Good morning, friends. My name’s Alex, one of the pastors here at South. If you’re visiting, a special welcome to you. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks just for me personally being here. Not preaching. It was just a lot, maybe the longest time I’ve got to do that. Just hearing Aaron’s voice and Sean’s voice and all that they had to share for the community.

Thank you for those of you that said, good job for taking some rest. Thank you, to those that came up to me and said, how’s your vacation going? Or something like that. Cause I only work one day a week, so to not work was yeah. It was what it was we are in the middle of a series for those of you joining us called In the Way of Jesus.

It’s built around this premise that when it comes to living life as a follower of Jesus, life with God. Empowers life for God. I don’t know about you. I find it really easy to do that the other way around to hold some sense that the life I live for God, the things that I do are actually the things that qualify me to live life with God.

The beautiful freeing nature of this statement is no, it begins. with Jesus. Beautiful invite in his invite to say, No, come with me. Stay with me. Abide with me. When we get that right life, it just looks so much different. And today we get to look at the spiritual practice, the discipline, because this one will beat you up.

It will. It will test you. in so many ways, the discipline of Sabbath. So if you have a scripture in front of you have the scriptures in front of you, turn to Matthew chapter 12. I really recommend, especially this week, an outline that’s somewhere floating around at the back, if you don’t have one.

There’s probably a couple of people that could help you get one, but it will help you just follow along with some of this stuff. Verse 1 of chapter 12. At that time, Jesus went through the green fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them.

When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, Look, your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath. He answered, haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for them to eat, but only for the priests.

Or haven’t you read in the law that the priests on sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that there is something here greater than the temple. If you had known what these words mean, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. You would not have condemned the innocent, for the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.

Jesus, as we open these words, you have a wonderful gift for us. This gift of Sabbath, one that many of us perhaps have struggled with. Some of us have said no to. Some of us have found ourselves too busy for. Some of us have found it just too complicated to imagine the gift of a day. Would you help us hear what you have for us?

Help us to be a community that celebrates Sabbath together. That knows there is more to life than what we can get out of it. But here in this day is a beautiful gift given for us. Free of charge, on the house, no strings attached. About 20 years ago, I was invited on what was my first big overseas trip.

It was a trip I was invited to join as part of a staff team. I was starting to take on a bigger role in the church, even though I was only young and very naive, and now Less young and hopefully less naive as well, but who knows and we got to go out on this trip to the Philippines I should have perhaps been aware that there were going to be complications on this trip We had two pastors that were organizing it not necessarily people gifted in administration And so when we arrived at the airport, my name was wrong on the ticket.

Finally, we managed to persuade The good old people in the TSA that there was some kind of jump that had taken the name Alex Walton and turned it into Alex Watson and we were off on an adventure. We flew six hours to Bahrain, nine hours out to Manila, then an hour to the island of Cebu. I’ve been traveling at this point for about 24 hours and I was tired and in Cebu I experienced life as I did not know it existed.

Poverty as I did not know it existed. I was shaken up, jet lagged, all of those things. We took a 10 hour boat ride out to the southern island of Mindanao. On the way there, in the blackness of the ocean, like in this foreign land, I could not sleep with the bright fluorescent lights of the bunk room that we had berths in.

I got up and sat for a while with the man running our mission. out there, and he started to tell me about how he would love to see me come out to the Philippines to live there, to attend their seminary, to become their full time missionaries. My friends on the trip began to tell me that I was destined to marry a Filipino girl, perhaps before this trip was over.

One of the pastors leading it told me that if anyone preached from the book of Philippians during that trip, it was certain, it was prophesied, it was destiny. I got to, finally, to the island of Mindanao after now 48 hours of travel and almost no sleep whatsoever. We got to the place that we were staying, and I hoped to be able to recuperate, to recalibrate, to find the center of myself, which I was quickly losing.

But the leader of the trip decided it was never too early to begin visiting tribes that we knew in the jungle. And without really anything more than mango for breakfast, we climbed aboard an old jeepney left from the American time in the Philippines. And we headed off on a river road, like river that had dried up.

We drove out to these people out in the middle of the jungle. I remember getting to this point on this trip when my exhaustion. was just extreme. It was something I’d not experienced before in that time of life. There was an elderly gentleman next to me on the bus. He insisted on trying to nap on this bus while putting his arm behind me.

So every time my head started to drop, I got the sweat of someone in the middle of the jungle. He just dripping down my face. And I remember distinctly my anger. My irritation with every bump that we hit. I remember some deep, sick part of me that was like, I hope we jump this bus so badly, I bash myself into his arm and I hope he breaks his arm.

I’m just done with this thing all. It was a part of me that I didn’t know existed, and my first understanding that not only is tiredness detrimental to the person that experiences it, but detrimental to everybody who exists around the person that is tired as well. Tiredness is not only something that comes out of extreme moments of days without sleep but a long journey of just not enough rest.

It’s somewhere in the intersection of work and rest and when we don’t get enough of the rest side, long term tiredness seems to kick in. In the movie Forrest Gump, Forrest celebrates the return of his beloved Jenny to his house. Wonders whether she had nowhere else to go. Or whether she was just so tired she needed somewhere safe to be.

These are his words in that moment. She slept and she slept like she hadn’t slept in years. There was this point of tiredness that kicked in that needed that deep refreshing that comes from long term rest. Tiredness is a continuum. It’s like a range from one end to another end and sometimes we think that the gap feels like a long gap, but in actual fact, slow movements over a long period of time easily move us from one end to the continuum, one end of the continuum to the other.

If you take the outline that you have in front of you, you’ll see some of those some of those words that I’ve located on a continuum. Tiredness is a continuum that on one hand has the idea of being rested, maybe the idea of being replenished, refreshed, any of those. And then somewhere in the midst of a life well lived, of healthy work, of involvement in the mission of God, of earning a living, of raising a family, all of those different things that we enter into, somewhere in the middle of that continuum, I would suggest, are these words.

Happy. Tired. You’ve invested yourself. You’ve done something that matters. And then when that work. That role in the world is not suitably paired with rest. There’s the end of the continuum on the far right that might be described with these words, dangerously tired. This idea that there is something in me that no longer functions as it should function.

Maybe the tiredness that comes at the end of a long sickness. Maybe the tiredness that comes when you haven’t taken a day off or you haven’t kept enough time free, enough margin free in order to be able to rest. In my mid twenties, I was just married. We just had our first child. I was writing a PhD, working 40 hours a week on a golf course, and volunteering 40 hours a week at the church.

Somewhere in my smugness of youth, I believed that I could easily handle all of these things. That I was enough. Other people might get tired, but I was not one of those people. I could just keep going and going. But sure enough, like everybody, I reached this point where slowly my level of like happy tired began to deplete, and I too ended up in this dangerously tired place.

Perhaps it’s this truth that many of us would say, just looking at that continuum, we find ourselves in this world. To be dangerously tired. Wherever you are, maybe just take a moment. Take a breath and somewhere on that continuum, just put a mark. An X. Just locate yourself there and feel some of what life feels like.

right now. Beautifully, the grand story of Scripture has rest both at the end and at the beginning. Genesis 2 starts with the idea that God made the world in six days and then rested on a seventh day. The God of the universe, who needs no rest, chose rest to model it for us. And at the far end of the story in Revelation 21 and 22, there’s this invitation to enter God’s eternal story that is signified By rest, in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 3, there’s this invitation of now we who have believed enter that rest.

It’s a rest that awaits the people of God. Many of you know that our dear friend, our sister, Carol Evans, entered into that rest this week. She was someone who was involved deeply in our Watchmen prayer program. She was involved in this church in so many ways. Journeyed in a journey that was a shock to us but was a blessing to her the moment she stepped into it.

That’s the picture scripture gives us of the journey of God’s people. This beautiful invitation. It’s an invitation that’s surprisingly refreshing given that it seems suited more to people that worked an agrarian life. People that had a subsistence living that they worked and worked and at the end of it with a body worn out they needed this invitation of rest.

Does it work for us? In today’s world, that perhaps we find that we’re physically, even into our long years, not worn down by hard physical. Somewhere I would suggest there’s been a twist over the years. Many of our ancestors, maybe two generations, three generations ago, they lived lives. That will harden the body, but they were easy on the soul today Perhaps we might find our tirednesses of a different kind we live lives that are often easy on the body Oh, but they are deeply hard on the soul wearing on the soul long years of continued soul work in a recent study the CDC found that of people of the ages 19 to 18 to 44 especially women around would say they have been either exhausted or very tired most or every day of the last three months.

Just a constant epidemic of tiredness, of exhaustion. These are not the people that wouldn’t own to that or couldn’t own to that. The people that convinced themselves it wasn’t true of them. These are the people that could say, no I am exhausted. It may not be physically, but somewhere. I cannot keep going like this.

That kind of exhaustion tends to push us towards some existential questions, whether we would call ourselves followers of Jesus or not. It might raise the question, who am I? What’s this life? What is it for? Is this what it is? Or maybe, for someone who follows Jesus, the question is this what God made me for?

There’s times that we might paint a fairly bleak picture of the life that we’re invited to live. The 70s band The Jam have a song called Smithers Jones about a man who works a job day after day and finally is fired from that job for no particular reason. These are the lyrics towards the end. It’s time to relax.

Now you’ve worked your butt off, but the only one smiling is the suntan bus. Work and work and work till you die. There’s plenty more fish in the sea to fry. Do you notice the almost forced syllable when it talks about work? You actually only need three works to make that line. But in actual fact, they force an extra one in just to give you this overriding sense of, no, what you’re invited to in the world they paint is just to continually work yourself into the ground because there’s always someone else that will jump in to do that for you after you’re gone.

Somewhere that, that, that is the culture that we might be invited to live. Into that culture, God offers the most beautiful gift. The gift of a day. The gift of a day that is not centered around work and work and work. But is centered around rest. Around replenishment, about restoring sanity to your soul, to the world that we live in.

The first appearance of Sabbath is in Genesis chapter 2. It actually gets talked about more consistently somewhere around Exodus 16 through to 20. The people, the children of Israel, the Israelites, the Jewish people, however you might turn them, have escaped from Egypt. Accurately, God has freed them from Egypt through a deliverer called Moses.

In the midst of that escape, they have found themselves in the midst of the desert with no ability to provide for themselves. And in that period, God provides for them. It’s a supernatural provision. That could continue, could theoretically continue across seven days, except in this narrative, it doesn’t.

The provision is for seven days, but only takes place on six days. In Exodus 16, verse 20, we read these words. Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none of the manna that God had provided. Then the Lord, God, said to Moses, How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my instructions?

Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath, the seventh day, in which to rest. That is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where they are on the seventh day. No one is to go out. So the people rested. Traditionally, as the sixth day came to a close, the sun would begin to set.

In some cultures, almost exactly around 18 minutes before it set, people would begin to stop what they were doing. It’s a culture completely foreign to us who have electric lights to be able to continue to work at all times, have cars to be able to get round in the middle of the night, have things to be able to keep us connected, phones, internet to be able to go.

But in this culture. None of those things existed. It’s why J. R. Tolkien, after buying a car for a brief period, said, I wish the infernal combustion engine had never been invented. To him, cars just made life too fast. He might have said the same about electricity, about the same about internet, despite all of the benefits that actually come with those things.

Somewhere, for these people, as the sun started to set, there would be this profound revelation that whatever needed to be done would no longer get done that day. There was no way of doing it. It would be laid down, perhaps a candle would be lit, and friends or family would gather around a shared meal, would forget about work, and enjoy entering into rest in this beautiful way.

Somewhere there’s an idea that theologians have talked about, that Sabbath must be remembered and kept in Exodus 20 when it’s codified in the Jewish law system. We read these words, remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. There’s this invitation to two things, to keeping on one hand and remembering.

Keeping is the setting up part. It’s the things that you do to enable yourself to stop for a day, harder today than perhaps it’s ever been. And remembering is the thing that takes place throughout the day where you celebrate it, enter into it. You don’t forget that this day is a gift that you’ve been given.

Now perhaps, depending on your situation in life, You might say this was something I really could have done with hearing 30 or 40 years ago. I’ve done that season of life and now perhaps your feeling is I get more Sabbath. Then I feel like I need. I’m free to do whatever I want at all points. My whole life is beginning to feel like a rest.

I don’t know. I haven’t lived there. You guys can tell me. Some of you might not be at that point. You say, right now I feel like you felt at 20. I have all the energy in the world I need. I can go. And some of you are right in the middle. I have that sense of what does it look like to rest? I’ve forgotten that sense of rest.

The challenge of this sermon, and hopefully you feel it as we go, is that there’s all sorts of questions and protests and excuses against Sabbath that might make us say, I don’t need it, I can’t possibly do it. It is a thing that is hard to choose to enter into. In Exodus 20, we get some more of the sense of the why of Sabbath.

Some of the rules of Sabbath. Six days you shall have to labor to do all your work. Everything has to be completed then. But the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work. Neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servants, nor your animals, nor any foreigners residing in your towns.

And the why of it is given in verse 11. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and that’s, and all that’s in them. But he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, or because of, or so, the Lord rested, blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy. In Exodus 20 we read that the invite in is that God did this.

Perhaps opening the door to many protests that might say God can get everything He needs done. in six days. I cannot possibly do what he did. To stop, to close that door, to stop us getting away from that excuse in, in Deuteronomy when the law is repeated, another reason is given. In Deuteronomy 515 we read these words.

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath. When the people came out of Egypt, they came out of the land of empire. The land where there were always more bricks to be made because there were always more buildings to be built.

Because, just because, the empire had to continue to grow, continue to expand, continue to be all that it could be. When we look at the reason behind Deuteronomy and the why of Sabbath, it has nothing to do with getting everything done, it has nothing to do with production, it is the opposite. Of all of those things Walter Brueggemann who is a brilliant old testament scholar says this in Deuteronomy work stoppage is not only a great act of trust in god.

You have to believe To do it, that God will provide for the work that you didn’t do on the six days or couldn’t get done when the sun came down and had to stop. But a daring act of refusal, because to be defined by production or consumption, entails the loss of the very freedom given in the Exodus.

Israel must dare to be different from the real world, even at some risk and cost. For the empire never takes refusal. Easily. The Empire constantly expects you to produce for the good of the Empire. And we live in that world today. The salient message of the way that we live life is keep producing. We need to see you produce because that’s how we determine how much you’re actually worth.

What’s your net worth? How much do you own? How much have you produced? All of those questions are Empire based questions. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong. with achievement, nothing wrong with success, unless it’s how you come to determine how God sees your worth. The moment your production is what God sees in you, then somewhere, that friends, is the voice of empire.

In the brilliant 1990s movie, The Matrix, human beings are seen as part of a vast, fields for harvest, the energy used to enable the machines to continue to build and build. That, too, is the voice of empire. It’s the same thing. When seen in these terms, Sabbath is not simply about obedience, although it is that.

Sabbath is an act of resistance. It’s an act of resistance that says, I will not go along with the path of empire, however attractive. it might seem. Whatever car I might be able to drive if I do it. However many extra bedrooms I might be able to add to my house. None of those questions apply. When Sabbath is entered into as this act of resistance that goes against all of those things.

Alex Tsu Yan Kim Pang, who spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, says this, Rest is not something that the world gives us. It’s never been a gift. It’s never been something you do when you finished everything else. If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

To practice Sabbath requires standing up to a graceless master who gives no space, who will give no quarter, who will allow no freedom, but continue the demand that you give everything that you have. Wayne Mueller says this, and get the beauty of this, get the heartache of this passage. A successful life has become a violent enterprise.

We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond our limits. War on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them. When they are hurt and afraid and need our company. War on our spirit because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us.

War on our communities because we are fearfully protecting what we have and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous. War on the earth because we cannot take time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings, and to give thanks. That’s the world that we live in.

And here is the challenge of all of this. There is a graceless master that continually demands of us. There is this empire, this world that is set up, is structured in that way, but here is the kind of like heart aching twist of it all. So often the graceless master that drives us. Can be found best in the mirror.

Can be found best in us who need to succeed to prove that we are worth something. Need to find our value in our success. Need to be seen to be successful. To have enough to have all of the answers. Need to be independent. Need to be self sufficient. All of those things are found in the mirror as we see the person who is that graceless master.

That continues to drive us. In amongst all of that, and that’s not a new story. That’s an old story. That’s been going on for a long time. And amongst all of that, this gracious God gave this beautiful gift of a day. And for brief periods in history, whole groups of people have embraced that day, said enough is enough.

We choose to do this God’s way. We choose to enter into this practice. We choose to believe that what can be done in six days is enough for us. We choose to believe that we not continually need to borrow from that spare time, that rest that is given to us in order to enable us to continue to move forward for just a few moments in history.

People have embraced that day. The Jewish writer Abraham Heschel said of the Sabbath, that it was a time it was practiced. And it was as if a whole nation had fallen in love with a day. Fallen in love with a day that was not like the other days. Think about that gift. Think about what it is to be told that however tired you are never more than six days away from rest.

We have continually stretched ourselves, have told ourselves that rest is at a vacation six months away or nine months away. We have told ourselves that it’s okay to continue, build activity upon activity, to pack days with so much. I feel like sometimes I have lived like a great literary character who once said, you cannot do much in a day, but each day contains 24 hours, and each hour contains 60 minutes, and each minute contains 60 seconds, and you can do an awful lot in 86, 400 seconds.

We’ve continued to push ourselves to do more, and to do more, and to do more. And in this one moment of time, we’re told The whole, it was like a nation. They fell in love with this day, this practice of Sabbath that was centered around rest and joy. Unsurprisingly, if all of this is true, if there is an empire that wants to pull us into a life of work, of continual activity, it’s no surprise that this did not go.

Easily. A few Star Wars fans out there. A few Trekkies, I’ll have something next week. There is somewhere in between this time of this gift of a day and the time of Jesus some kind of shift where the day is no longer what it once was. It’s the passage that we read earlier in Matthew chapter 12, at the time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath.

His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. It’s the act of an innocent child, to be hungry and to want something. to eat. I have a seven year old who loves fruit, which is an expensive commodity right now. We put fruit into the fridge and occasionally we’ll just find him wandering into the kitchen.

He opens the drawer and he grabs handfuls and disappears off quickly into another room. Occasionally when we catch him, his protest is, oh, it’s just too good. I can’t possibly say no. This is the activity that we see here in this bunch of disciples. They’re just a hunger. And a casual taking of food and a critique of a group called the Pharisees look at your disciples They are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath in their defense These Pharisees had what they perceived was a good reason they had a belief that if every Jewish person could practice Sabbath for two sabbaths in a row then the Messiah would come God would interact with the world They missed God’s interaction in the world trying to force God’s action in the world But that was their goal broadly.

To do that they made the Sabbath an unbearable thing 39 different things that you couldn’t do on the Sabbath and perhaps if you grew up in the generation I did or perhaps one further back you experienced that too. We joked in our pre service meeting that the Sabbath was always fun for adults, but never fun for children.

It was a day of nothing, a day of misery. And yet, Sabbath was intended to be a joyful thing, a gift, as we’ve called it. In Mark’s version of this story, Jesus replies to them that Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Sabbath doesn’t need a human being to fill it, to obey it. But you, human being, you desperately need this gift.

You need to take it, hold on to it with everything you have. Abraham Heschel again says this, unlike other festivals, the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively to spiritual goals. It’s a day of the soul. As well as the day of the body. Comfort and pleasure are integral parts of the Sabbath observance. Man is in his entirety, all of his faculties must share in this blessing.

There’s almost nothing that you can’t do on the Sabbath if it doesn’t. Classes work, you’re invited into all sorts of things. The deliciousness of a nap when you are specifically told to take a nap is a wonderful thing of slow walks in the countryside in no particular direction. In dinner with friends, a meal sat shared amongst people that you love.

There’s so many options that are invite, that you’re invited into on what is called Sabbath. When Mueller again says, if busyness can become a kind of violence, we do not have to stretch our perception very far to see that Sabbath time, effortless, nourishing rest, can invite a healing of this violence.

When we consecrate a time to listen to the still, small voices, we remember the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful. We remember from where we are most deeply nourished and see more clearly the shape and texture of people and things before us. Sabbath may possibly be one of the great evidences that the God of the universe loves you.

That he gave you space to rest, gave you space to say enough is enough. Although Sabbath is challenging, although it’s hard to imagine that a day can be surrendered with no real purpose to it. When you practice it, even amongst the time of small children, there’s evidence that eventually they capture that spirit too.

As hard as the negotiations. might seem to be. Ruth Haley Barton in her book on Sabbath records a conversation with one of her children who resented Sabbath to begin with. She writes these words, As my mother began to practice Sabbath, my sisters and I couldn’t help but experience a shift.

On Sundays, mom was just home. She wasn’t working or writing. She wasn’t in a car or on a phone. She pulled out her recipe book and made food there wasn’t always time to make. She curled up on a couch for the book, but was always happy to be interrupted by one of us wanting to talk. We didn’t change all our plans, and we certainly didn’t appreciate the practice ourselves at the moment, but we were drawn to be with her, and the Sabbath seed was shown.

You who run hard with so many things on the to do list, imagine a day that has no to do list, because it’s simply not part of what that day means. One more from Wayne Mueller. This is the counter to that, the side of not leaning into Sabbath. If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illnesses become our Sabbath, our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack.

Our accidents create Sabbath for us. Eventually, there is a way which the system catches up. I found that myself a few years ago, about four years ago. I’d been working hard, running hard. I’d moved to South not long before, many of you were here. Then I was meeting with as many people as I possibly could.

Meeting, after meeting. That stretch, I was sometimes preaching 10, 12 plus weeks in a row. Had this constant sense that there was more to be done. Finally took a vacation, but even that vacation was work. It was go. I was visiting family. I was back in England.

I had all of my kids and my wife with me. It was a constant sense of emotion, a roller coaster of that kind of experience. That’s beautiful of seeing family, but it has all of the kind of trauma on the body of travel. And so I got back and went out to a party with some friends after preaching that Sunday morning.

Friend that was there was a nurse and I said to him casually in the midst of the party, how many days? Should you have serious abdominal pain before going to the ER? And he said, what level would you describe your pain? And I said 7 or 8. And he knows I’m an Enneagram 7, so he took that to mean 9 or 10.

And he said, really maybe two days at most. It had already been for me about six days. So as we were driving home, I found myself just, Laura drove and I just curled up on the front seat of the car, got home and lay on the bed for about 10 minutes, thrashing around, trying to find some position that was comfortable.

And finally I said to Laura, I’m going to go to the ER. She said, give me five minutes to put the kids to bed. I’ll take you. I said, I cannot wait five minutes. The pain is too unbearable. Got myself into the car and drove and sat in the waiting room in the ER. Some kind person, as I sat throwing up into one of the things that they gave you, came over and said, we’re going to give you something for the nausea.

And I said, I’m already throwing up. Can you give me something for the pain? Finally, they took me into the backroom and gave me an injection of some substance that made it seem like nothing would ever matter again. In that moment, I melted into the feeling of a warm blanket laid on top of you. Didn’t seem to matter what the outcome.

Would be after a while a surgeon came in and said your gallbladder is shot to bits. It’s so blocked up We’ve not seen one this bad miraculously everything else around it feels seems good. So in the morning, we’re gonna take it out I have a picture of me there. It’s not funny. I was sick You guys you must be really tired to act like That’s a in the midst of lying there in this hospital room with good people around caring for me Suddenly, there was this joy of realizing that I wasn’t responsible for anything in that moment.

No one expected anything of me. No one was asking me to do anything. For the first time in as long as I could remember, simply rested. Simply lay there with no responsibilities whatsoever. I got up out of that bed, came in on, I think, the Wednesday to prepare a sermon for the Sunday. One of the staff came up to me and said, we already text about this.

I’m preaching for you. And I didn’t remember a word of it. I just was grateful that someone else was taking a task that was assigned to me. It was a space forced upon me to rest because I had no rhythm to my life that enabled me to take rest seriously. Here’s the core of Sabbath. The God who made me with limits.

Made a day of rest to limit me with. Made a day of rest to say to me stop. Made a day of rest for me to say there is no more to do. Light a candle. Eat dinner with friends. Take a nap. Go for a walk. Enter into life at a different pace to the way you live the rest of the week. Enjoy the fact that you are not responsible for the world continuing to turn.

You’re not responsible for self, being a healthy community. You’re not responsible for every detail of anybody’s life. As much as Sabbath is a day, it’s also a rhythm. A rhythm that you are invited into weekly, and you might find if you practice it weekly, becomes an essential part of your life. It’s a rhythm that looks like this.

The first command is simply to stop. To own nothing, to put down the list, to say no to it. Maybe a question that you might want to write next to that is when Sabbath comes, how do I mark my stop? This Thursday after finishing work, I take Friday as Sabbath. I got home to make some food for my family, lit a candle, put on some classical music, just rested in the freedom of that space.

That’s the second word. Rest. Once you’ve stopped, what does it look like for you to rest? What do you do to rest? How do you find that space once you’ve stopped work? How do you find that thing that rejuvenates the soul? Is it a particular type of music? Is it a particular place? Is it particular people?

How do you find yourself reconnecting, moving from dangerously tired back towards maybe happy tired and back towards rejuvenated, replenished. Next rhythm is worship, to remember that there’s a God that gave you this day, commanded it. You didn’t create it yourself, you weren’t smart enough, I wasn’t smart enough to see that work wasn’t a seven day operation.

But there’s a God who can be worshiped because he chose to create a world in six days and rest on a seventh day. What a gift to worship a God like that. How do you honor God in your day of Sabbath? How do you choose to teach your kids what it is to be thankful for a creator that gave you back to them in a different way than your present for the rest of the week?

And then delight. How do you delight in who God made you? How do you delight in who you are in this world? Maybe a question that you might raise there is, What brings me joy? What is it about this world that I love? Is it mountain peaks? Is it oceans? Water? Any of those things may be sitting cooking. All of those things that may be for you a joyful enterprises in a sabbath there is always room for those too Because the God who made you made sabbath for you, too Jesus I pray in the midst of Busy lives.

I know so many people in this room There’s so much busyness so much to be done Give us the courage to be Sabbath people and a Sabbath community. Help us to teach a busy, overworked world what it is to rest. Amen.