“Come to me, all you that are weary
and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest”.
I expect that line of the Gospel reading spoke to many people
today. It certainly did to me. Many people have told me that over these last
few months, their concentration is shot to pieces, their sleep is disturbed,
and that they’ve found it hard to settle to anything, and hard to rest. Even
those who are retired or have been furloughed or aren’t at work have found it
wearing and wearying, let alone those who have been working, worrying,
suffering or grieving through this time.
It’s understandable that we’re weary, but it’s also worrying,
because we’re not through this yet. The virus is still out there. There’s no
cure, no vaccine. And we are now dealing with the financial and social impacts
of lockdown too, and will be for years to come. The danger with weariness is
that it easily turns inward into depression, or outward into irritability and
anger, as people either collapse or explode in response to it.
So it really matters that we look at our weariness, and hear
Jesus’ words. “Come to me…and I will give
you rest” he says. That sounds
pretty good to me right at the moment – “I
will give you rest” - a comfy chair,
a G & T, a long lie down, a bit of a holiday. Bring it on, Jesus!
But then he spoils it rather in the next line. “Take my yoke upon you…” he says. “Take
my yoke upon you…” That doesn’t
sound like rest at all. It sounds like work! Yokes are the things you put on
the necks of oxen so they can pull a plough, or that dairymaids and labourers
used to use to carry heavy buckets…
But perhaps our problem is with this little word “rest”. We
tend to think of it as the state of doing nothing – that long lie down.
Sometimes that’s really important and just what we do need, but as anyone who
is bedbound will tell you, you can be lying down all day but still not feel in
the least rested. There’s more to true rest than the absence of work.
In the Bible, of course, the idea of rest is inextricably
linked with the idea of the Sabbath, which drew it’s inspiration from the story
of creation in Genesis 1. God worked for six days, creating the world and all
that was in it, and then he rested. He didn’t rest because he was tired – he
was God, after all! – he rested because he
knew a good thing when he saw it. He delighted in it. He could have made an
extra animal or two, a bit more ocean, another mountain… he could have kept
tinkering, but he didn’t. It was enough, just as it was. It was very good. That’s
why he stopped, so that he could enjoy it!
Many years ago I was telling this story of creation to some
children. When we got to the end, I said to the children “and then God rested”.
They looked at me blankly. What? He’d just made all those wonderful things –
trees and worms and whales and all the rest – and now he rested. Clearly in
their minds rest was what happened when your dad sent you to bed early, or that
your mum came in from work and wanted to put her feet up and not be bothered
with demands. Boring, in other words.
I realised that they were right. A lot of what adults call rest
probably is pretty boring. So I wrote a poem, in which I imagined that God was
like one of these children, and I thought about what they would do with a
new-made world. It’s called , the Seventh Day, or what God did on his day off,
and it goes like this.
On the seventh day
God played with his
creation.
In the morning
In the morning
he ran down early to the
sea’s edge,
and in the crusted rock
pools teased
the waving fingers of sea
anemones.
He let the sand, like
powdered silk,
run through his funneled
fingers
and the shallow water play
around his feet,
drawing a sandy wake around
them.
Crashing on the rocks the
waves leapt
to greet him with sprayed
salt.
In the afternoon
he kicked up leaves,
musty in the dark woods,
and chased the spidery seed
children of the
rosebay willowherb,
tumbling idly into their
new generation
over dry earth.
He dammed the icy streams
to sail twig boats down
rocky rivers
and climbed into the
branches of rough oaks
looking for secret
squirrels
But in the evening -
in the evening he wanted to
talk.
So he sought out man and
woman by their campfire,
finding worlds within its
embers.
Late into the night,
they listened, with their
arms around each other,
to the songs of night
creatures,
and invented music.
And God thought the seventh
day was good,
because he played with his
creation –
and the whole earth joined
the game.
The truth is that rest, real rest, isn’t about doing nothing.
It’s about finding delight in the life we have and the world around us, and
anything which helps us do that can be restful, whether it’s climbing a tree or
reading a book or meeting a friend or planting a garden, or whatever does it
for you.
Most deeply, it’s about finding the God who plays alongside
us, who delights in our lives as we learn to delight in them ourselves. Even
the things we’re paid to do can feel restful, or aspects of them can, - if
we’re lucky enough to enjoy them and find them worthwhile. Real rest can be
quite energetic. It can leave us physically tired, but with a sense of
satisfaction and completeness, a sense that we, and the world around us, have
somehow been set right, healed, even if only in small ways.
The Sabbath was meant to be a time when people had a
foretaste of that “set-rightness” – or “righteousness” as the Bible puts it.
And that, I think, is where the “yoke” Jesus talks about
comes in. God’s true rest, that deep sense of peace, comes to us as we share in
his work of setting right the world. “You’ve
got to be in it to win it,” as the saying goes. We won’t find God’s peace
by sitting on the side-lines, carping about what is wrong with the world like
the children Jesus talks about in the little parable he tells. In other places
in the Gospels he tells stories about weddings whose invited guests refuse to
come. They don’t want to be part of what’s happening, and as a result, they
miss out on the party. A wedding in the Bible, especially a royal wedding, like
the one today’s Psalm talked about, is always shorthand for a new age, a new
kingdom. In the ancient world, Weddings weren’t about romantic love; they were
about creating a new future for the kingdom – the sons the Psalmist says the
king in the Psalm will have and the new household the royal bride will now be
part of. The Psalm’s language may sound archaic to us, but the point the
Psalmist wants to make is that here is a new world, and the bride and groom can
help to make it.
Our weariness, our exhaustion, is ultimately rooted in our
awareness that things aren’t as they ought to be – in ourselves and in our
world. No one has a magic wand, and sometimes simply stopping and remembering
to breathe is the most important thing that we can do. But if we want to find
the deep rest, the Sabbath, the delight God wants for us, we will need to hear
his invitation to join in the dance, to walk with him, to work with him, to
play with him as he sets his creation to rights.
Amen
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