I Will Give You Rest

Sermon for Sunday, July 9, 2023 || Proper 9A || Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

This is a sermon about rest. The concept of rest is on my mind because one week from today, after church services, lemonade on the lawn, and premarital counseling, I will be on vacation for three weeks. I will be able to rest in a way that I’m unable to do for the bulk of the year. While I will miss you all, I am really looking forward to my vacation. At the same time, thinking of vacation as the only time to rest is not a great way to maintain a healthy, balanced life. God built rest into the very fabric of creation, and everyone (me more than most) can learn from creation’s example.

But first, I need to quote one of my favorite movies. Near the end of the 1987 cult classic The Princess Bride, the two bad guys are having a heart to heart. The evil inventor Count Rugen is about to test his life-sucking machine on the hero Westley, and Rugen asks Prince Humperdinck if he’d like to come and watch.

Humperdinck considers for a moment, then says, very sincerely: “Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work, but I’ve got my country’s five hundredth anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it: I’m swamped.”

Count Rugen, just as sincerely, responds to the prince: “Get some rest. If you haven’t got your health, then you haven’t got anything.”

So, if even the bad guys in movies recognize the need to get some rest, we can take this advice too.

The ancient Israelites, who wrote the stories of creation in the book of Genesis, identified rest as one of the great workings of God. Over the course of the first six days of creation, God creates light and sky and land and sea and plants and sun and moon and fish and birds and beasts and people. Whoo, it was a lot. But God wasn’t quite done. There was one more day of creation left. On the seventh day of creation, God rested from all the labors God had done. God created rest on the seventh day. Rest was not a break from, or something entirely set apart from creation. Rest was just as important an element of creation as light or gravity.

We see this element of creation when we look at the natural world. Some animals hibernate for long stretches of the year. Others, like sloths, whose heart rates measure around 20 beats per minute, rest as a way of life. Deciduous trees go dormant during the winter only to bud again when spring arrives. Fields that lie fallow return again with more nutrient-rich soil.

Humans that lie fallow for a time return with more energy as well. But here’s where we have to pause and examine why we rest. In our culture of stress and overwork and billable hours and overtime pay, we might be tempted to think that we rest in order to come back to work with new energy. In this case, rest is not a good in and of itself; rest is something that can make us work harder. Have you ever said that you were going on vacation to “recharge your batteries?” I have, certainly. But guess what? We’re not machines. We don’t have batteries.

We have hearts and minds and souls and spirits that find refreshment and new life in rest. Rest is an end in itself, not a means to greater production. This is a hard truth for us to remember in our society which is dominated by what is now called “grind culture.” Even when folks are on vacation or taking time off, their phones still ping, work projects still demand attention, the boss has no boundaries as to appropriate times for texting. That Zoom meeting? Sure, I can join from beach.

So even when we’re supposed to be resting, we don’t. We feel guilty about sitting on the porch to read a novel when there’s a to-do list a mile long. Something inside us tells us we’re failing when we’re not being “productive.”

But that something is lying to us. There is so much more to life than productivity. In her book Rest as Resistance, Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, reminds us that our country was built on the forced labor of millions of Black folks who were not allowed by their slavers to rest – ever.* Their slavers saw them as replaceable units of production, and that viewpoint continues to influence and infect modern-day work in our capitalist society. So too does the “Protestant Work Ethic,” an import from European settlers, which sees dutiful and continual labor as a sign of grace. The history of the United States is full of people not resting, but rather being used as cogs in the machine.

Again, resting is an end in itself, not a means to greater production. Living this truth about rest creates a whole new way of moving through the world, one that stands against grind culture. Jesus calls us into that way in today’s Gospel reading. “Come to me,” he invites, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

I will give you rest. The rest Jesus offers is not the rest of recharging, but the rest of re-creating. There’s a reason we call tossing a Frisbee or paddling idly around a pond “recreation.” When we engage in recreation, God re-creates us with the wisdom of the seventh day. Our spirits find refreshment. Our souls find deeper connection to God. I’ve quoted St. Augustine in sermons before, but the opening line to his Confessions is right on here: “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.”

When we rest, our fractured and frenetic selves knit back together. We find wholeness in God’s presence that we cannot find when we’re literally working ourselves to death. And that’s why we cannot reserve rest just for times of vacation. The ancient Israelites took the seventh day of creation and turned it into a weekly observance called Sabbath – a day to rest in the palm of God’s hand and by doing so attune ourselves to God’s movement in Creation.

When Jesus says, “I will give you rest,” we still must be willing to receive it. With God’s help, we can prayerfully reevaluate our schedules. We can start fresh with times of restfulness blocked off from the beginning rather than squeezed in at the end. We can also approach rest as an issue of justice, advocating for policies** that will allow new opportunities for rest for people who right now have to work three jobs just to make ends meet.

Rest is not a break from our everyday lives. Rest is part of our everyday lives. Rest is not about making us more productive, but about making us more creative. This week, I invite you to hear Jesus’ words anew, as both a promise and command: “Come to me…and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you… and you will find rest for your souls.”

* That did not stop enslaved people from resting as a form of resistance. They carved out what they could by, among other things, not working quite as hard as possible and by creating hush harbors to support one another and reclaim the traditions of their homelands.

** Free childcare/universal Pre-K, free universal healthcare, universal basic income, higher minimum wages, support for unions, four-day work weeks…these are the ones I can name off the top of my head. There are plenty more.