Choosing Rest

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD
St. John’s, Essex, CT
July 18, 2021
2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Psalm 89:20-37; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56


May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[Good morning friends. I am grateful to my friend Kate for the invitation to be here. As I was preparing to come here, I realized that it has been a decade since I stood in this pulpit to bid farewell to you as your associate rector. It is indeed a joy to be here in this place that had such a meaningful role in forming me as a priest.]

Now anyone who has been on a road trip with me or been to a meeting I have hosted or just generally spent more than a few hours with me, knows that I cannot go very long without eating. I also assume this is true of everyone else, so snacks are never far away. I love to cook and love to eat good food. A leisurely meal where each bite is savored, where the conversation is meandering, meaningful, and punctuated with lots of laughter is my idea of a perfect evening. And so you can perhaps understand why I would find the line in our Gospel this morning so troubling, “they had no leisure even to eat.” No leisure to eat. What? How could this be? If I were there with Jesus, I would be applauding his intervention with the apostles. Too busy to eat? Not okay. Not at all. That is not enjoyable nor advisable for our health and well-being. We need to eat, and we need to take time to be with those we love. Those whose company fills our souls as well as delicious meals fill our stomachs.

The Apostles were keeping a frantic pace. So much coming and going. They were trying to do as much as they could to address the needs in front of them. Their effort was noble, but Jesus saw the writing on the wall. Their pace was not sustainable. They were on the road to burnout. They needed to take a break. He invites them away to a deserted place. He wants them to learn to do ministry at a pace that allows them to feed their souls as well as their bodies.

I think this reminder about pacing, and this reminder to do our life and ministry at a pace that sustains our bodies and souls is a particularly important one for us in this season. As the world reopens and we return to so many things we missed, it could be easy for us to quickly accelerate to an unsustainable pace, like that of the apostles. There is so much we want to do. Hopefully one of the gifts of this past year has been real clarity about where our priorities are and what really matters to us. Even amidst all the loss and challenges of this past year, I hope we have also come to see how much connection and community matter to us. How much it matters to be able to gather in the same physical space. Hopefully we have been reminded of the gifts of not hurrying from one place to another. The gifts of time at home. The gifts of quiet. (Although if you are a caregiver or everyone in your house was doing everything at home in the midst of this pandemic, quiet might have been a very rare commodity. I, for one, came to savor a few minutes of silence on the way to the grocery store.)

Jesus is onto something. We need time apart from work, from the hustle and bustle of daily life. We need time away. We need vacation and retreat. We need time to connect with God, time to remember whose we are, and that we belong to something much larger than ourselves. Without time to connect with God we risk losing our spiritual depth or giving into the myth that we can do it all ourselves.

Now it is easy to push back on this. There is so much work to do in the world. The world needs us - the world especially needs the abundant gifts that are present in this remarkable community of St. John’s. And for those of us with caregiving obligations the idea of a break or time off seems like a pipe dream. For those of us working in jobs that figured out how to go fully remote on a dime, we may even feel like we are working more than ever. We’ve lost (at least for a time) those walks between meetings, or that commute time on the train (I am guessing Geof would join me in missing those long commutes on Metro North without meetings), or time in airport lounges or just a daily commute in the car. When your office is mere steps from your bed or your kitchen, it is easy to have a day with meetings in all the available time. The days can feel far fuller than when we traveled miles and miles.

So what are we to do? Well, I think we have an important choice to make. Do we want to go along like the apostles? Do we want to do life and ministry at such a pace that we do not even have time to sit down and enjoy a decent meal? There are lots of societal messages that would reinforce that. In her work on wholehearted living, Brene Brown notes how American society sees exhaustion as a status symbol. If we allow ourselves to be defined by our productivity, by our achievements, and our accomplishments, then it is easy to just keep pushing, to just keep going without regard to our wellbeing.

Or do we want to accept Jesus’ invitation to rest, to renewal? Now that cannot always be accomplished by literally going away to a deserted place. If you get solitude for a walk in the woods or at the beach, wonderful. But I think it is important to remember the restorative power of just a few minutes. We do not literally have to go to a desert. We do not even have to be alone. We just need to slow down. We need to breathe deeply. We need to pay attention and be present - notice what is happening. Take a few moments to note what we are grateful for on this day, in this moment. Those simple actions can make a world of difference.

As we return to so much that we have missed, I hope that we will do so at a pace that feeds our whole selves - body, mind, and spirit. I hope we will make time - even just small windows - to do that which restores our souls. The world needs us. It needs our gifts. And we can only share them when we are whole and nourished. AMEN.