Gimme a Break | Exod. 20:8-11; Deut. 5:12-15 | 4.19.26

Well, I am grateful to be with y'all.

And to start with a little silliness, I also secretly love to be in churches when everybody is out because everybody still sits in the same spots.

I promise that if we copy-pasted last week onto this one, y'all would all still be exactly where you are, deeply Presbyterians.

So thank y'all for having me.

I am always grateful to be with this church and to be with y'all, and also to let Chad spend a little bit of time maybe having brunch on a Sunday because we all dream about it.

And so I hope that Chad and Lauren are having a wonderful time in Chattanooga.

And I am grateful to get to be with y'all this morning.

We all join me in prayer.

Holy God, word made flesh.

Let us come to this word open to being surprised, silence our agendas, banish our assumptions, cast out our casual detachment, confound our expectations and clear the cobwebs from our ears.

Penetrate the corners of our hearts in this word.

We know that you can and we pray that you will.

And we wait with great anticipation.

Amen.

So we have uh two scripture readings.

You have them in your bulletin.

We're gonna look at them again later, so you just want to might want to make sure you know where this piece of paper is, but in case you want to follow along.

Our first reading is coming from the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verses 8 through 11.

Exodus 20:8–11

Remember the Sabbath day and 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.

You shall not do any work, you, your son, or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.

Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

Our second scripture is coming from Deuteronomy five.

Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you.

Six days you shall labor and do all of your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God, you shall not do any work.

You or your son or your daughter, or your male, or your female slave, or your ox, or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slaves may rest as well as you.

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

This is the work this is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

We all join me in prayer.

Holy one, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be welcome in your sight, our rock and redeemer, spirit and sustainer.

Amen.

So I've been pretty fascinated recently by the ways that sleep and rest and naps have become things that we want to see.

I am uh particularly fascinated by this because my my soon-to-be-five-year-old just gave up a nap and I didn't realize how precious those two hours of my day are.

Um, and so I'm holding on to my two and a half-year-old's nap with a vice grip.

And so I am just aware of how we are viewing sleep and naps and everything in this world.

In 2013, the actress Tilda Swinton, which you may know if you've ever seen The Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe, she's the white witch.

If you've ever seen that Wes Anderson film, she's in that.

But regardless, she went to the Museum of Modern Art and slept in a glass box for a couple hours a day.

She did this for a week.

That was the whole exhibit.

Come see an Oscar-winning actress, take a nap.

Which you may not think people would really want to see.

She was just wearing regular clothes, sleeping on regular sheets, but people flocked to this exhibit.

People came from all over to watch Tilda Swinton take a nap.

And another one, it uh a Rotterdam-based design student named Kirsten Spruitt made something called a space for lingering.

And it's where she invited visitors to lay down.

She made the whole room one big mattress, and she gave them headphones to play resident soundscapes and to do nothing for as long as they needed.

Because she was doing this research around the feeling of restlessness and always needing to be productive and efficient.

So she created a space that was wholly inefficient.

And so, over the past 10 or so years, people have really been creating art around the need to rest and to combat restlessness because we are in a culture that values the grind and values burnout.

I worked as a hospital chaplain for two years, and in the hospital we have something called a code lavender, which is where you respond to somebody that is actively experiencing burnout.

And we all know it.

We've all experienced it in one form of another: the burnout of your job, the burnout of being a working parent or a stay-at-home parent.

We all know burnout in our lives.

Even in ministry, we experience it.

The research now is that 56% of pastors burn out of ministry in the first five years after they graduate seminary.

And I can tell you that the majority of friends I went to seminary with are no longer in ministry.

They are doing ministry in other ways.

They are therapists, they are flight attendants, they are bartenders, and they are Costco employees, and they are very happy.

But evidence shows that we think that busy people are better.

We think that the idea of rest is what people do when they're lazy, when you've when you don't have enough to do, and so rest has suddenly become commercialized.

Look at all the wellness movement.

You have to do all of these things in order to feel better, in order to get some rest.

And this result is taking its toll.

We feel guilty when we don't do enough, but then we feel guilty when we don't rest enough.

Earlier this year, research from the uh revealed that Americans between the ages of 35 and 65 are more stressed than people their age in the 1990s.

The World Health Organization has classified stress as a health epidemic of the 21st century.

And I imagine a lot of you, if you work in a corporate environment, are warned about the hazards of burnout, or maybe you've seen it or you've experienced it yourself, because all we want is a day off.

All we want is a break, and all we do is fill it.

And then we have this Hebrew word Shabbat, this word Sabbath.

In these scriptures, you see they're almost identical, but they're in different books.

And this word Sabbath literally means to cease, to rest.

And we talk about Sabbath all the time, and when it comes down to it, we just don't like doing it.

We don't want to be doing stuff, and so we don't want to cease doing stuff.

Rest just gets in the way of the things that we want to do.

My mom just got a new oven and it has a Sabbath setting on it, so you can preset it, which is very confusing to her.

But the church that we come to to understand Sabbath on this day, which is supposed to be a day of Sabbath, is not very good at acknowledging rest or talking about it, but God is very, very clear that Sabbath rest is rooted in pleasure and delight.

It is one of the most basic building blocks of our covenantal relationship with God.

God values Sabbath so much that God made it a commandment, the fourth commandment.

Coming before, advocating for respect for one's parents, as well as those condemning murder, infidelity, stealing, lying, and jealousy.

Rest comes before all of those.

The word Sabbath occurs over 140 times in Scripture.

That's more than the word grace, which occurs more than 129, and it's more than the word judgment, which occurs 121.

Sabbath is what marks all of God's people as set apart from the rest of society.

The refusal to do work, the refusal to engage in a system that makes us falsely believe that we are dependent on anything other than God.

That is what makes God's people unique.

And I want to take a look at this commandment.

I gave you these printouts because I wanted uh you guys to see them with me.

And we're gonna read them together.

You can kind of see how some of it's bolded, I think, hopefully.

Um we're gonna read these together.

I'm gonna read the non-bold parts, and if you will read the bold parts together, like you do with every other part of the bulletin.

Let's start with Exodus.

You ready?

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all of your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

You shall not do any work, you, your son or your daughter, your male or your female slave, your livestock, or the alien residents in your homes.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.

Therefore, the Lord blessed the seventh day and consecrated it.

Now the second iteration of this commandment is a little different, but I want we're gonna read it the same way and see what you notice.

Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

As the Lord your God commanded you, six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

You shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock or the resident aliens in your towns, so that your male and female slaves may rest as well as you.

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

What we see in these two scriptures is that Sabbath is more than just a word.

We are not only to practice Sabbath because God values it, we are to practice Sabbath as a form of justice.

We are to practice Sabbath to honor our ancestors who couldn't.

We are to practice Sabbath as a means of remembering who we are and who we are called to be.

We are to practice Sabbath because people who have been redeemed and rescued from a grind culture that has made us into slaves is not who we were made to be.

Sabbath isn't some cute excuse to justify a nap.

It's a revolutionary practice mandated by a revolutionary God.

And we as the church don't acknowledge how important Sabbath is because the church is a part of this culture where we worship the idol of busyness and committees and commitments, not only through the societal value of our ability to consume, but also through our ideological ideologies about our ability to produce.

Just think about it.

We have the Protestant work ethic, the Protestant work ethic, which crystallizes the truth that churches too have become complicit in the promoting the idea that your virtue can be measured by your labor, that what we produce determines how we are worth.

And friends, I am here to tell you that that's a lie.

God can work through us, but if we work ourselves to death, even if we are doing God's work, we are missing the point of life.

Practicing Sabbath is vital and it is who we are created to be.

But practicing Sabbath is countercultural, which means no one is going to make it easy for you.

You have to prioritize it and you have to define it.

I get to lay on the rug and make believe with my toddler, even if it's just three minutes before they go to bed.

I get to share dinner with my family.

I get to spend the afternoon making cookies or art or music with my friends.

I get to sleep in in the morning.

I get to take my dog for a walk outside.

I get to listen to a podcast or an album or an audiobook for the next 20 minutes.

I get this moment.

But we have to be willing to put down the busyness and allow ourselves to rest.

Not because it's a reward for getting things done, but because we are prioritizing what blesses our lives with meaning.

We are prioritizing beauty and awe, and it requires sacrifice because getting to practice Sabbath often means we have to put something down.

It means we have to step out of the treadmill of life for a second, step away from the things that are taking our energy and bleeding us dry.

And that may mean we have to put down a relationship that is unhealthy, or an addiction, or social media, or Netflix, or the FOMO that leads you to attend every social event that you're invited to.

We have to put down the idea that we have to be the perfect student or employee or partner or child.

To experience God's rest and renewal, you are going to have to claim your moment, which is going to require you to find that moment and know that it is blessed by God.

So, right here, we're going to practice it because I'm going to tell you all these things and then you go out, but what is it like?

Catch a fish, see a fish?

Never mind, not gonna do that.

You are here.

All right, we are going to practice a little Sabbath, and we are gonna start with something you do already with your breath.

We did it a little bit in the children's sermon, but at the beginning of every one of our Eukirk worship services, we start with three deep breaths.

And the difference in the room from when we sit down to when the prelude starts, we have those three deep breaths, and the difference in the feeling in the room is palpable because people are given a chance to get to breathe and rest for a moment.

And so I'm going to invite you to do the same.

I want you to close your eyes.

I want you to sit comfortably, let your feet rest on the ground.

I want you to unclench your jaw, drop your shoulders from your ears.

Whatever you are carrying, expectations, grocery lists, emails, worries, just imagine setting it down beside you.

It will still be there later.

Now hear this.

You do not earn this moment.

You are allowed to rest.

You are already held by God.

So let us take three deep breaths together.

Inhale and exhale.

And inhale, and exhale, and inhale, and exhale.

You did not earn this moment.

You are held by a beloved God.

And as you breathe, maybe you quietly repeat to yourself, be still and know that I am God.

Let that truth settle into you.

Not something to achieve, just something to receive.

Now bring your awareness back into this room.

Wiggle your fingers and your toes.

You can open your eyes.

And carry this small Sabbath.

This is the kind of micro Sabbath, as they call, that you can do at any time.

Maybe don't close your eyes when you're driving, but if you're sitting at your desk at a stoplight or something, you can take three deep breaths.

This is your invitation.

Your get to reclaim the Sabbath that defines who we are as children of God.

It is not what we achieve and how much we produce, but it is how we pause and remember God around us and God within us and God calling us to be who we can be.

Your rest is an act of resistance, it is an act of justice, and it invites other people to do the same.

So how will you practice this Sabbath, this moment to cease, this moment to rest?

It will be different for each of you, but maybe it just starts with your breath.

Starts with something you're already doing anyway.

How will you be invited into this world?

Not to go faster, not to keep burning the candle at both ends, but instead to claim the moments of God's peace and God's love, and the God that shows you that just a moment of pause can change yourselves and the world around you.

May it be so.

Amen.