Getting Rest: Hours of Sabbath, Rest, and Play

Note: Due to technical issues, we do not have a sermon recording for this week. Please find the transcript of this sermon below!

I. ALL HOURS ARE SACRED

Well, the last few weeks have been warm! I’ve really enjoyed this turn toward summer weather. I feel all the knotted tension of bracing against the cold and rain releasing, and the days seem to spread out the way I used to sprawl on the grass as a child with a book in endless summer hours. To me there’s something magic about these warm, long days, as if every hour lights up with sacred delight. Maybe the longer days make us more aware of how we spend each hour, since it seems we suddenly have so many more of them.

In her memoir, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard muses: “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” And we could add, what we do with this hour and that one, is sacred ground.

What can feel mundane and ordinary to us—getting rest, doing work, eating meals, and paying attention—all this is the daily place where we can encounter the Holy. Over the next few weeks, this sermon series as we turn toward Ordinary Time will explore the common experiences of life, where we can welcome the Divine into the texture of our ordinary world.

That’s not always easy, is it? I mean, take a moment with me and just think back over the last year. Think on some of the good moments, the joyful moments, the moments that you felt alive and energized and engaged. and now, think on some of the hard times, the griefs and losses and pains and disappointments. We’ve all felt them this year, haven’t we? And also—those forgettable days, the ones that were just lather, rinse, repeat, the ones where nothing really seemed to happen at all and you just got through it.

Now, if we were to take those moments and plot them on a chart —say, make high peaks for the moments where you felt alive and engaged with the world, and low valleys where you were just getting by or disengaged—and let’s say we wanted to point to the moments that were sacred. Where would you point? Probably those big moments, some good, some bad, but vivid.

Oh, but weren’t the rest of those hours sacred too—because they were yours, and they are part of you? My hope is that in our time together over the next few weeks, we are reminded that our actual lives—as we are now living them, as we are now—are already flooded with the divine, full of the sacred. The Benedictine monastic tradition has a saying: “Ora et labora,” prayer and work. It’s a shorthand reminder—prayer and work, the sacred and the mundane, go hand in hand and it is all sacred.

II. PLAY IS HARD FOR US

Over the next four weeks we will consider the sacred place of these different kinds of hours in our lives—hours of rest and play; hours of creative work; hours of relationship and hospitality; hours of attending to the Divine. They all have their place and most likely, whether we notice or not, they’re all already in the texture of the lives we’re already living.

But we start with hours of rest and play this week, because I suspect that among us, these are some of the hardest for us to accept as sacred - and that hours of play and rest are those that we are most tempted to omit.

Dr. Stuart Brown is the founder of the National Institute of Play (sounds like a fun job, right?) and has invested his life in studying play and its effects on animals and humans of every age. He defines play as “anything that is spontaneously done for its own sake… (play) appears purposeless and produces pleasure and joy.”

It’s that appearance of purposelessness that makes resting and playing hard for us. We don’t do purposeless well.

I had a roommate in college who was better at doing nothing than anyone I have ever met. I say this with respect and admiration. I would come home and he would be lying with his back on the couch, feet on the wall behind the couch, walking his bare feet back and forth on the wall in an arch for hours, doing nothing, until every so often I would have to wash the rainbow of dirty footprints off the wall.

Me on the other hand: my roommates used to play a game, where they would intentionally create little messes around the house—a picture tilted on the wall, a jar left on the counter, dishes put away in the wrong cabinet—and then I’d get home and they’d watch me run around fixing it all. I couldn’t sit still!

Even my forms of resting slowly morphed into work. As a child I loved to read more than anything; I used to scale the jungle gym in the playground and sit up there reading a book where no one would bother me at recess. I read widely, anything I could get my hands on, no plan, just because I delighted in discovery of stories and facts. But as I grew older I came to feel that if I was reading, I should be reading serious things, theology and philosophy, and I should be taking notes—and reading just became one long continual preparation for future sermons.

There is a real irony that we can turn our rest itself into work, so that even taking time off of our work is seen as important so that we can be even more efficient when we return to work! But this sharply undercuts the importance and goodness of rest in our lives.

III. RESTFUL RELATIONSHIP TO SELF

Times of playfulness and purposeless delight are crucial for our flourishing—for healthy relationship to ourselves, for healthy relationship to the Divine, and for healthy relationship with others around us.

Playfulness and rest allow us to develop a healthy relationship to ourselves.

In his studies at the National Institute of Play, Stuart Brown studied the play behavior of laboratory rats. These rats love to wrestle and pin each other down, rough-and-tumble play. Brown’s team found that,

if the laboratory investigator stops the rats specifically from playing, there are some dire consequences. They do not socialize normally. They can’t recognize friend from foe… animals and humans who are deprived of it, are fixed and rigid in their responses to complex stimuli. They don’t have a repertoire of choices that are as broad as their intelligence should allow them to have. And they don’t seek out novelty and newness.

It turns out that playfulness is an essential part in developing and maintaining our adaptability, our capacity to be creative and curious about the world around us. An ongoing practice of play keeps our resilience levels high, and exposes us to ideas and possibilities that wouldn’t have occurred to us if we kept our noses to the grindstone.

Perhaps some of you have had this experience, which is common for me when writing: I don’t know how to approach a certain section, feel stuck, the words aren’t flowing—so I walk away, go on a walk, do something physical. And after a while, I’ll find ideas bursting out—because my mind and body wanted freedom for coming at the problem from different angles.

Playfulness doesn’t just develop our capacity for adaptability and curiosity as children; again, Stuart Brown notes that research has shown,

the human being really is designed biologically to play throughout the life cycle. … From my standpoint as a clinician, when one really doesn’t play at all or very little in adulthood, there are consequences: rigidities, depression, lack of adaptability, no irony … things that are pretty important, that enable us to cope in a world of many demands.

So, playfulness and rest are essential for healthy relationship to ourselves in developing our resilience. But it is also essential for healthy relationship to ourselves in that we come to fuller self-knowledge when we allow ourselves to play.

Brown encourages us to watch children play: “if you just observe them, and don’t try and direct them, and watch what it is they like to do in play, and get some sense of how their temperament intermixes with their play desires, you often will see a key to their innate talents… And that this is nature’s way of sort of saying this is who you are and what you are.”

It is when we open ourselves to curiosity and try new things that we find, “oh! I didn’t know I enjoyed that!” Whether it’s trying a new dish, jumping into a new activity or game, or opening a book about an unknown topic—this free-ranging playfulness is where we meet ourselves and surprise ourselves.

Of course, for this to be true, we have to release ourselves from the very adult demand that we do things correctly. This is really hard, because as adults we forget how we learned everything we now know—by trying lots of things that didn’t work until we stumbled our way into what does work. So embracing playfulness returns us to a healthier relationship to ourselves—one of patience, curiosity, and compassion.

IV. RESTFUL RELATIONSHIP TO DIVINE

But playfulness and rest aren’t just important for our relationship to ourselves—they are also crucial for healthy relationship to the Divine.

And at the heart of this is the vital theological idea that God takes days off. Let me repeat: God takes days off.

This is a central part of the creation poem of Genesis 1-2—after finishing all the work, God rested on the seventh day. And this turns out to be an essential image of God for us to hold on to.

The Hebrew Scriptures are bookended by two experiences of trauma—the people in Egypt, and the people in Babylon. Slavery and exile. And in both these situations, the people are presented with stories about the gods, stories told by Egypt and by Babylon.

The scholar Walter Brueggemann points out that, “What (these gods) all have in common is that they are confiscatory gods who demand endless produce and who authorize endless systems of productions that are, in principle, insatiable.” (Sabbath as Resistance, 2)

The Egyptian gods, and the Babylonian gods, were gods who needed to be served. The whole mythology around these gods is that they create humans to meet their needs, and they are never satisfied.

And so a counter-story and counter-practice develops in the Hebrew culture—the idea that their God is easily satisfied. That their God doesn’t need the work of human lives. That this God is so far from demanding, this God can take a day off and rest. This is expressed in the practice of Sabbath, which is the divine invitation to join in the sacredness of rest and delight.

Now of course Sabbath has come down to us through the lens of things you’re not supposed to do on Sundays—but this wasn’t the intent. The intent, as Jesus recognized and taught, is for us—humans aren’t made to fulfill the demands of sabbath but rather sabbath is there for us.

You see, if God can take a nap every week, then maybe we can too. Maybe this God won’t drive us into the ground with demands that we do more or do better. As Brueggemann comments:

The divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear (a) that YHWH is not a workaholic, (b) that YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and (c) that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work.

Just think about that: the Divine is not a workaholic. The Divine is not anxious about the world.

What would it be like, for you, to relate to a God who is just not worried? Not in a hurry to get something out of your life, not demanding anything? What if, in fact, God is really easily satisfied, so much so that God is happy to take the Divine hands off and relax?

Wouldn’t that tell us that we are in a world that is much safer than we fear? That our well-being is not at risk the way we tend to believe?

And wouldn’t that tell us that our playfulness, curiosity, joy and delight, are just as much of a treasure as anything we accomplish or get done?

We don’t need to be legalistic about keeping a day as sabbath, if it’s not practical for our lives—but what we don’t want to lose is the regular embodiment of this vision—that rest is a divine priority, and that God is really delighted by our playfulness.

V. RESTFUL RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS

So—playfulness and rest open the door for healthy relationship to ourselves and to the Divine. But they also help us sustain healthy relationship with those around us—our neighbors, our family and friends, and even those far spread across the globe.

This morning we read from Deuteronomy, where we find the familiar call to keep the Sabbath, but Deuteronomy adds an important clarification about why:

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 servant, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female servant 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.

There’s an addition here from how this command was first stated in Exodus: Deuteronomy insists that a core part of this Sabbath practice is not just so that we can rest, but so that those who we depend on can rest as well. So Sabbath is not just about our relationship to self or relationship to God, but how we see and relate to those around us.

Have you ever had a boss who was just go-go-go and demanded that everyone else keep up - late nights, work weekends! If that boss can’t manage their own compulsion to produce and work, then neither can anyone else in the company!

Part of playfulness and rest is accepting limits, accepting that we have done enough and we have enough and we can rest now. And that lets others around me off the hook. Just as God being restful and non-anxious lets us off the hook of trying constantly to please and satisfy God, our own non-anxious presence can invite others into rest, too. If I can accept that I have enough and have done enough, I can rest and so can you. I can let my spouse off the hook of producing for me 24/7. I can let my friends and family have days off and I will be okay.

More extended—if I am restful and can be content, then I don’t need to constantly acquire and therefore I don’t need others to constantly work to provide my needs.

While I was writing this sermon I paused to order something on Amazon. And—would you believe—they could get it to me that very day! But at what cost? How many people need to run around at top speed to fulfill my desires? How many employees aren’t given adequate rest just so I can get my delivery today? I can get this tomorrow, please have a bathroom break.

I’m not saying it’s morally wrong to use same-day delivery. But it is true that if we cultivate a rested, playful, contented way of being in the world, we will tend not to demand that others bend over backwards to fulfill our desires now. Our own capacity to have the buffer of rest, creates room for others to rest as well. And, inter-connected as we all are now in this global economy, it is not going too far to say that our ability to be contended and rest here, can lower the demand for people all across the world to work ceaselessly.

VI. CURIOSITY ABOUT REST

Playfulness and space for rest help us develop a healthier relationship with ourselves, a healthier relationship with the Divine, and a healthier relationship with those around us. And while observing a sabbath isn’t a law that should crush us—the wisdom of living into our hours of playfulness and rest is plentiful.

I expect that today we are all in different places in our hours of rest. Maybe you’re in a season where rest seems really hard to come by and you’ve been cranking hard for a long time. That’s ok—there are seasons where that’s true. Maybe you have little ones and the idea of rest sounds lovely but far off in the distance. Believe it or not this season will end. Maybe you have space for rest in your life but you always feel guilty about it, like you should probably be doing something productive. Maybe playfulness feels difficult to you—it does for me. It can be vulnerable to play, to try something new, to let yourself go. Or maybe you’re a rock star at play—maybe you should have given this sermon instead of me.

Wherever we find ourselves today, my hope is that we can stir up curiosity and awareness around play, around rest. May we begin to see play and rest, not as time stolen or snatched from productivity, a guilty pleasure, or a luxury we can’t afford, but as part of the good ebb and flow of human flourishing. And may we rest with the Divine who rests alongside us.