Readings:
Sermon:
Hello, I’m Adam Hadley, Priest in Charge at St Mary Kingswinford and Church of the Ascension Wall Heath.
I’m going to focus on a small part of the reading for today and it comes right at the beginning of the chunk of St Mark’s gospel where we are told this:
“He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while’.”
And inherent in this small section of the reading is a direction from Jesus that we always need to make sure we properly rest. In other words, we need to ensure sabbath is built into our routines and that we don’t just frantically work until we burn out.
In this reading the disciples have been busy doing things for God and teaching people about God. We get the impression they are buzzing. Excited to tell Jesus all the good stuff they had done. And we probably all know something of that adrenaline rush: those moments when we are hyper and want to keep going, pushing ourselves to do more. Here, Jesus could have easily said something like ‘fabulous, keep going, do more healing, do more teaching, do more and more and that way we build the kingdom’ and the disciples would have no doubt done it. Done it until they were exhausted and burnt out. However, Jesus doesn’t say this. Instead, having done all that they have done, he takes them away to rest before continuing with their activity and within this series of events are questions and challenges to us: do we ensure we have proper time to rest and do we see rest as much a part of our Christian discipleship and ministry as we do activity?
We live in a world of instant communication of endless emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, social media posts. People want, or even demand, a response in the moment and so often we reinforce that by offering the immediate response demanded of us. Work demands more and more of our time. Working late into the evening and rest being seen as a weakness. A toxic worldwide culture of working until we drop. And all too often this can spill over into our churches and ministry. That we define ourselves through the amount of activity we can do and that somehow the more we do the better people or Christians or disciples we demonstrate ourselves to be.
And it’s within this modern context of excessive work that we find the challenge contained both in this reading, and many others throughout the Bible, a challenge from Jesus where he teaches that a fundamentally important part of our lives is found in rest and in teaching us this he also lives it out in his own life and ministry: often going away to rest and find space to just be. We also only have to return to Genesis to see God resting on the seventh day.
Thisisn’t a whimsical end to the creation story but instead a deep theological insight into what is Godly and through this we learn that rest is both something of God and something which God lives out in practice.
A theologian called Walter Brueggemann wrote a book called ‘Sabbath as Resistance’ and a core message of it is how the Christian practice and discipline of taking rest, taking Sabbath, is now a completely radical concept. That in a world which has defined itself by activity and productivity a critical and radical challenge which Christianity offers is the living out and teaching about rest and sabbath. When Christianity says ‘no’ to a culture which inflicts burn out on so many people, a culture which reinforces the idea of our identity being found in work, Jesus teaches about seeing the importance of every single one of us living life in all it’s fulness, a fulness which cannot be found in endless work and exhaustion but instead in understanding our need to rest and to partake in sabbath.
And it is this idea of identity to which I turn to because it’s a question every Christian must one day reflect on. Where do we find our identity? Do we find our identity in the world, or do we find our identity in God and what does either mean for our lives? As children of God, we should always orientate ourselves to our identity in God and what today’s gospel reading reminds us is that part of this is resting with Him and allowing ourselves to be fully alive in Him rather than burnt out by the world.
As we read this gospel reading which is preceded by activity and ends in activity it is important to remember that in the middle of this is moving physically away from activity and engaging in disciplined, purposeful rest. Only by doing this ourselves in our own day to day lives will we find our identity in God and be fully able to live life in all its fulness.
Amen.
Questions:
- What is your response to the practice of ‘rest’ being a core part of being Christian?
- How will you ensure that as a church you hold yourselves, and others, to account in taking time to rest and taking sabbath?
- Where might you need to retreat to in order to rest?