instead, he seems to want to challenge what they think rest means. Because Jesus refers them to a story from first Samuel 21. And there, David and his men are hungry, and they go to the priest. But the priest doesn't have any food to share with them, except the men are really hungry.
Speaker 1:And so the priest goes in, and he brings out this special holy bread that was part of the community's offering and was only ever to be eaten by the priest himself, and he shares it with them. Jesus' point being, sometimes rules need to be broken. But here's the strange little thing. Because if you go and you read this story in first Samuel 21, what you'll find is that it is not Abathar who is the priest in the story. It's instead his father, Ahimelech.
Speaker 1:Now there are a number of different possible explanations for this. It could be that the writer of Mark just gets it wrong. It could be a scribe that copied this at some point in the transmission and mixed up the name. Perhaps most plausibly though is that in a couple places, the writer of Mark will introduce an Old Testament story by saying something like, in the section about this person, this thing happens. Abathar is introduced in chapter 22 right after this story, But he is the main character of the section.
Speaker 1:Much bigger character than his father Ahimelech. So what this could be is something more like in the scroll about Abathar there's a story about David and his men. That actually makes a lot of sense. Remember in Hebrew they didn't have chapter and verse. This is a very normal way of referencing the part of the scroll that you're talking about.
Speaker 1:But I've always wondered if maybe this isn't just an idiosyncrasy of Mark and maybe perhaps Jesus just actually does this on purpose. As if Jesus wants to tell them a story about missing the point and so he intentionally slips in a little mistake just to see if they would dare miss his point and call him out on that. I mean after all, if Jesus is willing to start a conversation with the pharisees by saying, have you not read? I'm not sure I'd put it past him to try to pull something like this. As the Pharisees, perhaps knowing that they're checkmated here and knowing that if they try to call out Jesus on this mistake, they're only gonna make his point for him.
Speaker 1:They choose to ignore it. And Jesus continues, the Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. And so the son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath. This is in its purest form Jesus returning us to the image of rest that God had always intended in the beginning. Rest not as a new task.
Speaker 1:Rest not as a new rule. Rest not as something to measure or manufacture or turn into a metric that you can achieve and check off. But rest simply as the gift that makes our work meaningful in a new way. You see, we may have thought that Sabbath was something that God wanted from us, but it was actually always something God wanted for us. And the secret to it is that rest was never meant to be just a break from your work.
Speaker 1:It was always supposed to be a complementary imagination of your place in the world. You could, in one moment, work hard and contribute and be loved for it, but that then you could also rest and receive and add nothing to the story and be equally loved for that. Because knowing that you are valued for your contribution, this is one of the most deeply satisfying emotions that we can have as human beings. But feeling like we are valued only for our next contribution, this is one of the most dehumanizing experiences we can suffer through. Because rest is not what allows you to go back and do more.
Speaker 1:Rest is what shows you you are loved in a completely different way. This is why Walter Brueggemann writes that the celebration of rest is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives will not be defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. Such an act of resistance requires enormous intentionality and communal reinforcement amid the barrage of seductive pressures from the insatiable insistences of the market with its intrusion into every part of our lives from the family to the national budget. But rest is not only resistance.
Speaker 1:It is also alternative. And the alternative of rest on offer is the awareness and the practice of the claim that we are always only situated on the receiving end of all that is good from God. You see, rest doesn't work when it's mandated. It only works when you want it. And sure, it takes discipline and it takes a community that reinforces our need to slow down at times, but you just simply can't be coerced into the kind of rest that God imagines for you.
Speaker 1:Because rest was never about the absence of work. It was about diving into an alternative imagination for where your value comes from. And when your time is incessantly full, either with work and appointments or with workouts and laptops and TV shows and Netflix and chill and however you think you want to rest, you will still inevitably find yourself multitasked firmly back into the status quo of believing that what you do is what gives you value. But when you rest, not simply as a break, but as a defiant statement that affirms your value in stillness and silence and solitude. This is your act of resistance in a world that desperately wants you to earn your place at the table.
Speaker 1:It's an alternative that returns you to an imagination of rest built in the image of a God who simply enjoys what has already been made. And so my prayer for you this week is that you might rest, not simply by not working, but by choosing consciously to disengage even if for a moment from the narrative that tells you you are worth what you bring to the table so that you can sink into a story that reminds you you are loved for everything you offer, and you are equally loved for everything that you don't. May you breathe out good work this week, And may you breathe in stillness and rest. And may it all be a holy experience shaped in the image of the divine. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, might you help us to rest this week, not simply as an absence from our work and job and career, but as an awareness of how we are loved for everything we can never offer. God, might we play hard and have lots of fun things that we pour our energy and our excitement into, but may there also be moments where we retreat And we disengage from a narrative that tells us we are worth what we contribute. May we come by your spirit to know ourselves in stillness, in silence, in solitude, alone in the presence of love. May we come to know ourselves in new ways through rest. And even if it is only a moment, five minutes of stillness, May that be a holy experience in your presence.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Now we've talked about work and rest. Next week, we need to talk about play and all the things we pour ourselves into with excitement and energy that will never pay us back because that is an important part of our equation as well. But we will end here as we always do with this.
Speaker 1:Love God. Love people. Tell the story.