So let us pray.
Creator God, you are the one who created all things out of breath, song,
and spirit, and
created us to do the same.
So just like you rested, may we find rest in this space together as we lean into your presence in
this space.
Amen.
So nowadays we have plenty of advertisements out there that are trying to convince us that rest is
simply Doing self-care, getting the right bubble bath stuff, going to the right massage place,
and buying the next thing that will make your life easy. Now, I know today's Father's Day,
but if we remember just last month to all of the Mother's Day advertisements, we know how our world
is trying to convince us what rest looks like.
While in reality, I think rest can also look like a friend of mine yesterday morning woke up in the
middle of the night to a sweltering Texas heat. because her AC had died.
And so when the AC repair guy showed up, she sent the twins and her husband off to go do whatever
they could possibly do, not at the house. And then it made it so as soon as the AC started working
and it was nice and cool, she just sat there in the silence and read a book.
So we find that rest is really just the time to be able to... Focus on existence as human beings
instead of human doings. To just be either with one another or with silence or in some capacity.
So maybe you might be like me. Running from one thing to the next thing or a nice busy calendar is
the thing that takes care of stuff. Because as most of you probably realized...
I waited until the first week of June to take my first week of vacation this year.
That's a problem.
And then all of my 13 years as a teacher, the summer before the school year started,
I worked at a summer program for five weeks. And so there was usually about a week between teaching
and working at Bridges. And so I've just... Been very good at staying busy,
which means I'm very bad at rest.
So maybe take some time to wonder, when's the last time you actually rested?
Because we live in a world where the demand to be productive at all times permeates our society.
We measure and brag about our successes, and we certainly don't brag about resting.
And someone's like, what did you do yesterday? then there's like a little bit of shame if all we
did was sit around, right? But instead, if we've got like a laundry list of things that we
accomplished in the day, we feel like we did more. We might be familiar with the phrases, I'll
sleep when I'm dead. Yep.
Or no rest for the... Right? Like we're just...
We're used to this. Like it is normalized to have common phrases that...
Make it so that it is normative for us to not rest.
We've gotten to the point where after all of the unions did the work to get us a 40-hour work
week, it's now been renormalized as the minimum number of hours of work each week. Even in how they
define pastor appointments, full-time is 40 to, I think, 60 hours a week,
which is wild, right?
We praise parents for all of the hard work they put into having three different jobs in order to
take care of their families instead of critiquing the systems that don't allow them to find rest
and making it so that they don't get to be with their families.
We see from our text today that our bodies were intimately designed for rhythms of work and rest.
It's interesting because since God is... present in all spaces and places across all of time,
God didn't need to rest. But the Genesis poem tells us that God chose to rest.
Rest is an inherent rhythm of creation. God takes the time to not work on the seventh day,
instead to focus on being in relationship with creation, to... Find joy in the goodness of things.
This might remind us of Koheleth's thoughts last week where he said that we should be able to enjoy
the fruit of our labor.
We're also reminded throughout all of the New Testament that Jesus took a lot of time to just rest,
to just hang out with people. If we measured the ministry of Jesus using current ministerial
standards, Jesus would look like he did nothing with his life.
that he didn't heal enough people, he didn't actually go and convert enough people to Christianity,
even though Jesus was inherently Jewish and not Christian, but that's a different story.
The way that we measure successes fall apart as soon as we look at the person of Jesus.
And so we are created by God to participate in a rest as a rhythm of creation.
We see from the science that going to bed after 1 a.m. is actually linked to higher rates of
mental health issues.
And newer research is showing that four-day work weeks improve worker well-being and job
satisfaction while reducing cost to employers and keeping the same level of productivity week to
week. It's almost as if if we push ourselves too hard, the work that we keep doing isn't nearly as
good as what we could have done if we had just rested.
God's time to rest gave God time to be in relationship and notice the intricacies of God's
creation.
Is anyone here someone who likes to put together puzzles? All right,
that's a good handful of us. When we put together puzzles, do you immediately just destroy it and
put it away?
No. We take the time to pour over it and see how the piece, because we were so focused on like,
does this fit? So there's this moment after we get the whole thing together that we take a step
back and notice what we had been creating the whole time. And so that rhythm that we have when we
do puzzles is the same type of rhythm of what God participates in in this Genesis story.
Because the reality is that rest invites us to slow down and notice God's creation and the fruit of
our own land. It's very easy to, if we're rushing in and out of places,
we might not notice things. And it's actually really fun to notice how sometimes creation is what
invites us to slow down. There's the little lilac bush right outside of my office.
And when that was blooming, practically half of the people had to stop to appreciate it and smell
it and notice it. So we even see that God's creation invites us into these sacred pauses and rest.
And so when we take the time to rest, we can focus on being in relationship with one another,
with God's creation.
And when I was doing some research, I have a blog from Psychology Today that outlines the seven
types of rest that we all need. And so that you don't have to take notes, I'll put it in the weekly
email this week because I'll make sure that I put that later today. So we need physical rest,
which sounds weird because physical rest is the lower stamina things like yoga or stretching,
massages, tai chi, anything that kind of moves our body with some sort of slower rhythm as opposed
to the way that we force our body to move through the world. We need mental rest,
like short breaks, or even journaling before bed. And if you want to partner journaling with
spiritual exercises, that's a great way to do the examine prayer, is to just journal through the
day in prayer with God.
Observing our thoughts and just allowing them to pass without judgment. There's plenty of Buddhist
teachers that teach about mindfulness of like allowing your thoughts and emotions to be passing
through your mind like clouds in the sky. We appreciate the clouds.
We look at them. We think about them and just allow them to keep going instead of harboring
additional emotions or like we have anger about a thing. Instead of holding on to things,
just allowing it to be acknowledged and keep moving.
We need sensory rest. Does anybody know about the 5, 4, 3, 2,
1 grounding? It's a really nice, simple one. You just notice five things you can see,
four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell,
and one thing you can taste.
You can change it up, but I don't think people, in order to find grounding, want to find five
different things to lick. because that doesn't feel very grounding. But the idea is starting with
the most external senses and going to the internal senses as a way to bringing us back to the
physical space that we're actually occupying. Other things involving the senses is practically
everyone says you shouldn't have screen time for at least like 45 minutes before bed. Some say
longer, some say, I don't think anyone says shorter, but at least 45 minutes. We need emotional
rest. So many times we have conversations with people where we have to put up a facade in order to
survive the conversation. So we need to find places of rest where we can just be authentic and open
emotionally before someone. So like when there's different types of levels of if someone's like,
how are you doing? There's different answers you give. We need to have that safe space where we can
just be true when we say how we're doing. And sometimes my yoga teacher is not ready for that
authenticity and I might need to find someone else.
We also need social rest. Paying attention to if we get drained or energized around people and
being mindful of trying to find balance. Especially within a relationship. We all know at this
point when you're dealing with other people, one person might need people in order to find rest and
another person might find your existence draining. And so finding nice, peaceful ways to coexist in
the space so that everyone has access to rest. I'm going to say that took me a few too many years
of marriage for me to learn that one. So, yeah. We also need creative rest.
to step away from a problem, just go exist in nature, or finding an inspiring environment in order
to stop trying to find a creative solution, but instead just taking that pause away from things.
And then they also list spiritual rest, connecting with something deeper than ourselves through
church or volunteering, hanging out in nature, community programs,
and so much more.
And at the same time, as we know that we all need this rest, I'm reminded of the fact that Tricia
Hersey of the Knapp Ministry reminds us that rest is resistance. So often we think that there's
something that's so much better, like something requires our time, more so than us taking care of
ourselves, because it's a problem we need to address, which is true.
Well, we have to remember that some systems are designed to just wear us out and make it so we can
never rest so that the system can prevail. And so in those instances, rest is a way of resisting
these larger systems of harm and injustice because it helps us maintain ourselves to continue to be
people who live out our baptismal vows of resisting evil and injustice and oppression in whatever
forms they find themselves.
And so... Throughout the summer, since we don't have our groups, I've been dropping some reflection
questions in our app group chat. And so to get you started thinking about that,
and so feel free to join us, and by us I mean me and Christina so far,
to be thinking about what could rest look like for you?
Or what would it look like for us as a community to value rest more?
Or do we feel like we already value it pretty well, especially... if we hold the decision to pause
the flea markets because it was just wearing us down and finding new restorative ways to exist
together?
How can we offer rest to our community that we find ourselves placed in?
And what could offering a place of sacred rest look like?
And so since journaling is one of the many things that can help us rest, I continue to encourage
you to journal the ways that you notice God's movement each week. either in your own life or in our
communal life together, so that when we get to August, we can look back and reflect on what we've
noticed as we do the series in August about loving boldly.
And so,
let us pray.
Creator God,
you instilled in us the need to find our breath.
And sometimes I wonder if that's because of the fact that you are always as close as our breath.
So may you guide us to find ways to rest in this world,
to be restored in that good image that you have created us in.
Help us to turn the thought about you calling us very good into the actions of deliberately pausing
and taking care of ourselves so
that your spirit can be with us and we can be energized to continue in the world.
as we're empowered by your Spirit to love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously.
Amen.