Songs of Summer : Rest Hard, Work Hard (Psalm 127) | Scott Newman | Part 7 of 9

Special welcome to those of you watching online or on demand at a later point in time.

We are continuing this morning our series that we've been in this summer called Songs of Summer, where we are looking at the Psalms.

So it's been a great series so far.

But uh I have a confession to make this morning, and that is that I am an anxious person.

Um, not just anxiety, like, you know, I get anxious every once in a while, but uh I've actually been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

So that's super fun.

Uh, but this shows up in my life in in all kinds of different ways.

So there was one fall early on in my ministry life where it was just this really, really awful, difficult season for me.

It involves just a whole lot of really ugly and abusive things, but part of it was someone attacking my integrity and my work ethic in order to make themselves look and feel better.

So that was a long time ago now.

But as a result of that, every fall since then, I've struggled with this extra layer of anxiety going into the fall season.

It's like as soon as the calendar flips over from July to August, which I know isn't fall yet, but for those of us in church ministry, that means we're in full-on fall ministry prep mode.

Um, it's like as soon as the calendar flips over, anxiety decides to come and be an uninvited guest for a month or two.

So there's a number of ways to deal with anxiety, as you know.

But me being the white male American person that I am, of course, my go-to way to handle anxiety and stress is to work harder.

So I work harder, put in longer hours, try to be more productive, get my ducks in a row, make sure no one can question my productivity or my work ethic, right?

And it's all like trying to maintain this sense of control.

Because if I can feel in control, then what I believe at least is that my anxiety will be under control as well.

So for you all, I I sincerely and deeply hope that you have not had the kind of traumatic experiences that I had all those years ago.

But we're all human.

I I know that you have all experienced the reality of anxiety and stress in your life.

And so for some of you, it shows up like it does for me as this kind of like constant background noise, this consistent presence that's with you all the time.

For others of you, I would love to be in your shoes.

It just shows up in difficult or demanding moments and then it goes away again.

But there's no one who gets out of the experience of living life as a human being without having to navigate the reality of anxiety and stress.

So work pressure is a constant reality that many, if not all of us, have to deal with.

Uh, the constant and relentless pressure to produce more with less.

That's work life today.

Family anxiety is always there.

It can show up in tensions with our spouse or our partner, conflict with your kids, anxiety when it comes to differences with your extended family.

And then, of course, there's relational anxiety, right?

Relationships that once just felt fun and easy suddenly aren't anymore.

And then I know there's many of you listening who have to live with the constant anxiety of being part of a marginalized group in our world, where at best you don't feel seen or heard by the dominant culture, or at worst, you feel like the dominant culture is just outright hostile to you.

So I'm sure if you and I were to sit down and have coffee or or a drink and talk, you'd be able to tell me about the ways that anxiety shows up in your life.

But the question that we have to ask ourselves this morning is what do we do with this universal human experience?

How do we navigate the reality of anxiety in our lives?

Well, God created each of us with nervous systems.

And when our nervous systems are activated by anxiety, we tend to respond in more or less one of two ways.

So there's the fight response, which doesn't mean that we're at work in our cubicle, like having a fist fight with someone, right?

Um it's it means that when we get activated, we start working overtime.

We work really, really, really hard to overcome what we perceive to be causing our anxiety.

Now, this is super common in our culture, right?

And it's one of the major reasons that things like exhaustion and burnout and mental health challenges are just so increasingly common in our world.

So what seems like the pathway to freedom, overcome it, work harder, only leads deeper down that rabbit hole of anxiety.

So that's the first response.

The second response is there's the flight or sometimes called freeze response.

And this is where we get so overwhelmed by the pressures that we're experiencing that we just sort of shut down and give up.

And this can show up in our lives in things like depression or addiction or sabotaging our lives, or just finding anything that we can grab onto that kind of numbs that experience of overwhelm and panic.

So when the pressure gets too much that we believe it's beyond our ability to cope, something inevitably gives way and we just end up shutting down.

But just like the fight response, what starts as a way to cope and to deal with it ends up just causing more problems in the long run.

So, what I want to invite us to see this morning is that there's a third way, and that's the way of resting in God.

Now, talking about resting in God can easily sound like spiritual bypassing, like when you're anxious and overwhelmed, and someone well-meaning, truly, comes up to you and says, just rest in God.

It's gonna be okay.

I don't know about you, but whenever I hear that, I always feel worse because now I'm anxious about my life and about not resting in God.

So that's always fun.

But what I hope that we can see this morning is that truly resting in God is not a form of spiritual bypassing.

It's actually the only way forward.

Instead, we're gonna discover that it's only when we rest in God's work for us that we can do the next right thing in our lives.

So, to see how this works, let's dive into our psalm for this morning.

We're gonna be looking at Psalm 127.

I'm gonna invite you to follow along, it'll be on the screen, uh, but let's read Psalm 127 together.

So Psalm 127 says, Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain.

In vain you rise up early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves.

Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.

Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth.

Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.

They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.

So, what's going on here?

So, first, Psalm 127 is what's known as a wisdom psalm.

So in the Hebrew wisdom literature, there's oftentimes sort of two seemingly opposite truths that we have to kind of hold in tension together.

And and wisdom is not found in one or the other side, but it's it's existing in the tension between them.

So we find going on in our we find that dynamic going on in our psalm this morning.

So, in order to receive the wisdom that Psalm 127 wants to offer us, we need to be willing to sit in the tension that it's setting up.

So, on the one hand, we're invited to rest in God.

And what the psalmist is telling us is that God is behind all the working for good in the world.

If you want to build something beautiful, if you want to guard something worth protecting, ultimately it's God that enables that to happen.

And the upshot of this truth is that it gives us a place to address our anxiety.

So much of our anxiety lies to us and tells us that it's all up to you.

Anyone can relate to that?

Right?

So it's all up to you.

So work those longer hours.

Don't take your vacation time.

Just push, just push, just push.

Because if you don't, everything that you're building is gonna crumble and fall and eventually fail.

But in the face of that, the psalm tells us that we can rest easy, we can sleep, we don't have to lie awake at night with those anxious thoughts and everything left undone assaulting us because we know that God has got us.

God is gonna make it happen.

And this is a beautiful truth that we're gonna explore a little more in just a moment.

But then the psalm takes what seems like a like a like a complete left turn.

So, why do we go from talking about trusting in God's work for us and all of a sudden we're talking about children?

Okay, it seems random.

So we read this about children being a blessing from God in our modern world.

We read this in a really sentimental way, like, oh, how sweet.

God gives us these precious little lives to guide and protect and prepare for the next generation.

And and all of that is completely true.

I'm not knocking that at all.

But it misses so much of what this would have meant to people in the ancient world.

So, what we gotta understand is that for most of human history, like honestly, up until the past 100, 150 years or so, children were far more than just the next generation.

They were also your labor.

As they got older, they were your protection, and they were your ultimate social safety net for the future.

So most families didn't have the resources to hire workers, but they could have more kids.

And the more kids you have, the more productive your land and your household would be.

And what about thieves or enemies who might attack you and try to take your stuff?

Well, if you had a bunch of kids, especially sons, then they might think twice about doing you harm.

And then, of course, back in the day, people didn't have Social Security or 401ks or pensions, any of the retirement things that we do now.

So, what did you do once you weren't able to work anymore?

Well, your children would care for you and take you in.

So, what's the point of all of this?

The point is the psalmist is saying that you have to fulfill your responsibilities if you want to have security in life.

If you want your land to be productive, if you want to be safe, if you want to be cared for in your old age, get busy having kids, you've got to put in the work.

Now, I know you're probably thinking right now, but wait, like, didn't the psalmist just say that unless God builds the house or keep watch over the city, like all of that work is meaningless?

Yeah.

Yeah, he did.

So wisdom in this case lies in the tension between these two realities.

That on the one hand, we're responsible to show up, to put in the work, to work hard, but that ultimately God is the one that makes it all happen.

And those two things exist together at one and the same time.

Now, there's a passage in the New Testament that makes a very similar point.

Paul, the apostle Paul, writing to the church in Philippi, the letter that we know is Philippians, talks about this.

So look at Philippians chapter two, verses 12 and 13 with me.

Paul says, Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.

So Paul is telling us as Christians, we have to work out our salvation, but we do it knowing that we're not left alone.

It's not all up to us.

God is the one who is there, enabling our labor to accomplish what we want it to do.

Eugene Peterson puts this really beautifully in his message translation of the same Philippians passage.

So let's look at Philippians 2, 12 and 13 in the message.

Eugene Peterson says, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul, what I'm getting at, friends, is that you should simply keep on doing what you've done from the beginning.

When I was living among you, you lived in responsive obedience.

Now that I'm separated from you, keep it up.

Better yet, redouble your efforts.

Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God.

That energy is God's energy, an energy deep within you.

God Himself willing and working what will give him the most pleasure.

So Paul's basically saying the same thing as the psalmist that when we rest in God, it's then that we're able to do more than we think possible.

We're able to do the good that needs to be done in the world, the things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do on our own.

But it's easy to fall off the wagon on one side or the other with this.

So I want to look at each of these dynamics in turn, right?

Resting in God and then fulfilling our responsibilities.

So let's start with resting in God.

We've already gone over this morning the stress and the anxiety of living in today's world, right?

The struggle to make ends meet, the constant pressure to produce, the feeling that so many people are depending on you, the wondering when what little rights you have are going to be taken away from you, right?

Some of us, a few of us, might even thrive under that kind of pressure.

But underneath that, the productivity, the praise, the worry, we're doing so much harm to our nervous systems and to our souls.

So the message that we're able to rest in God, it invites us and gives us space to stop all the frenetic activity, the constant hamster wheel that we believe is necessary to get ahead in life, or even just the constant pressure to survive.

So for many of us, we can decide to close the office at 5 p.m.

We can shut the laptop for the night.

We can leave the house just a little bit messier than we'd like it to be.

We can recognize that all the good that we want to do in the world doesn't have to be done right this minute.

We can rest.

We can discover that we're held in love.

Our worth and our worthiness doesn't and never has depended on what we produce.

We're loved, you and I, right now, just as we sit here doing nothing, flaws, brokenness and all, simply because we're God's beloved children.

For others of us, you can look at your history and the history of your people and recognize so much of your labor has been exploited and stolen.

And the memory of that relentless drive to work, to enrich others is deep in your bones, and that makes it hard for you to rest.

So for you, God invites you to rest, to come home to yourself, to discover that God allows you to be yourself, to be your own voice without needing to work for someone else's benefit.

So when we discover this, there's a part of us that breathes that big sigh of relief.

We can let it go.

It's freeing to discover that we don't have to work our fingers to the bone just to survive and prove ourselves in the world.

But at the same time, I find in myself, and you've experienced this too, I'm sure, there's a part of us that's deeply uncomfortable with this.

Every culture struggles with this, but our American culture is brutal in that it ties our worth to our productivity.

And we learn early on in life to prove our worth and gain a sense of security in the world by working hard and working long and keeping everything in our control.

And this is a system and strategy that we've all practiced for decades as a way to feel safe and secure in a world that's so often just chaotic and unpredictable.

And so when God comes along and tells us that we can rest, that God's got us, even when we're not being productive, that we can sleep without anxious thoughts assaulting us and consuming us in the middle of the night, part of us freaks out a little bit, right?

It because it unmasks our systems for coping that have gotten so used to living that way.

And it doesn't feel good, but it's an opportunity for us to experience more freedom and more wholeness and more peace.

Early on in my working life, I was right out of college and I was I was working an entry-level job, which you've all been there before.

They're fantastic, meaning they're not actually fantastic.

And so I was working a lot of hours and there was a lot of pressure and responsibility.

And um, I got very little vacation time, and I made sure I took all of that vacation time.

But what I discovered was that when I would take vacation, I was great for about 24 hours.

It was like, thank God I'm not at work right now.

And then about sometime on the second day, I would start feeling this anxiousness, this restlessness, like, oh, I got to get back to work.

I got to check my email, I gotta wonder what's going on.

Like everything was outside of my control.

And I wasn't able to make sure that everything was locked down and buttoned tight.

And so it made me really unable to enjoy time off.

And this has been a constant struggle for me through my working years.

But one of the things that God has been so patient to help me see is that that part of me that just has that white knuckle death grip on control in my work life is able to just relax and release and define that things don't always fall apart just because I'm not there, which is a pretty egotistic thing to think, right?

So, in whatever ways that you struggle with that, remember that God has got you.

You can offload your burdens to God and trust that you can take the rest you need and everything will be okay.

As the Apostle Peter wrote to a group of Christians in the first century, this is 1 Peter 5, 6 and 7.

He says, Humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor.

Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares for you.

So offload your worries, your burdens, your cares to God, and find that he is the one holding everything, not us.

So that's the first dynamic.

But the second dynamic is doing the next right thing.

So there's another side of the coin to this, right?

At times, some of us can get so burdened or overwhelmed by life or our responsibilities or what's happening in the world that we can just sort of shut down.

Like we don't we don't know what to do.

And we can turn to substances, we can turn to different activities, relationships, any number of things to numb us out and distract us.

From how bad and overwhelming life feels at times.

I mean, this is what doom scrolling is, right?

Like I'm guilty of this too.

At the end of the day, instead of doing something worthwhile or actually useful, it's so easy to just crawl into bed and bed rot and doom scroll on our devices.

Right?

And that's the fight or fleas flee response of our nervous system.

Sorry, that's the I didn't write that down right.

It's the freeze response or flee part of our nervous system having too much going on.

So these ways to cope, right, like they're totally understandable.

They're actually built into us.

And so I'm not throwing stones here.

But but what we need to see here, myself included, is that these ways of coping with our anxiety, when we just let them go on and on and on, they actually leave us worse off.

So they feel good in the moment.

Oh, I know.

They feel really good in the moment, right?

To just doom scroll or to binge watch a TV show or to just play video games late into the night or whatever it is.

But they leave our nervous systems in a worse place and set us up for even greater anxiety in the morning.

So what feels like self-care in the moment oftentimes isn't actually caring for ourselves at all.

So in the face of this, the psalmist invites us to action, to do the next right thing, to do the thing that feels impossible in the moment.

So I know it feels like too much, and giving up and numbing out seems so comforting, but this is where we have to remember God is the one working for us and in us.

And that gives us permission to rest, but it also gives us permission to work hard at the things that truly matter.

But there's another way that we can shut down and end up not doing the good that we're called to do.

So sometimes we can even use this truth about resting in God to justify inaction or the status quo or things that are wrong in the world.

So in 1963, the Reverend Dr.

Martin Luther King was in Birmingham, Alabama, uh leading a series of nonviolent protests against racism and Jim Crow segregation in the South, especially in Birmingham.

And as a part of their strategy, Dr.

King was jailed in the Birmingham City Jail for eight days.

So while he was in jail, a number of white clergy from the city that were against racism, they were against segregation, but they also didn't like that he was there kind of stirring up trouble.

They wrote him a letter asking him to stop leading the nonviolent protests against segregation.

So Dr.

King wrote a long letter back to them, which has become known as the letter from Birmingham Jail.

If you haven't read it yet, it's a must-read, right?

It's an incredibly famous, incredibly important statement on our Christian responsibility to do justice.

And so in this letter, he tells these white clergymen, he says, I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas, which said, All Christians know that the colored people, remember, this is the 1960s, so the colored people will receive equal rights eventually.

But is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry?

It has taken Christianity almost 2,000 years to accomplish what it has.

The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.

That's what this person wrote to Dr.

King.

So he responded and goes on to say, all that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time.

We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.

It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men and women willing to be coworkers with God.

And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

We must use time creatively and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

So again, this person who wrote to Dr.

King and the clergyman who wrote to him, um, that King was responding to believed that God would eventually make things right when it came to racism and Jim Crow segregation.

Like they were against these things.

And they were right about that because God is always working towards taking the wrong in the world and making it right.

I mean, that's the good news of the gospel, that God is taking everything wrong, even the wrong in us, and eventually making it right because of what God has done in Jesus.

But where they got things wrong was that they used that as an excuse for their inaction.

It was an excuse for cowardice and for comfort and complicity.

They believed they were on the right side of history, but out of fear refused to get involved in loving their neighbors on the ground.

And here's where this stings for me.

Because again, these guys weren't the villains in Birmingham.

They weren't the out and out racists.

They were the good, church-going, moderate, right, white Christians who agreed with the goal and only questioned the timing.

And King wrote this letter to people like me.

Trusting God's work should never be an excuse to not love our neighbor, to do nothing when we see something wrong being done in the world.

So many of us see what's wrong in the world, but do we likewise let fear get in the way of showing up, of actually loving our neighbors well?

So we need to receive the good news that what feels hard, even impossible at times, is possible because God is behind all of our efforts to love our neighbors, both big and small.

So many of the things that we're involved in, right?

Things like building a business, shepherding a church, working for justice, even taking care of our families, like many of us won't see the end of what we're working for.

And yet, that's where we trust God.

That God is the one who is willing and working for his good pleasure.

And yet, knowing that it is God who is there, working, willing, is what gives you and I the resources to keep going, the resources we need to continue on, especially when it gets hard.

And anything worth doing in life is gonna be hard.

I'm sure your dad told you that at some point in life, right?

So, how do we get there?

How do we live into this?

Practice.

I always say that our spiritual life is like a muscle.

You have to go to the gym and work out your muscles if you want to get stronger.

And you need to find a spiritual practice to strengthen spiritual muscles in the places where we're weak.

So if you're struggling with overwork, exhaustion, and burnout as an unconscious or maybe even a conscious strategy for handling your stress and anxiety, I want to invite you to take time to stop your activity and to simply be with Jesus this week.

Many of you maybe already have a practice of time with Jesus using something like the Praise You Go app or a Bible reading plan or something like that.

That's fantastic if you do.

But if you don't already have something, I just invite you to spend, it could be as simple as five or 10 minutes a day.

Read this Psalm 127, two or three times, and then just sit quietly and talk to God about what you noticed in the psalm and the reactions that you notice coming up in you as you read it.

And take some time and just listen to God's still small voice and how it wants to respond to you and invite you into greater love, into greater wholeness, into greater flourishing in your life.

Others of us, we need the reminder to show up, to do the next right thing.

And if you're resonating with that call, this week I invite you to think about how to practice showing up instead of checking out when life feels overwhelming.

That might mean being intentional about time with your spouse or with your kids.

It might mean taking the time to read or write or work out or journal instead of doom scroll or binge watching Netflix.

It also might mean taking time to volunteer to support people that are struggling in our society, working with some of our partners like the food pantry on Tuesdays or Thursdays, or Santa Cruz Bread and Roses that cooks and takes fresh meals out to the unhoused population in our community, or Santa Cruz Welcoming Network that supports refugees and asylum seekers in our community.

Especially when you wonder what you have to offer, or when you feel like the problems in this world are just too big for you, that's when God invites you to show up and just to discover that it's God's power working in you for God's good pleasure.

As we finish this morning, there's one final practice I want to invite all of us to today, and that's the practice of communion.

And communion is how we as Christians remember and receive on a week or month-by-month basis the gift of Jesus' own life.

The good news that the psalmist talked about, that Paul talked about in Philippians is that it's not our effort that makes things happen, it's God working through us.

And so when we take a little cup of juice or a little wafer of bread, it's a reminder that it's Jesus' blood that was shed for us and his body that was broken for us that enables us and gives us the resources to show up and to do good and to grow in a difficult world.

So I want to invite us all to Jesus' table this morning, because it was gathered around a table where Jesus so often met people, where he could see people face to face and listen to their stories and share their laughter.

And so this morning we are here figuratively gathered around Jesus' table because this is where Jesus promised to be for those who want to meet him.

So I invite you this morning, accept his invitation and feel welcome at Jesus' table, no matter where you're coming from, because Jesus Christ, who here offers us a foretaste of eternal life, invites you to be his guests.

So there's uh three tables around the room, two on the sides, one in the back.

After I pray in a moment, the band is gonna come and lead us in a song.

And so when you're ready, you can make your way to the tables and receive a little cup of juice and a little wafer of bread.

Take that back to your seat and hang on to it because we're gonna take them together after the song.

But as the song goes, I invite you to reflect on all the ways that God has been so good to you.

All the ways that God has shown up with his power to make things happen in you and through you, for you and for others throughout your life.

That's evidence of God's love in your life.

So reflect on that, and then after the song is done, I'll come back up and we'll receive those elements together.

So let's pray right now as Kate and the worship team come.

So, Holy Three, we thank you for Jesus, who was born among us incognito, who grew up without privilege or status, who walked the way to heaven through the back streets of the world, who told the deepest truths in ordinary language, who touched and healed, blessed and disturbed without fear or favor, who showed inclusive love in all its unconditional glory, and who for all this was crucified, died, and was buried, and who for all this and for all of us rose again, who, though high in heaven, is present with us here and now.

So, God beyond holiness, as we do what Jesus once did, let your spirit move among us to settle on this bread and this cup that may be they may become for us our true spiritual food.

And let that same spirit stir our souls so that as we share this sacrament, we may recognize our Lord and receive him, that he may be in us and we in him forever.

Amen.