First Reading: Zechariah 9:9-12
9Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. 10I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations; his rule shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. 11As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. 12Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.
Psalm 145:1-14/15
1I will exalt you, O God my King, and bless your name forever and ever. 2Every day will I bless you and praise your Name forever and ever. 3Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised; there is no end to his greatness. 4One generation shall praise your works to another and shall declare your power. 5I will ponder the glorious splendor of your majesty and all your marvelous works. 6They shall speak of the might of your wondrous acts, and I will tell of your greatness. 7They shall publish the remembrance of your great goodness; they shall sing of your righteous deeds. 8The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness. 9The Lord is loving to everyone and his compassion is over all his works. 10All your works praise you, O Lord, and your faithful servants bless you. 11They make known the glory of your kingdom and speak of your power; 12That the peoples may know of your power and the glorious splendor of your kingdom. 13Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom; your dominion endures throughout all ages. 14The Lord is faithful in all his words and merciful in all his deeds. 15The Lord upholds all those who fall; he lifts up those who are bowed down.
Second Reading: Romans 7:14-25a
14We know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. 17So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 21So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25aThanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Gospel: Matthew 11:25-30
25Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; 26yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. 28Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Rest
I don’t think there’s a more appropriate time for us to consider our subject for today than in these long, dogdays of summer, that’s the subject of rest. Summertime is the season of the year when we plan and enjoy our time away. We work hard and we look for ways to unwind, to relax, to get away from the burdens of our everyday lives and get some much-deserved rest. I, for one, have no problem admitting that the older I get the more I want to slow down and find more time to rest. I’m finding the wisdom of my grandfather to be truer than ever, “you don’t have to go at everything like you’re killing snakes.”
We’ve all heard, or are even guilty of saying, things like, there’s no rest for the weary or, I’ll rest when I’m dead. But deep down we know we all need a break. Nonetheless, the more advanced in years we get, the less time we seem to have to relax. Finding time to relax, to park our brain, or even just get a nap, these are things we don’t seem to do anymore. And when we finally do find the time, our plans are so full, we seem to have to come home from vacation in order to get the rest we need. A good deal of our problem is because we live in a hyper stimulated society.
Texts, instant communication apps, and cellphones in general, not to mention 24-hour access to information, all compete for our time. If I want the current news or the weather, there’s an app for that. If priority shipping is required, even overnight, Amazon’s got it. Got the munchies or don’t want to cook? Grubhub, Doordash, and Uber, among others, will get that to you in a flash. Even our recreation time seems to be at warp speed. There is, it sems, a never-ending search for leisure time. So maybe it isn’t a result of getting old, it’s more a result of the full-throttle society we live in. So, to cope, we invent ways to be more efficient.
But what we find is that the more efficient we are, the more demands are placed upon us. I’ve shared this with some of you, but it’s a great example of how greater efficiency can bring greater demands. My first assignment in the Air Force was at Kunsan AB, Korea. Each morning we were required to provide the Colonel with the status of our Pave Spike pods and equipment. To accomplish this, each morning at 5:30 am, one of us would take a single 8½” x11” laminated sheet of paper to the Colonel. Before delivering the slide, we would update the status with a grease pencil. All we had to do was hand him the slide and wait to see if he had any questions. The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Fast forward 25 years.
That same report, 2½ decades later, required between 15 and 25 computer printed pages and three 1-hour briefings. There was a 1-hour break between each briefing just in case we needed to go back and do more research. Before I retired in 2007, my day started at 4:00 AM and ended most days just about suppertime. Additionally, during many of those years I was also taking college and Seminary classes. But I’m not unique, many of you know what I’m talking about.
Take the part time dairy farmer, for example. For these industrious families, getting up before daylight was routine. For some in this congregation, you had to get up before daybreak to milk the cows and take care of the other needed chores. Then once the cows were milked, it was breakfast and then off to the city to work an 8-5 job. Then once you got home, it was milk the cows again, and do the rest of the necessary chores. We all know that tending to livestock is a 7-days a week job, and taking a break means getting someone else to come and do your chores for you.
Both my grandfathers used to tell me that a good man will work from can’t see to can’t see and never complain. And both my grandfathers exemplified that statement. However, they also taught me the value of rest. Grandfather Hargis would often say, “boy, you need to sit down from time to time and just study on things.” This was his way of taking a nice break, usually in the heat of the day to simply rest and relax. Rest, do we even know how to rest anymore? I’m not talking about sleep; I’m talking about taking the time to relax and allow yourself the time needed to rest your body, your mind, and your soul. Jesus knew the value of getting away; Jesus knew we need time to relax.
In our Gospel reading for today we find a wonderful invitation: “Come to me all you who labor and are being burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). In this passage, Jesus is speaking to the woman who cannot sleep, to the child who is anxious, and to the man is bone-tired. Come … rest. The invitation is gentle, not forceful. His invitation includes all who will respond: or as we like to say here in the South, He’s talking to “all y’all.” No one is excluded. Everyone is invited to come, to come, and rest. What intrigues me is why so many people turn Jesus down.
Growing up my father and grandfathers taught me the value of putting in a long day’s work. Commuting into Phoenix each morning, my dad was at his desk by eight, and then home for supper. After supper, if needed, he would gather us boys and go outside to take care of the needed things around the house. Because mom and dad owned two additional apartments, we were responsible for lawncare and repairs to these other structures. Both mom and dad came from a family of farmers. No one, it seemed, had much time to sit much. There were always crops to irrigate, fences to mend, equipment to repair, alfalfa to bail, cotton to hoe or pick…you know the routine. The days were long and there was precious little time for rest.
This routine reminds me of the time Terry and I were stationed at Nellis AFB, in Las Vegas, Nevada. I worked up range in Nevada and worked the nightshift. I would fly to work at noon on Monday and wouldn’t get back until 7am on Friday. Because my family lived just 6 hours away in Phoenix, many times we would jump in the car and head home. That evening I would get some sleep and then on Saturday, I would help my younger brother Mark with his landscaping business. He would pick me up early and we wouldn’t get back until after dark most days. Then after church on Sunday we would once again drive the 6 hours back to Las Vegas so I could get ready to head to work again on Monday.
As I said before, I’m not unique, there are a lot of people with similar routines. I grew up listening to my parents and grandparents quoting the Bible: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” (Proverbs 16:27, TLB). The other quote I heard often comes from the 6th chapter of Proverbs; “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her food in summer, and gathers her sustenance in harvest. How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond, and want like an armed man (6:6-11, RSV).
Solomon is bidding us to learn a lesson from nature. I appreciate the way the NRSV translated the Hebrew word asel or sluggard, they chose to use the word “lazybones.” Go to the hard-working ant, O lazybones, and learn your lesson. Work hard. Don’t ever sit still. Our parents and grandparents didn’t invent a hard work ethic. They found it in their Bibles. But what we often miss when reading this passage is that there is also the invitation to rest. According to the Greek dictionary, the word Jesus uses here for rest is anapauso, “to pause, to cease from movement or labor in order to recover and collect (one’s) strength.” I don’t think we need a dictionary to tell us what that means. We already know what rest is. We just don’t do it very well.
We also need to note a second consideration here. Jesus is saying that rest is also a matter of the soul. “Come to me,” Jesus said, “and I will give you rest for your souls.” The soul is the part of us that’s communes with God. For the Greek culture, the soul is the intersection of thought, feeling, and breath. It’s the gift breathed into us by God that makes us human. The soul is our consciousness, it’s where our dreams lie, it houses our imagination, and it’s the seat of our passions and hopes.
The soul is the part of us that can be traumatized, anxious, and fearful. When the soul is wounded, one of the typical responses is to keep pushing on, persisting through, often in the vain hope, that if we just add another inch to the span of our day, we will speed by or gloss over the deep wound that we are trying to avoid. That’s what Wayne Muller identified as he reflected the practice of keeping sabbath – and why so many people resist it. He wrote: “This is one of our fears of quiet; if we stop and listen, we will hear this emptiness. If we worry we’re not good or whole inside, we will be reluctant to stop and rest, afraid we will find a lurking emptiness, a terrible, aching void with nothing to fill it, as if it will corrode and destroy us like some horrible, insatiable monster. If we’re terrified of what we’ll find in rest, we will refuse to look up from our work, refuse to stop moving. We quickly fill all the blanks on our calendar with errands, tasks, accomplishments, things to be done … anything to fill the time, the empty space.” Muller’s right.
Go to a restaurant tomorrow and watch the people around you. Some of them would rather stay attached to their smart phones than have an intelligent conversation. Go the beach to get away from it all, and when you realize that others had the same idea, take note of how many of them are staying tethered to email and internet. It’s simply the next extension of what I discovered about two weeks after I bought my first laptop computer some 25 years ago: because we can do work anywhere, we never stop working, especially if the work is mental, emotional, virtual, or expected of us. So what is the rest that Jesus invites us to that restores our souls?
That is the invitation to come to Jesus Himself. We find the rest we so desperately need by “coming to Him. Coming to Jesus is more than simply coming to church. Coming to Jesus means pondering His words, we “do not live by bread alone, but by the life-giving words that come from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). We come to Christ by spending time in prayer, spending time reflecting on His grace, by counting our blessings and giving thanks to God for all He does for us day in and day out. It means remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy. Coming to Jesus means remembering that God rested on the seventh day and commanded us to do the same.
Speaking of honoring the Sabbath, I would be remis as your pastor not to talk about the how we fail not only to keep the 3rd Commandment but to rest as God rested. In Genesis chapter 2 we read, “And on the seventh day God finished His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all His work that He had done in creation.” (vs. 2-3). Then in Exodus chapter 20 we read, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (vs. 8-11).
Trust me when I say much ink has been spilled discussing exactly what it means to refrain from work on the Sabbath. Jesus even battled the hypocrisy of the religious leaders over their double-standard. The only “work” (and I put that word in quotes) Jesus did on the Sabbath was to restore people, to unburden them, to give them rest from the burdens of life. Jesus healed, and He taught in the Synagogues to give people the rest they needed and to refresh their souls. God made the Sabbath holy for our sake not His.
God set the Sabbath aside so that we have a chance to rest, to be refreshed and to take the time to worship and honor God. Remember how in the desert the Israelites were not allowed to gather manna on the Sabbath, but they were allowed to prepare it so they could eat. There are those necessary things we must do on the Sabbath in order to live and come to church. But we need to examine our activities and ask ourselves the tough questions.
Is my gathering with friends and family on Sunday to share a simple meal and enjoy each other’s company a violation of the Sabbath, of course not. Fellowship is a part of rest and relaxation. However, we love to joke that we need to beat the Baptists to the buffet. Instead of simply saying that eating out at restaurants on Sunday can be seen as not in keeping with the Third Commandment, look again at our Exodus reading. On the [Sabbath] “you shall not do any work, you, your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.” By going out to eat on Sunday, don’t you, by your actions, force your children and/or others to work?
Keeping the Sabbath holy is more than simply coming to church and going home to watch the latest game on TV. God set aside the Sabbath and declared it holy for us to rest and recuperate from our everyday activities. For us to keep the 3rd Commandment, we need to examine everything we do to ensure our leisure activities do not force someone else to work. Now before you grab me after the service and ask me about emergency services, or the military, yes, we need these essential services for our protection and well-being. But we cannot use that as an excuse for our non-essential activities. We must examine our lives and ask ourselves, am I doing something that would cause someone else to work unnecessarily? Jesus recognized that labors such as healing and teaching on the Sabbath were important for the well-being of God’s people.
Honoring the Sabbath means coming to Jesus for the rest we need. The world doesn’t revolve around us, and we need to ensure our leisure time doesn’t cause someone else to work. Here’s a thought, wouldn’t it be better for us to orbit around the One who made it all, the One who fills it with life and brings it to such abundance. Jesus said, “Come to me all who labor and are being burdened, and I will give you rest.” Jesus’ call isn’t a once and done invitation, it’s an on-going invite.
We don’t rest once and then think we’re done with it. Neither do we sit on our hands while others labor to benefit us. A full life is a rhythm of work and rest, of task and reflection. Rest involves not only the body, but the soul as well. God set aside the Sabbath so that body, mind, and soul could be refreshed. Jesus’ offer is an invitation to help us regain the balance in our lives. That’s why we come to this place for worship.
It’s here that we hear how much we’re loved, how much God cares about us and is concerned about what’s best for us body and soul. Yes, choices must be made, but the question is, do the things I do on the Sabbath refresh my body, mind, and soul, and do those leisure activities cause someone else to miss the opportunity to do the same? May you have a blessed day of rest in body, mind, and spirit, as you honor and keep the sabbath. Jesus said, “Come to me…I will give you rest.
Amen