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.

Carrying (and Sharing) our Burdens

 

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer via Zoom

Anselm of Canterbury, April 21, 2021

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. 

“‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” 

Anyone else breathing a little more deeply after hearing those lines from Matthew? I am weary. We are all carrying heavy burdens. Sometimes I think more than we even realize. I was reflecting a bit on this past year, and the image came to mind of walking with a heavy backpack. I certainly feel like I am. And in some ways I feel like I have only begun to realize what it is that I am carrying. So much grief over all that we have lost in the last year - lost lives, lost opportunities. The fear and anxiety of rising case numbers. Another mass shooting in a grocery store. What will the aftermath be of the guilty verdict in the Chauvin case? And the knowledge that no matter what happens in the days ahead we still have so much work ahead of us to undo the systemic realities of oppression in our nation and our society. 

And while we may share many of these burdens, we each have our own. Burdens particular to our circumstances, our family or community. Burdens we carry because of race, gender, sexual orientation, or another category society has placed upon us. Those burdens may weigh on us in different ways at different times. Even though I think Atticus and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird were on to something, we cannot fully know what it is like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. We cannot fully know each other’s burdens. 

But here’s what we can know. We ALL have them. We are ALL carrying them. No matter how peaceful someone may seem on the outside. No matter how “all figured out” or “put together” they may seem, the burdens are there. So there is our first invitation of the day, an invitation to compassion, for ourselves and for others. We don’t need to beat ourselves up about the burdens. We don’t need to get trapped in a cycle of comparison about who has more or whose are heavier. Let’s just stipulate that everyone’s got them, and we are all weary.

So, I think oh good, thank you Jesus, we are going to get to rest. But then we keep reading in Matthew, and out comes my argumentative self. What? Jesus, you just promised rest, but now you are talking about yokes, and learning, and more burdens. Did you miss the part about how we are weary? And by weary, we mean bone tired, exhausted, sacred, anxious, worried, and all the rest of it. 

Then I pause. I breathe. I think. Would the Jesus I know really say, “Oh I see you are carrying a lot of burdens there. Here let me give you some more stuff to carry.” No. That doesn’t actually sound like Jesus. Could I imagine Jesus saying, “Oh, I see you are carrying a lot of burdens. How about we take that backpack off and look through them together and see what we can put down?” That I could imagine. 

So, my friends, there is our second invitation. An invitation to learning, an invitation to lay some burdens down or to ask for help carrying whatever it is that has to stay in the backpack. 

I hope that for many of us there has been a gift buried in all the challenges of the past year; it is the gift that comes with being confronted with the fragility of life. The gift of having our priorities clarified. The gift of being able to see and know with certainty what really matters in life. We can indeed lay some burdens down. We can let go of those things that no longer serve us. We can let go of those things that have been barriers to connection, barriers to a deeper relationship with God and with each other. If this year has shown us nothing else, it has shown us the primacy of community, of connection, of belonging. 

So, in this week, in this Easter season, I invite you to take some time in your prayers to unpack whatever it is you are carrying. To see if you might lay some of it down. And then to ask for help, from Jesus, from those who are beloved to you, to pick up whatever it is that you need to keep carrying. We may not be able to fully understand the particularities of each other’s burdens, but we can certainly bear them. We can carry them together. And I trust, my friends, that as we move forward together sharing the load and leaving some behind, we will no longer be quite so weary. We will be energized with hope and possibility for the future. Amen. 

Finding More Mary Moments

View from cliffs of Monhegan Island in Maine

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer

Feast of Mary and Martha

July 29, 2020

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. 

It is not possible for me to read this Gospel lesson and not think of my college roommate, Michelle. Truly you could just swap out Mary and Martha in this lesson for Michelle and Molly. I had always been the kid who had to do her homework before playing. I often worked ahead, starting a paper weeks before it was due. Michelle, on the other hand, could wake up early the morning a paper was due and crank out a brilliant piece of writing. I marveled at this ability. 

Multiple years of living together and decades of friendship have meant that both of us do a bit more of both. Michelle has become a successful lawyer and does a lot more advance work and planning. I have discovered that as a grown up it is not possible to complete your “to do” list first or do everything in advance. I have even written a sermon on the day I preached it! 

But the lessons that Michelle taught me are far more significant and powerful than just about when we do our work or how we manage our time. The important thing wasn’t about planning vs. procrastinating. It was about priorities. Michelle reminded me of that all important truth (which I have the tendency to forget when I get focused like Martha on all the tasks in front of me) that time and relationships are far more valuable and meaningful than achievements.  

The Holy Spirit has a way of showing up and providing the lessons when I need them, as long as I am paying attention, of course! I feel like I needed this Mary and Martha reminder this week especially. Perhaps it is that I am just back from vacation trying to hold on to that sense of peace and serenity I found sitting on the cliffs of Monhegan Island in Maine staring out at the vast expanse of ocean and sky. It is so easy to just dive right back into all the things, all the tasks. Particularly in the midst of a pandemic when tasks are so wonderfully useful for keeping the stress and anxiety of this time at a relative distance. If I just focus on my “to do” list - on sending more emails and writing more documents, making more phone calls, I can forget for a few minutes about all the headlines of rising infection rates and rising death tolls, I can stop thinking about all the what ifs for our work life, for our families, for our children - what are the next weeks and months going to look like? 

Now of course there is value in accomplishing tasks. There is a certain joy and creativity that comes with losing ourselves in a piece of writing or a project. And it is good to have things to keep our anxiety at bay. Of course, we all have jobs to do. We have important and meaningful work, which requires us to complete tasks. I am not dismissing our tasks or our work at all. 

I am just taking a cautionary tale from our Gospel (mostly because I need it today), and I hope it is a helpful reminder for you as well. There are dangers if we live on the Martha end of the spectrum, if we pour ourselves into work, something that is especially easy to do when we are all working from home. Our work is always right there. It requires a particular kind of self-discipline (and the blessing of compassionate and smart supervisors) to leave something “at the office” when “the office” is only a few feet from where we make dinner, play cards, read for fun, watch tv or do our morning exercise routine. It is all right there. We have to choose to be Mary. 

It takes work on our part. But my friends that “work” is so completely worth it. That is what we need to remember today. Jesus tells Mary that she has chosen “the better part.” Indeed. We need that part. We need those times where we sit, we pause, we reflect, we learn. We need to put aside the tasks and the busyness from time to time. We need time that feeds our souls and fills our hearts. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that we are going to be in this mode of living and working for the long haul, and so we need to sustain ourselves. We cannot rely on grit or willpower or the rewards of achievements. We need the kind of inner strength and fortitude that comes with having reoriented ourselves to God. 

That is the gift of today’s Gospel, that is the gift of having friends like Michelle in our lives. It is the gift of being reminded that being present to each other, that pausing to reflect, to learn, to listen is a balm to our soul in troubled times. 

Sitting at the feet of Jesus likely looks a little different to each of us, depending on our circumstances or our spiritual journeys. And also what time of day or day of the week it is. Whatever that might look like in your context today and this week, I hope you will carry Mary and Martha with you as you go about your life. I hope you will honor your Martha moments for the good and meaningful work you accomplish. I hope that you will also be sure there are plenty of Mary moments (at least one a day) where you find a way to sit at Jesus’ feet and receive the gift of his grace that is so abundantly offered to us. Amen. 

Rest for our Souls

Half Moon Bay in CA

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD
DFMS Noonday Prayer via Zoom
Feast of Anselm of Canterbury

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.
‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’

I hope our Gospel text resonated for you today. “You will find rest for your souls.” Indeed. I would guess we are all in need of that. I will say that when I pulled up this text for today, I breathed a little deeper. My shoulders dropped a bit. I thought, “Thank you, God. I needed that text today. I needed that reminder. I need to know again that profound truth that we do not bear our burdens alone. Thanks be to God.”

I think there are two important truths for us to hold onto out of today’s readings. First, is that generous reminder in Jesus’ invitation to us that we do not journey alone. I am certainly one who can easily fall into the trap of thinking that I have to do something myself. Sometimes it is because I have high standards, and I don’t think anyone else will meet them. Or sometimes it is because I don’t want to be a burden to someone else. Or sometimes it is because I get stuck thinking that efficiency or results are more important than process. Never mind that I can work myself to exhaustion trying to balance all the spinning plates or complete all the tasks on my own.

Of course, Jesus’ invitation is for us to remember that he walks with us. I also think he is reminding us that the way to do ministry, the way to do life best is in collaboration. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” Indeed. What can we learn from Jesus? Well, he did not operate alone. He called his disciples to join him. He sent them out two by two, not solo. We are not meant to be solitary heroes. We are meant to be a team. We need each other.

Over and over again, my life experience has shown me that often the best solution to any given challenge is not my idea or my colleague’s idea. It is the version we hammer out together building on each other’s insights and wisdom. Jesus was on to an important truth about how we are meant to do our ministry when he sent the disciples out two by two. Collaboration is a far more life-giving way to minister.

Second, I think the important truth for us is about “rest.” That word shows up twice in just two lines of Scripture. Rest is so important. I don’t know about you all, but I am tired. I am weary. I could use that “rest for my soul” of which Jesus speaks. And as I talked about yesterday as well, in this time it can be truly challenging to do the normal practices that usually work for restoring our souls. We may need to rail and vent about that for a bit. I hope all of us have people in our lives with whom we can have truly honest conversations. Where we can say whatever is on our mind. They will listen with generosity and compassion, because they love us. Then, also because they love us, they will gently remind us that now that we have vented out all our anger and frustration, it might be possible for us to transform the situation. They kindly invite us to be our best selves moving forward, and they keep us from getting stuck in a place of anger and resentment.

So, if you are feeling frustrated, reach out to one of those friends or family members who serves that role for us. Vent. And then move forward.

There is a holy invitation in this time to expand our repertoire of soul restoring practices. An invitation to find new ways to rest, even in the midst of stress, anxiety, and very busy schedules. Those other practices will have their time again. They are not being replaced, only supplemented. Perhaps supplemented by a few minutes of quiet prayer. Or more exercise. Or drinking more water. Or rearranging our work setup to provide a different view or more comfortable way to sit or stand. Perhaps we will take up a new indoor hobby we had always been meaning to try. Whatever it may be, may we find new practices that are life giving and sustaining in this time. May we find small things that give rest for our souls.

May we also find solace and strength in God’s abiding love in our lives. May we give thanks for the companions on the way whose presence sustains us. AMEN.