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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Well, today, we continue our conversation about what makes us as in different members of the pastoral team, but also us, as human beings in general, happy. Scott kicked us off with a beautiful message on how fly fishing makes him happy because it taps into his love for nature and his passion for learning new things. Then Jeremy talked about LEGO and the ongoing work of deconstruction and reconstruction that we are all engaged in as we pursue the life of spiritual formation and faithfulness to the ways of Christ in our lives. And then Jeremy was very clear that he loved Scott's meditation on nature and life, but that he does not particularly like fishing. And I have no choice but to follow that honesty now and say that I do not particularly like Lego.
Speaker 2:And before you get mad at me, hey, I did not grow up with it. I don't know it. I don't get it. But I'm sure, though, that it will find its way into my life over the next few years as my son's lover gets older, and I will probably even love it. You know, I'll give you an update.
Speaker 2:But joke inside, I love how this topic, what makes you happy, connects us with the present, how happiness lurks in the details of our lives, in the growth we experience and commit to, and in the seasons we move through. And some of you might know, I am in a new season of life. I had a baby last year, my first child. He's now a year and a half, which means he is mastering all the tantrum tools while moving nonstop. And this summer, for the first time post pandemic and post math leave, our little family got to go on holiday and spend a week on a lake.
Speaker 2:And during that week, for the first time in many, many months, I had the time to unwind and sit by the water and soak in nature. I even saw a bald eagle catch a fish in a lake and eat it on a tree nearby. But what's more important, I got eight uninterrupted hours of sleep every night. Every night. And on the poetic side of things, that week felt like a gentle awakening to the life, larger life, in and around me.
Speaker 2:And on the practical side, it made me realize that right now, nothing makes me happier than rest. And not just and not just because my body needs it, but also because it makes me a better human to be around. So today, I invite you to join me in a bit of a personal and scriptural exploration of rest. And before we dive in, let us pray. Loving God, creator of beauty, a playful artist, as we continue to reflect on what brings us happiness, make us open and receptive to the lightness of your touch in our lives, to your joy, your curiosity, to the seen and unseen ways you move and play in the world, to all the particular little ways you tell us how much you love us.
Speaker 2:And as we keep seeking to build lives where we are at peace with ourselves, lives of generosity and fulfillment, would you ground us in a profound sense of trust that our happiness and our joy matter to you? And may we be attentive to the gentle leading of your spirit who knows the desires of our hearts. Amen. So today we will be talking about our narratives of rest, sabbath as an alternative story, rest as a territory of delight, and rest as practice. And one of the reasons I wanted to look at rest through a narrative lens is because changing my own narratives about rest is something I've been working on and off throughout my life.
Speaker 2:And we all have those narratives. As storied beings, we never stop interpreting our life events and life experiences and then stringing them into stories that we hold as true about ourselves and our world. And to quote doctor Chenay Sword, it is inevitable that as we live our narratives, our narratives become our way of living. But if we are attentive to the terms in our stories and the moments of insight that we have, we have an opportunity to examine those narratives and even reauthor them. One of the narratives that I had to rewrite for myself was that rest is primarily functional.
Speaker 2:You rest because you finished one one task and need some strength and energy to move to the next. And that was my family narrative. My parents always had physically intense jobs and worked shifts. For as long as I can remember, they were on the four days on and two days off schedule. And the days off were the days when we could do more work, just of a different kind.
Speaker 2:Time off was for the never ending renovations and construction projects and working on two plots of land, which we ran as an urban farm for some additional income. My parents were in their thirties when they lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, when their life, as they knew it, fell apart, and it took them years to rebuild it. So working hard and working a lot is how they operate to this day. And the narrative of rest that I held for the longest time was that apart from special occasions, rest is something you do when all the work is done, which, of course, happens quite rarely. Now in the Judeo Christian tradition, rest is the crowning glory of the creation narrative.
Speaker 2:We read in Genesis chapter two. Thus, the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work God had been doing. So on the seventh day, God rested from all God's work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, God rested from all the work of creating that God had done.
Speaker 2:And there are some fascinating things here. First, in the creation myth of the ancient Near East, some of which came down to us in the ancient Babylonian epics, Anuma Elish and Atrahasis, rest is reserved only for the gods. When the arduous work of creating the world is done, the gods create human beings to assume the drudgery of caring for it, while the gods themselves retreat and rest. In contrast, in Jewish cosmology, rest is not God's escape from the world that God just created and pronounced good. This god is not exasperated with creation, not exhausted from it, but sees it as something to celebrate and bask in.
Speaker 2:And this god does not rest alone. Human beings made in the image of a resting god receive rest as a gift. The verb used here for rest literally means to stop working, and it shares the root with the noun for Sabbath, and we will talk more about Sabbath in a moment. Now second, some ancient manuscripts read that God had finished all the work not by the seventh day, but on the seventh day, which made some ancient rabbis believe that there was actually another act of creation on the seventh day. They said that after six days of creation, there was one thing that the universe still lacked, and it was menucha, which is another spacious Hebrew word for rest.
Speaker 2:Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, what was created on the seventh day? Tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose. To the biblical mind, that rest is the same as happiness and stillness, as peace and harmony. It is the essence of good life. And then finally, if in Genesis one twenty two and one twenty eight, we see God blessing living creatures and human beings, here, the seventh day is blessed.
Speaker 2:And not only blessed, but also pronounced holy. And this is the first time in the bible that the word holy is used. And what is called holy is not an odd object or a living being or a space or a temple. It is time. The very first thing that God declares holy is the time of rest that caps the creation story.
Speaker 2:In the Jewish tradition, rest is not meant to make us more efficient at the work we do. It is an invitation to see our time of rest as a sanctuary where we can be awake and present to the goodness of the created world and to the presence of God with us. After becoming a parent, I have been thinking more about rest and boundaries and narratives, and not only in terms of my own self regulation as I parent, but also in terms of what my child will learn from watching me rest or not rest. What will shape his narrative? Rabbi Heschel says, what we are depends on what the Sabbath is to us.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I'm trying to practice now is resting without guilt. Saturday is my weekly sanctuary in time, and I try to protect and treasure it as much as I can. And maybe you're like me, negotiating your relationship with work and rest or rethinking some of the narratives that no longer serve you or stand in the way of your rest. Or maybe your rest comes with baggage and a little suitcase of mom guilt or dad guilt. Or maybe it comes with a voice whispering about how self indulgent it is to take time for what fills you up instead of doing a, b, or c.
Speaker 2:Or maybe you find it hard to relax given what is going on in the world right now. I sometimes do. And it is good to spend time with those personal narratives of work and rest because they can tell us a lot about who we are. But we also should remember that there are alternative stories. Rest is not only about stopping work to create a personal sanctuary.
Speaker 2:It is an alternative story of liberation and justice and resistance to everything that seeks to diminish and reduce us and our communities. Speaking about the restlessness of our Western society, an Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, believes that some of its roots go back to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The Reformation's categories of faith and works over time shifted to works, taking more space and emphasis, and creating a sense that whatever we do, it is not enough or not good enough for God. And the Enlightenment gave us the ideology of individualism, which provided us with personal freedoms, but also weakened our ties with our communities and traditions, which then contributed to the creation of systems where our future depends only on our own effort. And the greater the effort, the better our chances.
Speaker 2:So now we have a hard time to stop. But this narrative of not doing enough or needing to try harder is not a modern invention. When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, the book of Exodus tells us that for the pharaoh and the labor system he created, no amount of work was ever enough. Pharaoh's restlessness drove the restlessness of his production managers, which meant that there was no rest for Hebrew slaves, only the oppressing and dehumanizing demands of productivity. So when God liberates Israel from slavery and gives them the 10 commandments as a sign of the covenant relationship and the map to creating an alternative way of living in the world, the longest commandment out of 10 is actually about rest.
Speaker 2:The institution of the Sabbath rest with its cycle of stopping all work for twenty four hours every six days was unique to Israel. There was nothing analogous in the ancient world. In Exodus 20, we read, remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days, you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.
Speaker 2:Now to remember the Sabbath day here does not imply a mental act of keeping something in mind. It means to actively observe and to hold as an ongoing priority. And it's interesting that this fourth commandment, to take rest seriously, acts as a bridge between the first three that give Israel the parameters for their life with God and the last six that outline how they should live with each other. Rest is what connects our worship and our neighborliness, our love for God and our love of people, which kind of makes sense because when you take one seventh of your life to slow down and reorient yourself away from striving and accomplishing towards the freedom to just be, the chances of you making idols of your fears and daily preoccupations will be lessened. And when you slow down and enjoy what you have, you are less likely to harm your community by coveting what your neighbor has and acting on those desires.
Speaker 2:Another unique feature of the institution of the Sabbath is that the day of rest was meant to be held communally. It equally belonged to male and female masters and servants, rich and poor, children, animals, hired hands, foreigners who had no rights in the Israel society. Everyone got a break. In Exodus, Sabbath rest is an alternative story that refuses to see life as an endless striving for more and invites us into the economy of neighborliness. If rest is for everyone, who is not resting when I am?
Speaker 2:My husband, Dennis, and I got to experience this kind of rest and care last year when we just had our baby. The first few months were so, so hard for us. No one warned us about that. But then the friends in this community and our small group and my colleagues on the staff team all rallied around us and brought us meals so we could have a bit of a break and get some precious, precious sleep. So one way to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy is to take this wider view on rest as an alternative story, the one that tells us that it is okay to step outside the cycles that create our restlessness.
Speaker 2:By taking a pause from our production or our consumption, we affirm that our worth is not attached to our productivity or what we have. We affirm that rest is not an act is an act of trust in the goodness of God who still keeps the world. And we say that rest is something to be shared and cultivated in our communities. But another way to keep the Sabbath holy is to wander into the territory of delight. And I don't know if you can relate, but for the longest time, I was in the space where I sensed the need to rethink how I rest and lean more into the spiritual discipline of Sabbath and its promises.
Speaker 2:But then reorganizing my life in order to engage and plan a meaningful time of rest just required a lot and seemed too daunting. And when rest becomes another chore, it stops being restful. In the gospels, Jesus repeatedly counters the narratives that reduce the Sabbath rest to a function guided by rules and prohibitions. In Mark two, he says that Sabbath is not a burden. The Sabbath was made for you, not you for the Sabbath.
Speaker 2:And from early on in biblical times, the Sabbath was seen as a day for delight, a day to grasp joy and weave it back into the fabric of our lives. One of the things that I find really beautiful about the theology of Sabbath is that the day of rest belongs as much to the body as it belongs to the soul. Doctor Sandra Dalton Smith identifies seven types of rest that we need: physical, mental, social, emotional, creative, spiritual, and sensory. And I find the sensory part really interesting. Many of us today live with low level sensory fatigue, sometimes without even being aware how overstimulated our brains are.
Speaker 2:Our technology compresses the time for us. We can do more things, we can do them more efficiently, we can do them faster, and we might not even notice how in the process, not just the time, but we ourselves get compressed. And sensory, even sensual rest, can bring us back into our bodies and help us unfurl. Sabbath rest invites us to seek delight through all of our senses, in naps and forest bathing, in smelling fresh bread, in lighting candles and getting lost in the book, in silence and with company, in holding our loved ones tied against our bodies. So that when our Sabbath is over and we return to a world of work we can carry the fragrance of rest in our bodies and remember who we are.
Speaker 2:And long before Slava, Dennis and I started our Saturday morning tradition, when we would leisurely begin the day by making an elaborate breakfast and spending a good amount of time checking in with each other and listening to what's going on in our lives. Now, the leisure aspect is gone, but that Saturday tradition, that Saturday breakfast, remains a ritual that says that this time is for us. It's time to delight and to rest. Another source of delight for me is watching my dog, Jojo, live her dog life to the full. Now Dennis and I have different philosophies on what's good for a dog.
Speaker 2:He thinks discipline, and I think freedom. So whenever I have a chance, I take her to big open areas where she can run to her heart's content. And the reason I love it so much is because watching this dog run and play and enjoy her physicality gives me a glimpse of what it feels like to be a creature at ease with the world. And the beauty of delight is that we do not even have to create it. We just need to lean more fully with all our senses, with all our physicality, into the life we already have.
Speaker 2:So rest is both an art and a practice. It is fluid, but it also thrives when it has a rhythm. As a central spiritual discipline in the Jewish tradition, the Sabbath requires the life of work to be oriented and planned around the time of rest and not the other way around. The Sabbath always begins on Friday night at sunset. The candles are lit, the feast is prepared, the blessings are said, the scriptures are read, and the atmosphere is created to reflect that in this home, for the next twenty four hours, all of life moves into an alternative realm, into holy time.
Speaker 2:But even when we are not in a position to set aside twenty four hours for rest every week, There's still ways to incorporate rest into our lives and allow its rhythms to work on us. And as we shift gears from a more relaxed summer mode to a more focused and scheduled season, here's an exercise to help you create your own map of rest. And this is how you do it. Find ten or fifteen minutes to journal or use your notes app on your phone if you'd like, and start by making a list of all the ways you rest, things or activities that fill you up and delight your senses, whatever it is that helps you unplug and unfurl. Then divide your page into four quadrants or create four categories: daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.
Speaker 2:And then take that list you just made of your own personal practices of rest and see what you can put under each category of time. What is one thing that can regularly create a restful moment for you in your day? What are one or two things that will bring you joy and delight if you make them part of your weekly rest? What is one social, sensory, creative, or physical thing that you can practice monthly? And what can your rest look like during a longer break once or twice a year?
Speaker 2:And if you think of your work and everything you need to do on a regular basis as your inhales, this rest map that you will have created is for your exhales. Some simple things you can do to turn your time into a sanctuary, to practice resistance to the pressures you feel, to choose delight, and to rest with God. Let me finish with a Sabbath poem by Marcia Falk, a feminist Jewish scholar and a poet. This poem was called Will. Three generations back, my family had only to light a candle, and the world parted.
Speaker 2:Today, Friday afternoon, I disconnect the clocks and phone. When night fills my house with passages, I begin saving my life. Let us pray. Loving God. Sometimes saving our life looks like taking a break, finding a moment of delight in our day, getting enough sleep.
Speaker 2:And as we think about the fall, we anticipate and we welcome the changes to our routines and the different kind of busyness that we will dive into. As we do so, we pray that we will remember to stop, to linger, to enjoy. Help us to pay attention to the stories of rest that we inhabit and live out. Awaken us to the holiness of the time we take to refresh our bodies and our souls. Meet us in the moments of pleasure.
Speaker 2:We ask all this in the name of Christ who gives us rest. Amen.