Come Away, … and Rest

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

 It’s odd.  We’re planning a dinner at our church, a big celebration to mark the 150^th year since our sanctuary’s construction in 1859.  We hope there will be a crowd, and we expect we’ll have to feed them.  So last week, an email went out to some of our best volunteers asking, “Can you help?”  Almost immediately someone wrote back:  “Hi.  I’m in the middle of being overwhelmed.  There is [so] much to do for the [mission to families of prisoners], and another big event in August, and then I’ll be working on the September fund-raiser for the Nicaragua trip, and [after that there’s] the women’s retreat.  [But] I promise that I’ll help clean up after the anniversary dinner.”  Jesus knows, and loves, disciples like that.  He loves them especially by saying to them, “Come away, … and rest.”

 There were folks like that on that lonely hillside with Jesus:  the overcommitted, the deeply dedicated, and the passionately devoted.  These over-achieving disciples were there because Jesus invited them.

 But there were others, too.  Mark says that they had recognized Jesus, and they “hurried there on foot” to be with him and his overworked, weary disciples.  They came because they had needs.  But their needs were a kind of invitation, too.  They, too, are implicitly invited to listen, learn, and get a perspective on their lives, their needs, maybe even their illnesses:  “Come away, … and rest.”

 Now that summer has finally arrived, maybe it’s time for us to remember that God calls us all to come away and rest.  Rest, says God, in the Lord’s presence.  It is an invitation to us all, but especially invited are all of us who are so very task oriented and outcome-dedicated, or to those of us whose age, infirmity, or other circumstance has put us on the sidelines with little more to accomplish than to pray.

 It’s striking to hear Jesus’ invitation to “rest” just when our culture invites us to vacation.  I was with a man this past week whose marriage is new and whose children are young, and who is so committed to caring for this family that he has little time to enjoy them.  I kidded him about not seeing him in church since Easter.  He told me that his business kept him occupied, especially on the weekends.  He said, “Every day there is work to do.  There’s money to make out there.  If I wait, I lose a chance.  So I keep on the run.”

 My friend is young. Maybe he will learn to pace himself.  Maybe he’ll establish a routine that works well, and gives him both the accomplishment and the rest that he needs.  Maybe he’ll learn the truth of something I read years ago by the great Methodist preacher and Bishop, Gerald Kennedy, who said, “I can do a week’s work in six days, but not in seven.  And I can do a year’s work in eleven months, but not twelve.”  Kennedy published numerous books, and preached around the country, because early on, he had heard Jesus invited him, “Come away, and rest.”

 I feel sadness when I see people who never learn that lesson, or who learn it too late, or who learn it, only to forget it.  I recently felt a tinge of the sadness while reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church, a memoir describing her coming to the decision that God was calling her away from her life as an Episcopal priest.  She didn’t lose her faith, or even her calling.  But she was overwhelmed by the world’s need, and her own need to respond to needs.  Hers is the dilemma of every disciple who follows Jesus and who feels sent into the world by Jesus.  “In my lexicon,” she wrote, “a priest is someone willing to stand between a God and a people who are longing for one another’s love….  To be a priest is to serve a God who never stops calling people to do more justice and love more mercy, and simultaneously to serve people who nine times out of ten are just looking for a safe place to rest.  … To be a priest is to wonder sometimes if you are missing the boat altogether, by deferring pleasure in what God has made until you have fixed it up so that it will please God more.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church, page 44) 

 A gifted preacher, Taylor’s very success was overwhelming.  She cared for people, but too much.  She found herself drained, busy serving God but longing for a moment alone with God.  She continues to write and teach, but she has found time to stop and notice God’s presence in her world, too.  She had to stop, go away, and rest.

 We have a name for the kind of respite that Taylor found, the rest that Jesus invited the disciples to enjoy.  Our name for that time of rest is “Sabbath.”  It’s the same rest we’re invited to share every week. Sabbath time is so essential that God commands us to find it.  In fact, it’s one of the Ten Commandments – instructions that we still claim to follow.

 Barbara Taylor – still a preacher (in her writings, anyway) if no longer a priest – says that discovering the Sabbath saved her life with God, even if it did not save her vocation as a priest.  She rediscovered both the Sabbath and the holy trust and holy wonder that weekly rest provides.  This ritual of rest is so important that, as she says, “Sabbath is written into the ancient covenant with God.  Remember the Sabbath, the rabbis say, and you fulfill all of Torah.  Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it mean to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom.  The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.”  (Taylor, Leaving Church, page 136.)

 She doesn’t exaggerate.  Without the rest that connects us to God, to ourselves, and to the best parts of our world, we fly blindly toward death.  Even as we all try to find meaning, or at least a bit of understanding in Michael Jackson’s untimely death, I ran across an article noting that as a child performer Jackson longed for a time merely to play.  Maybe his grown-up fascination with childhood reflected his need to play, to escape the pressures of constantly performing, always earning, and working without the rest every human body needs. The article noted that the elders in Jackson’s family’s Jehovah Witness church treated him like everyone else, giving him a place to retreat and rest.  Jackson once said, “I still miss the sense of community that I felt there.  I miss the friends and the people who treated me like I was simply one of them.  Simply human.  Sharing a day with God.” (Quoted in “Century Marks,” The Christian Century, July 28, 2009, page 8.)

 Jesus Christ, our living Lord, continues to call disciples to “Come away, … and rest.” I invite you to join me this morning as we stop everything else, and simply sit for a while in God’s presence.  Come away, … and rest.  You may want to take a moment where you are, to pray.  Right now, Come away, and rest.  You might want to come to the altar.  You might want to notice the beauty of the rich diversity of God’s family here with you this morning.  In your heart, come away, and rest.

 And as you go from this place, go in faith – the faith of the Sabbath – that God will take care of you and yours.  Remember that God delights in you today, and always.  Remember that God invites you to trust in God alone, and remember that such trust is the foundation of all faith.  Your life and my life are blessed because God makes it so.  Nothing we can do will change that.

 After creating the worlds by the mere force of His word echoing in creative love, God rested.  God just stopped.  God stopped, took a breath, and rested, savoring the goodness of all that was, and is, and will be.  And then, because God loves us and is committed to the relationship we shard, God invited us – commanded us – to savor creation also. 

 Maybe it’s time to trust God’s grace for a day, and put the world, including “our” portion of it, back into God’s hands.  Maybe it’s time to trust that God can, and will, take care of creation without our help for 24 hours.  That creation God will care for, without our help, includes our nation, our country, and our families.  Partly God wants us to know of the great love God has for us, and partly, I believe, God wants us to savor the universe as much as God does.  And partly, even mostly, God hopes that we will learn the beginning of faith as trust. 

 Trust the God who loved you into your living, and who will love you beyond your dying.  Trust the God who calls you name as a child, and who calls the names of those in the nursing homes.  Trust the God who keeps us, who loves us, and who calls us finally to be with Him forever.  “Come away, and rest,” he says to us.  Trust the God who honors our work, and who shares our rest, today and always.

 Amen.

Trinity United Methodist, White Plains, July 19, 2009.

[Pulpit exchange with David Jefferson.]