Work And Rest
Preaching
Gathering Up the Fragments
Preaching As Spiritual Practice
Object:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and here he was working at his wheel.
-- Jeremiah 18:1-3
Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
-- Luke 14:25-33
The observance of Labor Day began in the late 1800s, both as a celebration and protest, as workers took an unpaid day off to gather in New York City's Union Square. The idea of a holiday devoted to Labor's cause spread across various states and was eventually shepherded through the US Congress, mostly in an effort to calm the intense labor tensions of the time. President Grover Cleveland, running for reelection, signed the legislation six days after he sent 12,000 federal troops to break a railroad workers' strike in Pullman, Illinois.
As a reelection strategy, it didn't work; Cleveland lost. However, Labor Day remains, no longer a protest and not so much a celebration of labor as a break from it. It's fitting that we honor those upon whose labors our lives depend by giving them a day off. It's good to honor our own work by stepping away from it for a day. And it's very nice to be able to catch our breath as summer gives way to fall and as life, for many, steps up to a decidedly busier pace.
One of the best things about the summer we're saying good-bye to was the opportunities it gave to take a break from whatever we consider normal routines and rediscover, for either short or long periods of time, a more relaxed way of living. My long stretch of rest came earlier in the year, during the gift of sabbatical from February to May. As a result, like many of you I worked through the summer, with a few shorter breaks -- a day, a weekend, four glorious days in northern Minnesota.
Throughout the summer, precisely because I was working, I tried to practice the art of sabbath. How could I learn to stop working at the end of day, not because I had finished my work, but because the time of work had ended? How could I let go of the problems that nagged at my consciousness and allow myself the luxury of reading a novel or relaxing with family? What would life be like if I allowed myself, at last, to get enough sleep?
The Jewish writer, Abraham Joshua Heschel, writes of sabbath in this way:
The sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one's lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. We are not beasts of burden and the sabbath is not for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of our work. It is not an interlude, but the climax of living.1
He goes on:
It must always be remembered that the sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity; not a day to shoot fireworks or to turn somersaults, but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives.2
Mending our tattered lives. How we need that. It's a standard, almost cliché, critique of modern society that in our busyness we have lost the essential rhythm between work and rest. The philosopher, Jacob Needleman, calls it a new kind of poverty and the effects of it are everywhere. "Because we do not rest," writes the author Wayne Muller, "we lose our way. We miss the compass points that show us where to go. We bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom. For want of rest, our lives are in danger."3
There are many ways that the lack of sabbath costs us, all that we lose when we miss the gift of living, being present, taking time for nourishment and renewal. On this Labor Day weekend, I'd like to focus, with due respect to Heschel, on the cost to our work when we don't step away from it regularly, how our work is compromised when we lose sight of the need to rest and mend the tattered places in us. In speaking of work, I don't mean simply what some of us do for a paycheck, but all aspects of life's labors. The union organizer, Si Kahn, wrote in a song, "Your life is more than your work. And your work is more than your job." What happens to our life and our work when we don't take adequate time away?
A friend of mine spent the last two years of her father's life monitoring his care from four states away. As a nurse, she had the expertise her family relied on to navigate the maze of health care and hospitalization. Every other week she would drive or take the train to her parents' home to care for them, meet with doctors, or make new arrangements for his treatment. In the meantime she tried to keep up with her own life -- her work, children, friends, and community ties. All in all, she said, she managed pretty well, or so she thought until the nurse taking her father's blood pressure offered to check hers, too. She was normally a very healthy person and while she seemed fine to everyone, including herself, her blood pressure had risen to dangerous levels and she had no awareness of it. What gave her pause wasn't so much concern for her own health, but rather the realization that she was making life and death decisions on her father's behalf in such a compromised state, all the more dangerous because she thought she was fine.
It's almost impossible to make good decisions under pressure, when we don't have the time to consider the consequences of our choices. One of the downsides of electronic communication, it seems to me, is that we have set ourselves the standard of instant response. No longer is there time for measured reflection, a chance to think before reacting. We expect answers right away.
I get nervous every legislative session watching the frenetic pace of public officials and those who work for them. It's as if sleep deprivation is a requirement of public office. And what does all the frenetic energy produce? To make his own point about being prepared and ready for work, Jesus gave the example of a king discerning whether or not to go to war. Whatever your views of the current war in Iraq, no one disputes the fact that in our country's rush to go to war we made grave miscalculations of its cost. Our understanding of what we, in fact, were there to fight and how we would be perceived was woefully inaccurate. No matter how noble our efforts and how sincere the soldiers were that we sent to fight, because we sent them under mistaken premises and ill-prepared for the reality awaiting them, our good intentions have had, in many instances, made things worse rather than better for the Iraqi people. We may have created, rather than destroyed, the ideal environment for terrorism.
This dangerous action without reflection is not unique to politics. As Wayne Muller wrote, even among those dedicated to the service of others, "the corrosive pressure of frantic overactivity can cause suffering in ourselves and others ... With few notable exceptions, the way we solve problems in all fields of public service is reactively, quickly, and badly. It's naive to assume that our good intentions protect us from doing unintended harm. Doing good requires more than hard work. We need time to step back, reflect on past actions, and be quiet enough to recognize what is good."4
Scripture speaks often and well about the spiritual implications of our work and of the need for rest from it. The Bible begins, you recall, with a creation story in which God created the heavens, the earth, and every living thing, including humankind in God's own likeness, and then rested on the seventh day. Like God, our lives are best lived in such a rhythm of work and rest. In the passage read this morning from the prophet Jeremiah, he likens God's creative work to that of a potter at his wheel, able to craft, mold, and even destroy clay at his will. Jeremiah's point is that God is like the potter, but it's also true that we, as potters, are like God -- able to craft, mold, and even destroy. Our creative work is our most godlike potential, an awesome gift and responsibility.
Jesus speaks to us rather harshly this morning about the importance of being prepared and willing to sacrifice if we want to take up the work of following him. No more gentle talk about his yoke being easy and his burden light. This will be hard, he says, like carrying a cross. It will require preparation and foresight, careful discernment and persistent effort. Think it through carefully -- are you up for it?
Keep in mind that he speaks this way as he has realized the cost of his vocation for himself. After three years of ministry in Galilee, healing the sick, teaching in synagogues, forming his disciples; three years of frequent time away to pray, reflect, and consider his life's purpose, now he knows what he is to do and where he is to accomplish it. He's on his way to Jerusalem, now like all the great prophets before him. He's going back to his Father's house, the temple where he had sat as a twelve-year-old boy listening to the wisdom of his elders. He would confront the religious hypocrisy and abuse of temple leadership and give his life in witness to truth. I don't think he meant to be harsh as he told his disciples to measure the cost of following him. He was simply clear and wanted them to know that he could not spare them the cost he himself was willing to pay.
Every once in a while life asks of us that kind of clarity, that kind of conviction and total commitment. It doesn't happen all the time, thank goodness, but pity the person for whom it never happens, for it is a sign of a life truly lived. William Sloan Coffin once wrote, "It is not so much the unexamined life that is not worth living, but the uncommitted one." And yet how are we to know when such commitment and focused effort is required? How can we discern a true calling from a false one, a cause worthy of our lives from one that will simply deplete it, the things that are worth dying for from the things that aren't? When our true work invites us to give our life to it, how will we recognize it for what it is?
One very simple and life-giving way is to establish a rhythm of rest and reflection that allows us to ponder the deeper meaning of things, to renew our minds and spirits with the joys of living. For we will never be free to say yes to the great things life asks of us if we are so exhausted from the little things that we can't see the forest from the trees. We're learning that before we can discern our greatest calling as a community we have to let go of some things that drain our energy and creative spirit. If we are to find our path, wherever it will lead, we simply must make regular time and space for rest, relaxation, and prayer -- not only in the seasons that allow it, like the summer that is ending, but also, and especially, in the busy ones that work against it, like the one before us. In that quiet, restful space will come the clarity and conviction to follow Jesus where he leads and fully engage the work that is ours.
____________
1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: HarperCollins, 1951), p. 14.
2. Ibid., p. 18.
3. Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest (Bantam Books, 1991), p. 1.
4. Ibid., p. 163.
-- Jeremiah 18:1-3
Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."
-- Luke 14:25-33
The observance of Labor Day began in the late 1800s, both as a celebration and protest, as workers took an unpaid day off to gather in New York City's Union Square. The idea of a holiday devoted to Labor's cause spread across various states and was eventually shepherded through the US Congress, mostly in an effort to calm the intense labor tensions of the time. President Grover Cleveland, running for reelection, signed the legislation six days after he sent 12,000 federal troops to break a railroad workers' strike in Pullman, Illinois.
As a reelection strategy, it didn't work; Cleveland lost. However, Labor Day remains, no longer a protest and not so much a celebration of labor as a break from it. It's fitting that we honor those upon whose labors our lives depend by giving them a day off. It's good to honor our own work by stepping away from it for a day. And it's very nice to be able to catch our breath as summer gives way to fall and as life, for many, steps up to a decidedly busier pace.
One of the best things about the summer we're saying good-bye to was the opportunities it gave to take a break from whatever we consider normal routines and rediscover, for either short or long periods of time, a more relaxed way of living. My long stretch of rest came earlier in the year, during the gift of sabbatical from February to May. As a result, like many of you I worked through the summer, with a few shorter breaks -- a day, a weekend, four glorious days in northern Minnesota.
Throughout the summer, precisely because I was working, I tried to practice the art of sabbath. How could I learn to stop working at the end of day, not because I had finished my work, but because the time of work had ended? How could I let go of the problems that nagged at my consciousness and allow myself the luxury of reading a novel or relaxing with family? What would life be like if I allowed myself, at last, to get enough sleep?
The Jewish writer, Abraham Joshua Heschel, writes of sabbath in this way:
The sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one's lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. We are not beasts of burden and the sabbath is not for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of our work. It is not an interlude, but the climax of living.1
He goes on:
It must always be remembered that the sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity; not a day to shoot fireworks or to turn somersaults, but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives.2
Mending our tattered lives. How we need that. It's a standard, almost cliché, critique of modern society that in our busyness we have lost the essential rhythm between work and rest. The philosopher, Jacob Needleman, calls it a new kind of poverty and the effects of it are everywhere. "Because we do not rest," writes the author Wayne Muller, "we lose our way. We miss the compass points that show us where to go. We bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom. For want of rest, our lives are in danger."3
There are many ways that the lack of sabbath costs us, all that we lose when we miss the gift of living, being present, taking time for nourishment and renewal. On this Labor Day weekend, I'd like to focus, with due respect to Heschel, on the cost to our work when we don't step away from it regularly, how our work is compromised when we lose sight of the need to rest and mend the tattered places in us. In speaking of work, I don't mean simply what some of us do for a paycheck, but all aspects of life's labors. The union organizer, Si Kahn, wrote in a song, "Your life is more than your work. And your work is more than your job." What happens to our life and our work when we don't take adequate time away?
A friend of mine spent the last two years of her father's life monitoring his care from four states away. As a nurse, she had the expertise her family relied on to navigate the maze of health care and hospitalization. Every other week she would drive or take the train to her parents' home to care for them, meet with doctors, or make new arrangements for his treatment. In the meantime she tried to keep up with her own life -- her work, children, friends, and community ties. All in all, she said, she managed pretty well, or so she thought until the nurse taking her father's blood pressure offered to check hers, too. She was normally a very healthy person and while she seemed fine to everyone, including herself, her blood pressure had risen to dangerous levels and she had no awareness of it. What gave her pause wasn't so much concern for her own health, but rather the realization that she was making life and death decisions on her father's behalf in such a compromised state, all the more dangerous because she thought she was fine.
It's almost impossible to make good decisions under pressure, when we don't have the time to consider the consequences of our choices. One of the downsides of electronic communication, it seems to me, is that we have set ourselves the standard of instant response. No longer is there time for measured reflection, a chance to think before reacting. We expect answers right away.
I get nervous every legislative session watching the frenetic pace of public officials and those who work for them. It's as if sleep deprivation is a requirement of public office. And what does all the frenetic energy produce? To make his own point about being prepared and ready for work, Jesus gave the example of a king discerning whether or not to go to war. Whatever your views of the current war in Iraq, no one disputes the fact that in our country's rush to go to war we made grave miscalculations of its cost. Our understanding of what we, in fact, were there to fight and how we would be perceived was woefully inaccurate. No matter how noble our efforts and how sincere the soldiers were that we sent to fight, because we sent them under mistaken premises and ill-prepared for the reality awaiting them, our good intentions have had, in many instances, made things worse rather than better for the Iraqi people. We may have created, rather than destroyed, the ideal environment for terrorism.
This dangerous action without reflection is not unique to politics. As Wayne Muller wrote, even among those dedicated to the service of others, "the corrosive pressure of frantic overactivity can cause suffering in ourselves and others ... With few notable exceptions, the way we solve problems in all fields of public service is reactively, quickly, and badly. It's naive to assume that our good intentions protect us from doing unintended harm. Doing good requires more than hard work. We need time to step back, reflect on past actions, and be quiet enough to recognize what is good."4
Scripture speaks often and well about the spiritual implications of our work and of the need for rest from it. The Bible begins, you recall, with a creation story in which God created the heavens, the earth, and every living thing, including humankind in God's own likeness, and then rested on the seventh day. Like God, our lives are best lived in such a rhythm of work and rest. In the passage read this morning from the prophet Jeremiah, he likens God's creative work to that of a potter at his wheel, able to craft, mold, and even destroy clay at his will. Jeremiah's point is that God is like the potter, but it's also true that we, as potters, are like God -- able to craft, mold, and even destroy. Our creative work is our most godlike potential, an awesome gift and responsibility.
Jesus speaks to us rather harshly this morning about the importance of being prepared and willing to sacrifice if we want to take up the work of following him. No more gentle talk about his yoke being easy and his burden light. This will be hard, he says, like carrying a cross. It will require preparation and foresight, careful discernment and persistent effort. Think it through carefully -- are you up for it?
Keep in mind that he speaks this way as he has realized the cost of his vocation for himself. After three years of ministry in Galilee, healing the sick, teaching in synagogues, forming his disciples; three years of frequent time away to pray, reflect, and consider his life's purpose, now he knows what he is to do and where he is to accomplish it. He's on his way to Jerusalem, now like all the great prophets before him. He's going back to his Father's house, the temple where he had sat as a twelve-year-old boy listening to the wisdom of his elders. He would confront the religious hypocrisy and abuse of temple leadership and give his life in witness to truth. I don't think he meant to be harsh as he told his disciples to measure the cost of following him. He was simply clear and wanted them to know that he could not spare them the cost he himself was willing to pay.
Every once in a while life asks of us that kind of clarity, that kind of conviction and total commitment. It doesn't happen all the time, thank goodness, but pity the person for whom it never happens, for it is a sign of a life truly lived. William Sloan Coffin once wrote, "It is not so much the unexamined life that is not worth living, but the uncommitted one." And yet how are we to know when such commitment and focused effort is required? How can we discern a true calling from a false one, a cause worthy of our lives from one that will simply deplete it, the things that are worth dying for from the things that aren't? When our true work invites us to give our life to it, how will we recognize it for what it is?
One very simple and life-giving way is to establish a rhythm of rest and reflection that allows us to ponder the deeper meaning of things, to renew our minds and spirits with the joys of living. For we will never be free to say yes to the great things life asks of us if we are so exhausted from the little things that we can't see the forest from the trees. We're learning that before we can discern our greatest calling as a community we have to let go of some things that drain our energy and creative spirit. If we are to find our path, wherever it will lead, we simply must make regular time and space for rest, relaxation, and prayer -- not only in the seasons that allow it, like the summer that is ending, but also, and especially, in the busy ones that work against it, like the one before us. In that quiet, restful space will come the clarity and conviction to follow Jesus where he leads and fully engage the work that is ours.
____________
1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: HarperCollins, 1951), p. 14.
2. Ibid., p. 18.
3. Wayne Muller, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest (Bantam Books, 1991), p. 1.
4. Ibid., p. 163.
