Yesterday afternoon I took one of my sons and a friend on a canoe trip down the Little Miami.  We were out for 3 hours, six miles on the water, and at first I was a little nervous about the length of the trip, I was hustling us along, trying to figure out how fast we were moving.  But we soon passed a marker that told me we were moving along fine and had plenty of time.  And I slowed down.  There was nothing to be gained by hurrying.  I stopped paddling hard; I started letting the boys jump out and play in the water for as long as they wanted, we stopped off the river at one point to get a lemonade and a beer from a food truck.  I stopped hurrying, and I had the most wonderful 3 hours of rest.

This morning I’m going to talk about rest, and I’m going to do it through a religious story.  Religion isn’t so popular in our culture these days, but religious practices teach rhythms for daily life that make us healthier happier people, and this morning I want to talk about what our religion teaches us about rest.

Without rest, we are more stressed and more easily aggravated, and we function at a diminished level in every other thing we do.  Without rest we show up tired and impatient as a parent and as a spouse, in our work and with our neighbors.  I don’t have to tell you any of this, do I?  Most of us could use more rest, and we know it.  

But a few weeks ago, I attended a Presbyterian conference about rest,[1] and I came away with some new insights about rest that I’d like to share with you.  Let me tell you a religious story that might help you think about rest in a different light, and that might lead you to rest a little more as this summer begins.  

Today is Pentecost, and if you came to worship this morning knowing nothing about that, I’m not surprised and you should not be embarrassed.  Pentecost is one of those church holidays that has not transferred well to that rotating seasonal aisle at Kroger.  Perhaps that is an indication that Pentecost has something to teach us. 

         Pentecost was a harvest festival.  As the name—Pente—suggests, it takes place fifty days after Easter.  On Pentecost in the Book of Acts, the Holy Spirit comes among the disciples, and they begin to speak to one another in other languages.

         The story begins that they were all gathered together in one place—they had come to Jerusalem, and that tells us another layer to the story:  Before this story was a Christian one, Pentecost had also been a Jewish harvest festival, meant to be celebrated 50 days after Passover.  Jews would have paused from their labors and made the trip from their homes up to Jerusalem for the festival.  That is why it says they were gathered together all in one place.  

         It’s significant that they had gathered in this way because gathering wasn’t easy.  Most of us fail to rest and gather together because of our own choices, but for them it was different.  The burdens of living under Roman occupation were severe for the average subsistence farmer, who paid heavy taxes out of each harvest.  Not much was left. There were expenses to traveling up to Jerusalem.  With gas at $5 a gallon and groceries expensive in our own time, we can understand that.  So taxes were high, travel was expensive, and going to a festival also meant fewer days of work back at home in the field.  

         All of this makes a difference because it shows that these people put a high value on rest.  Sermons about Pentecost usually talk about the fire of the Holy Spirit and the miracle of the disciples speaking in other languages, the things that obviously get our attention; those images suggest that it’s time to get up and do something—something big and fast and important.  But today I want to consider a less dramatic detail that is just as important.  These people may never have sensed the presence of God, and would not have been there altogether in one place to begin with, had it not been for the priority they placed upon rest.  

         It’s really quite amazing to think about the importance our religion gives to rest.  One of the insights from that conference I attended had to do with the kind of rest we call Sabbath.  I heard a terrific sermon on this, it was given by a farmer named Nathan Stucky.  He talked about the Creation story in Genesis, and how we modern human beings misinterpret it in to justify our devotion to work.  In the story of Creation, God spends the first 5 days separating the light from the darkness and the land from the seas and populating the earth with plants and animals, followed by the sixth day when God creates the human beings, and on the seventh day, God rests.   We usually read this story as a celebration of work, a collected list of all of the amazing work that God gets done, culminating with the Creation of the humans, after which, God celebrates by taking a break.  Nathan Stucky invited us:  Consider, instead, what the timeline must have looked like for those first humans.  They don’t arrive until day 6, born into an amazing and beautiful created world where there is much to go see and do, but the very first thing that happens to them is Day 7—Sabbath with God.  Adam and Eve don’t do anything else until they have first spent time resting with and coming to know God.  It is a profound reversal of the commonly held notion that rest is something we earn by doing work.  No!  Rest is not a reward for finishing the work.  Rest is a gift.  It is about being with God first—it is what prepares us for life.  Rest is not a reward; it is a gift.

         The other insight about rest that I would like to share with you is that rest changes things, it can transform the world.  Rest is not doing nothing.  Rest is an intentional decision that leads to a different kind of life.  Rest can be an act of resistance to the forces of our culture that are so harmful and stressful to us all. 

         It would be another sermon, but at some point I’m going to tell you the story of the Book of Esther as I heard it told at my conference last week, thanks to two preachers, Casey Wait and Larissa Kwong Abazia.  Usually left out of a sermon on Esther is a key moment at the beginning.  In chapter 1, Queen Vashti of Persia says “no” to the king; he is having party to display his wealth and oppulance and power, and Queen Vashti refuses to come and dance for him and his court, as they celebrate their oppressive regime.  It is this courageous “no” from Vashti that kicks off the whole story in which the Jewish people are saved, they celebrate it to this day with an annual festival called Purim.  None of it is possible unless Vashti says no.  Never underestimate the power of change that comes from refusing to do something.

         This story too, challenges the way we think about rest, because rest is not doing nothing. How many of us participate in a work culture, a parenting culture, a church culture, where your value is determined by how much you will do—how much you will produce and participate, how active you will be.  What if you said “no” sometimes?  What might it add to the health of the communities you are a part of?  What if you said to your family, “you know, we just cannot spend every free moment moving from one activity to the next, so we’re going to have to say no to some things.  We’re going to set an example for our children that rest is important.”  What if you said to your boss, “I’m happy to give you my best 40 hours a week, but I need to stop looking at my messages in the evening, or on the weekend.”  Setting limits on family activities and on work—these are sacred cows, I know, so I want to be sure to add:  What if you said to your pastor, “You know, I need to prioritize sabbath in my life, so I cannot help the church with the task you are asking of me.”  Are there costs to saying no?  Yes, I know that there are.  Are they worth the good that comes from rest.  I think so.  So much of our drive to produce and achieve and accumulate anxiously sucks the life out of us one day at a time.  Can we make choices to escape it?  Absolutely.

I will share in this coming week’s email links to both the sermons from the conference:  the one about Sabbath and the story of Esther.  In both cases we are asked to consider a simple truth:  that rest is not “doing nothing.”  Rest is a deep and important part of our tradition; we cannot do without it.  It is the first thing we do to prepare for a healthy and happy life.  It is resistance to a culture whose expectations are killing us one activity and one email and one meeting at a time.  It is the key decision in our faith stories that creates space in our lives for God to show up.  

Here at the start of a new summer season, I invite all of you to consider the power, the importance, and the gift of making commitments in your life that allow for rest.  Amen.