The Rhythm of Rest
Pentecost + 4 - July 6, 2014
This weekend being the Fourth of July, I've been thinking about freedom. We celebrate our independence as a nation, as individual people. We value that our country is the land of the free. We honor our forefathers and mothers who came to a new land and made a new life and had the wisdom to declare that all people are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's common to hear Americans trumpeting this right to freedom in many and various forums.
And yet, as I thought about this holiday and looked at our gospel reading for today, I got to wondering about how free we really are. Though we have political freedoms that many around the world long for, there is more to freedom than just the form of government we live under. And it seems to me that in some big ways, we are held captive.
Let me explain. A few months ago, I was listening to the radio, and caught part of an interview with author Brigid Schulte, who is a reporter for The Washington Post, and also of a book, entitled Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time. Now, I’m a working mom, and I’ve witnessed the intensifying pace of life of people around me for years now, so I was intrigued. I checked the book out of the library – and ironically, had to return it before I had had time to read more than a few chapters. (!) But I did read an article in The New York Times based on the book. Ms. Schulte's struggles to balance her family and work responsibilities led her to research this time crunch that our culture seems to wrestle with so mightily in our pursuit of happiness. She described much of her experience as “contaminated” time – so whenever she was home trying to have family time, she'd be checking work email or text messages on her phone and trying to respond. When she was at work, she'd be making phone calls to her kids' teachers or trying to coordinate the car pool. Her mind was constantly racing, filled with the unfinished to-dos on her list, so that she never felt fully present in whatever she was doing at the moment. Her research led her to someone who studies the ways people spend their time. As he reviewed the time log she had kept, he found 27 hours of “leisure” time in a given week – almost none of which felt very leisurely to her. And so he asked her, “what does leisure look like to you?” Her response? “A sick day.”
It's not a very healthy way to live, nor is it an enjoyable one, and it doesn’t feel very free. We feel the pressure of expectations – from work, from family, from our friends, from the organizations we volunteer for (or would like to, if only we could find the time!), from ourselves. We want to capture the American dream – the family, the house, the cars, the meaningful work. We want to have it all. We believe we should be able to have it all – and if that means working crazy hours – both at work and trying to provide our loved ones with whatever TV and the internet suggest we should have, well, then so be it. So many of us are caught on the hamster wheel, so sucked into our society's glorification of busy that we hardly know that we're caught – or how to just get off and stop for a while. And even when we recognize how harmful these patterns can be, there's an undertone of pride in our busy-ness. It's an accomplishment to come home at the end of the day and look at the calendar and pat ourselves on the back - “Boy, look how busy we are – but we pulled it off!”
The people Jesus was talking to in this story from Matthew were no strangers to the demands and obligations of others. To be sure, they didn’t have a lot of the distractions and alleged conveniences that we have that often just clutter up our lives – no electricity meant going to bed when it got dark, no TV or computers or tablets to keep them up past their bedtimes, no work emails or texts to be answered well past the end of the working day, no elaborate themed birthday parties to plan and carry out and pay for. But they did have to balance the demands of work and family and survival. And this passage reminds us that they also faced the burden of religious expectations. They wanted to be good and faithful people and follow God’s law, and there were plenty of religious leaders around to explain the minutia of how to fulfill God’s word, and more than happy to point it out when the average person failed. They were beat up, worn down when they realized no matter how hard they tried, they’d never live up to God’s expectations, at least as defined by the Pharisees and the scribes and the elders.
And then along comes Jesus, who also knows what it is like to live under the demands and expectations of others. He knows it’s a no-win situation; he declares it at the beginning of this reading. “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Kind of darned if you do, and darned if you don’t – and both John the Baptizer and Jesus die because they refuse to conform to others’ expectations of how they should live.
But Jesus, he calls this whole system into question, and he reveals another way to us, we who think we are so intelligent and wise, who think we can figure out ways to manage everything, who fool ourselves into thinking we can have and do it all and somehow come out on the other side with no cost to ourselves or our relationships. Out of compassion and mercy for all who are burdened and weighed down, weary of the way we are living, Jesus calls us to come to him for rest. The Message version of the Bible puts it this way:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” (Matt. 11:28-30)
This is an invitation to join our lives to Jesus’ life, to be yoked to him. I’ll admit I don’t know all that much about that part of agricultural life, except that the yoke is that long piece of wood that lies across your shoulders – and if we’re yoked to Jesus, that means we are harnessed in with him alongside us. That yoke lies across his shoulders too – and he is pulling those burdens along with us. Don't get me wrong - this passage is not about sitting around, twiddling our thumbs. There is work to be done: real work. Urgent work. Kingdom work. Jesus was never a slacker. He worked and he worked hard at what he was sent here to do. But he knew how to get away, to leave the crowds and their demands behind. He knew how to find that time to reconnect with God, to spend time with his closest followers and friends and be renewed. He knew how to have a good time (remember that wedding in Cana?).
Jesus is our model for a different way of life, a life that embraces the rhythm of rest. When we are yoked with Jesus, walking and working with him, we follow his lead. He guides our steps. He helps us learn to put first things first. He teaches us to make the hard decisions about what really matters to him and for us and for our lives together. We learn about doing work with purpose, work that is meaningful, work that makes a difference in our lives, and in the life of the world. And we learn how to rest, how to let go and trust that God has this, that the world will continue to spin without our effort. It’s a revolutionary idea, in our day and age, no? It's rest as resistance to the pressures of the world around us, a different kind of Independence Day, when we embrace the freedom Christ gives. So, breathe deep, if you’re weary this day. Come to Jesus, if you are burned out and worn down by life. Link your life to his. Let him show you how he does it. Experience the unforced rhythms of grace found in Jesus – and then go to share this grace with a hurting and tired world.
Amen.
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